Legal Argument Recommendation and Precedent
Prediction using Graph Neural Networks
Abstract—The task of recommending legal arguments for
new cases and identifying relevant precedents is critical in
judicial decision-making. This paper presents a novel approach
leveraging advanced graph learning techniques to enhance legal
argument recommendations based on Facts and Issues at hand
as well as precedent prediction and precedent ranking. We utilize
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models for argument
recommendation, effectively incorporating facts and issues into
the argument generation using argument templates. For prece-
dent prediction, we exploit the graphical structure of legal cita-
tions using a Relational Graph Convolutional Network (RGCN),
specifically designed for heterogeneous graphs, to predict the
most relevant precedents that align with the current case’s
context. Our methodology demonstrates significant improvements
in argument quality and the accuracy of precedent prediction,
thereby providing robust support for legal practitioners.
Index Terms—RAG, Argument Recommendation, RGCN,
Precedent Prediction and Ranking
I. I NTRODUCTION
Automating legal citing, reasoning, and argumentation is
of growing interest, particularly with the advent of advanced
graph learning techniques. In judicial decision-making,
recommending legal arguments for new cases and identifying
relevant precedents are crucial tasks. Despite various efforts,
existing methods often fall short of effectively capturing the
complex, interconnected graphical nature of legal documents
and the nuanced relationships between them.
Our work is grounded in a newly created dataset, Indian
Legal Judgements (ILJ), compiled by scraping judgments
from the public legal website indiankanoon.org. The ILJ
dataset encompasses judgments from the 1900s to 2023,
forming a comprehensive resource for training and evaluating
our models. We can effectively model the precedence citation
network by creating a graph using citations as edge links in
the heterogeneous graph.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Previous research has explored various methods to address
the challenges of precedent prediction. Prior approaches pri-
marily relied on models such as BERT and GPT to understand
and generate legal text, improving context comprehension and
argument coherence. In LeSICiN (Shounak Paul et al.) [1]
and in Legal Case Document Similarity (Paheli Bhattacharya
2022 et al.) [2], the precedence citation graph was utilized to
understand the relationships between cases, but these studies
did not address the task of ranking and predicting which
sections of the precedents should be cited in judgments for
an unseen case document.
In the work by Wu et al. [3], the task of precedence re-
trieval for judgement prediction was done using unsupervised
contrastive learning. However, this approach did not leverage
the graphical nature of legal citations, potentially limiting its
effectiveness. Similarly, AutoLAW (Robert Zev Mahari) [4]
utilized a BERT model combined with a three-layered feed-
forward neural network for legal text processing; yet again, it
did not exploit the citation graph structure.
To date, work has yet to successfully integrate the graphical
nature of legal citations with argument recommendation and
generation. Our approach aims to fill this gap by leveraging
the structured relationships inherent in legal citations.
III. N OVEL A PPROACH
Our proposed framework consists of two main components:
Argument Recommendation: We aim to recommend the
facts and issues that can be used to make an argument. We
employ a RAG model to generate the arguments using a large
language model and argument templates.
Precedent Prediction: To predict the most relevant prece-
dents for a given case, we utilize a RGCN based model for
heterogeneous graphs. This model exploits the structure of
the citation network to identify which precedents are most
similar to the current case and likely to influence the outcome
favourably. By capturing the complex dependencies and rela-
tionships between legal documents, our graph-based approach
significantly enhances the accuracy of precedent identification.
Our approach not only addresses the tasks of legal argument
recommendation and precedent prediction but also introduces
a novel way of leveraging the graphical structure of legal
citations. Experimental results on the ILJ dataset demonstrate
that our method outperforms existing techniques, highlighting
its potential for practical application in the legal domain.
R EFERENCES
[1] Paul, Shounak, Goyal, Pawan, Ghosh, Saptarshi. ”LeSICiN: A Heteroge-
neous Graph-based Approach for Automatic Legal Statute Identification
from Indian Legal Documents.” Proceedings of the 36th AAAI Confer-
ence on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2022.
[2] Bhattacharya, Paheli, Ghosh, Kripabandhu, Pal, Arindam, and Ghosh,
Saptarshi. ”Legal case document similarity: You need both network and
text.” Information Processing & Management, vol. 59, no. 6, 2022, pp.
103069.
[3] Yiquan Wu, Siying Zhou, Yifei Liu, Weiming Lu, Xiaozhong Liu, Yating
Zhang, Changlong Sun, Fei Wu, and Kun Kuang. 2023. Precedent-
Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model
Collaboration. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical
Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12060–12075, Singa-
pore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
[4] Mahari, Robert Zev. ”AutoLAW: Augmented Legal Reasoning through
Legal Precedent Prediction.” arXiv:2106.16034 [cs.CL], June 2021.