arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Generating Legal Commentaries from Case Databases via Retrieval, Clustering, and Generation

The paper introduces an automated pipeline that converts court decisions into legal commentaries for specific German Civil Code sections, using paragraph extraction, summarization, keyword clustering, and large language models to generate headings and citation-rich sections. The system processes 4,555 decisions from the German Federal Court of Justice, evaluates the output on relevance, heading match, citation faithfulness, cluster distinction, and logical ordering, and demonstrates that rapid, low-cost commentary generation is feasible while noting limitations due to source restrictions and legal reasoning norms.

By Max Prior, Niklas Wais, Matthias Grabmair