Predicting Brazilian Court Decisions

Artificial intelligence extracts key insights from legal documents to predict intimate partner femicide

Legal documents serve as valuable repositories of information pertaining to crimes, encompassing not only legal aspects but also relevant details about criminal behaviors. To date and the best of our knowledge, no studies in the field examine legal documents for crime understanding using an Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach. The present study aims to fill this research gap by identifying relevant information available in legal documents for crime prediction using Artificial Intelligence (AI). This innovative approach will be applied to the specific crime of Intimate Partner Femicide (IPF). A total of 491 legal documents related to lethal and non-lethal violence by male-to-female intimate partners were extracted from the Vlex legal database. The information included in these documents was analyzed using AI algorithms belonging to Bayesian, functions-based, instance-based, tree-based, and rule-based classifiers. The findings demonstrate that specific information from legal documents, such as past criminal behaviors, imposed sanctions, characteristics of violence severity and frequency, as well as the environment and situation in which this crime occurs, enable the correct detection of more than three-quarters of both lethal and non-lethal violence within male-to-female intimate partner relationships. The obtained knowledge is crucial for professionals who have access to legal documents, as it can help identify high-risk IPF cases and shape strategies for preventing crime. While this study focuses on IPF, this innovative approach has the potential to be extended to other types of crimes, making it applicable and beneficial in a broader context.

Using deep learning to predict outcomes of legal appeals better than human experts: A study with data from Brazilian federal courts

Legal scholars have been trying to predict the outcomes of trials for a long time. In recent years, researchers have been harnessing advancements in machine learning to predict the behavior of natural and social processes. At the same time, the Brazilian judiciary faces a challenging number of new cases every year, which generates the need to improve the throughput of the justice system. Based on those premises, we trained three deep learning architectures, ULMFiT, BERT, and Big Bird, on 612,961 Federal Small Claims Courts appeals within the Brazilian 5th Regional Federal Court to predict their outcomes. We compare the predictive performance of the models to the predictions of 22 highly skilled experts. All models outperform human experts, with the best one achieving a Matthews Correlation Coefficient of 0.3688 compared to 0.1253 from the human experts. Our results demonstrate that natural language processing and machine learning techniques provide a promising approach for predicting legal outcomes. We also release the Brazilian Courts Appeal Dataset for the 5th Regional Federal Court (BrCAD-5), containing data from 765,602 appeals to promote further developments in this area.

Impact of System and Diagnostic Errors on Medical Litigation Outcomes: Machine Learning-Based Prediction Models

No prediction models using use conventional logistic models and machine learning exist for medical litigation outcomes involving medical doctors. Using a logistic model and three machine learning models, such as decision tree, random forest, and light-gradient boosting machine (LightGBM), we evaluated the prediction ability for litigation outcomes among medical litigation in Japan. The prediction model with LightGBM had a good predictive ability, with an area under the curve of 0.894 (95% CI; 0.893–0.895) in all patients’ data. When evaluating the feature importance using the SHApley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) value, the system error was the most significant predictive factor in all clinical settings for medical doctors’ loss in lawsuits. The other predictive factors were diagnostic error in outpatient settings, facility size in inpatients, and procedures or surgery settings. Our prediction model is useful for estimating medical litigation outcomes.