Researching Legal AI: The Cambridge Law Corpus and Predicting Decisions of the UK Employment Tribunal

This contribution introduces the Cambridge Law Corpus (CLC) and a research project benchmarking the prediction of UK Employment Tribunal decisions, which is based on the CLC data. The CLC is a dataset containing more than 320,000 UK court decisions. This article explains the need for legal datasets, the creation of the CLC and the ethical considerations concerning the dataset’s construction and distribution. Subsequently, an experiment engaging with legal judgment prediction using the dataset is reported. The decisions predicted are those of the UK Employment Tribunal, which is the first instance for conflicts between employees and their employers. The experiment compares baselines of different AI models and human experts predicting whether the employee will win, partly win, lose or whether the Tribunal will render another decision.