Explaining the Relevance of Court Decisions to Laymen

In the context of intelligent disclosure of case law, we report on our findings with respect to the presentation of relevant court decisions back to the laymen users. For this presentation we first localize the relevant legal concepts in the cases using shallow NLP techniques. Hereafter we investigated the use of techniques from the field of recommender systems, i.e. keyword style explanation and influence style explanation, to present the cases to the user in an understandable way. In order to find out if we succeeded in that respect, we conducted a small user satisfaction research. It shows promising results, and gives us some directions for future research.