Legal Services

Automated Headnote
Writing For Indian Law

Automated metadata extraction of both current and legacy court cases.

Case notes or headnotes from incoming court cases but that have remained a manual or semi-manual process, until now. Exela has developed a fully automated solution to extract vital metadata required to create headnotes from these court cases. Exela has so far produced more than 150,000 headnotes for Indian Primary Law mainly intended for country’s two leading legal content aggregators. Capability to produce more than 15,000 headnotes per month with a team of experienced SMEs located in various centers in India plus a tool called JET and a composite solution called BoxOffice.

Challenges

  • Case judgments from across the country vary
  • Certain elements of a case judgment must be identified in order to allow extraction of relevant details for head noting.
  • Reading the complete judgment manually was the preferred method but, as automation initiatives evolved, pattern recognition, trigger phrases and format conversion began to emerge.
  • Legal content industry faces mounting operational costs and, for most, locating the required number of legal experts has its own set of logistical challenges.

Solution

  • Automate extraction of metadata elements such as area of law, keywords, legislation, provision, facts, issues, holding, disposition, ratio decidendi, and orbitor dicta.
  • JET utilizes machine learning, natural language processing techniques and a set of statistical rules.
  • Subject Matter Experts and a dedicated team of data scientists worked together on developing the JET solution.
  • Regardless of document format—structured or unstructured—JET easily automates metadata extraction of both current and legacy court cases.

Benefits

  • Operation costs are remarkably low.
  • No manual intervention to segregate various elements of a case judgment, hence no possibility of quality fluctuations.
  • Dependency on offshoring is fully eliminated.