Improving Legal Judgement Prediction in Romanian with Long Text Encoders

In recent years,the entire field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has enjoyed amazing novel results achieving almost human-like performance on a variety of tasks. Legal NLP domain has also been part of this process, as it has seen an impressive growth. However, general-purpose models are not readily applicable for legal domain. Due to the nature of the domain (e.g. specialized vocabulary, long documents) specific models and methods are often needed for Legal NLP. In this work we investigate both specialized and general models for predicting the final ruling of a legal case, task known as Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP). We particularly focus on methods to extend to sequence length of Transformer-based models to better understand the long documents present in legal corpora. Extensive experiments on 4 LJP datasets in Romanian, originating from 2 sources with significantly different sizes and document lengths, show that specialized models and handling long texts are critical for a good performance.