NLP and AI: The Future of Legal Document Management and Analysis

Have you ever heard of companies that use NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to work with legal documents? If you’re not familiar with the concept of Document Management, let me break it down for you.

The process begins with document ingestion. This means that all kinds of documents, including scanned PDFs, are fed into the system. To turn a printed document into a computer-readable format, optical character recognition (OCR) technology is used. This process generates text that is used by the NLP and AI programs to understand the content of the document.

The next step is to extract the metadata about the document or content itself. This includes understanding where the paragraphs are delineated, how the articles are specifically called out, and how sections are numbered. Additionally, the program might even analyze the formatting of the document, such as bold or italicized words, to better understand the meaning of the text.

After extracting the metadata, the program identifies the topics discussed in the document. This step is crucial as it gives the program an idea of what the document is about. The program can then create a summary of the document, either by extracting key sentences or by abstracting the text.

To understand the document even further, the program extracts entities such as people, places, and times. Additionally, if tables are present in the document, the program extracts them to gain a better understanding of the information presented.

Finally, the program can extract clauses or articles from the document and run all of the above scenarios against each clause or article to gain a better understanding of the document as a whole.

In summary, NLP and AI programs can work with legal documents by ingesting the documents, using OCR to generate text, extracting metadata and topics, summarizing the document, extracting entities, and analyzing tables and clauses. This technology can save legal professionals significant time and effort, allowing them to focus on higher-level tasks.