Legal Research

Open Legal Data started as a research project and is built for research: the court decisions, laws and citations are available as open datasets, through a REST API and through an MCP server for AI assistants. Our approach is described in Towards an Open Platform for Legal Information (JCDL 2020, arXiv).

Since then, Open Legal Data has been cited in 65 papers: it is part of the training data of open language models, the basis of new legal datasets and benchmarks, and used in work on legal search, question answering, citation analysis and legal NLP.

Language models trained on Open Legal Data

German court decisions and laws from Open Legal Data are part of the training data of several open language models and pretraining corpora.

Datasets and benchmarks (9)

• Bundesrecht: An Open Library and Corpus for German Statutory Reference Processing
  Harshil Darji, Martin Heckelmann, Christina Kratsch et al. · arXiv · 2026
• Segmentation and Processing of German Court Decisions from Open Legal Data
  Harshil Darji, Martin Heckelmann, Christina Kratsch et al. · Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2025) · 2025
• AGB-DE: a corpus for the automated legal assessment of clauses in German consumer contracts
  Daniel Braun and Florian Matthes · arXiv · 2024
• FinCorpus-DE10k: A corpus for the German financial domain
  Serhii Hamotskyi, Nata Kozaeva and Christian Hänig · Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) · 2024
• Challenges and considerations in annotating legal data: A comprehensive overview
  Harshil Darji, Jelena Mitrović and Michael Granitzer · arXiv · 2024
• I beg to differ: how disagreement is handled in the annotation of legal machine learning data sets
  Daniel Braun · Artificial intelligence and law · 2024
• LLM-datasets: An open framework for pretraining datasets of large language models
  Malte Ostendorff, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Lucas Fonseca Lage et al. · First conference on language modeling · 2024
• A dataset of German legal reference annotations
  Harshil Darji, Jelena Mitrović and Michael Granitzer · Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law · 2023
• GerDaLIR: A German dataset for legal information retrieval
  Marco Wrzalik and Dirk Krechel · Proceedings of the natural legal language processing workshop 2021 · 2021

Legal search, question answering and RAG (11)

• Verifiable Retrieval for Legal Reasoning through Structure-driven Knowledge Graph
  Ibrahim Siddig, Sviatoslav Tugeev and Munir Georges · arXiv · 2026
• GRAF: Graph Retrieval Augmented by Facts for Romanian Legal Multi-Choice Question Answering
  Cristian-George Crăciun, Răzvan-Alexandru Smădu, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel et al. · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025 · 2025
• Enhancing the Precision and Interpretability of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in Legal Technology: A Survey
  Mahd Hindi, Linda Mohammed, Ommama Maaz et al. · IEEE Access · 2025
• SLANGO-The Initial Blueprint of Privacy-Oriented Legal Query Assistance: Exploring the Potential of Retrieval-Augmented Generation for German Law Using SPR
  Jérôme Agater and Ammar Memari · International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence · 2024
• Beyond Mere Words: Advanced Text Representations for Practical Similarity Analysis
  Marco Wrzalik · PhD thesis · 2024
• Aspect-based Document Similarity for Literature Recommender Systems
  Malte Ostendorff · PhD thesis, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen · 2023
• Collaborative system for question answering in german case law documents
  Christoph Hoppe, Nico Migenda, David Pelkmann et al. · Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises · 2022
• Towards intelligent legal advisors for document retrieval and question-answering in german legal documents
  Christoph Hoppe, David Pelkmann, Nico Migenda et al. · 2021 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering (AIKE) · 2021
• Evaluating document representations for content-based legal literature recommendations
  Malte Ostendorff, Elliott Ash, Terry Ruas et al. · Proceedings of the eighteenth international conference on artificial intelligence and law · 2021
• Exploring Semantic Similarity Between German Legal Texts and Referred Laws
  Harshil Darji, Jelena Mitrović and Michael Granitzer · International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering, and Knowledge Management · 2021
• Contextual document similarity for content-based literature recommender systems
  Malte Ostendorff · arXiv · 2020

Citation networks and knowledge graphs (3)

• The Missing Link: Joint Legal Citation Prediction Using Heterogeneous Graph Enrichment
  Lorenz Wendlinger, Simon Alexander Nonn, Abdullah Al Zubaer et al. · Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2025) · 2025
• Law in Order: An Open Legal Citation Network for New Zealand
  Tobias Milz, Elizabeth Macpherson and Varvara Vetrova · Australasian Conference on Data Science and Machine Learning · 2023
• Analysis of a German Legal Citation Network.
  Tobias Milz, Michael Granitzer and Jelena Mitrovic · KDIR · 2021

Legal NLP and AI (10)

• Challenges and Opportunities for Visual Analytics in Jurisprudence
  Daniel Fürst, Mennatallah El-Assady, Daniel A Keim et al. · arXiv · 2024
• Bringing order into the realm of Transformer-based language models for artificial intelligence and law
  Candida M Greco and Andrea Tagarelli · Artificial Intelligence and Law · 2024
• Combining semantic web and machine learning for auditable legal key element extraction
  Anna Breit, Laura Waltersdorfer, Fajar J Ekaputra et al. · European Semantic Web Conference · 2023
• Semantic Extraction of Key Figures and Their Properties From Tax Legal Texts Using Neural Models.
  Daniel Steinigen, Marcin Namysl, Markus Hepperle et al. · ASAIL@ ICAIL · 2023
• Tracking Semantic Shifts in German Court Decisions with Diachronic Word Embeddings
  Daniel Braun · Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022 · 2022
• Clause topic classification in German and English standard form contracts
  Daniel Braun and Florian Matthes · The 5th Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP, ECNLP 2022 · 2022
• Claim extraction and law matching for covid-19-related legislation
  Niklas Dehio, Malte Ostendorff and Georg Rehm · Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference · 2022
• Legal named entity recognition with multi-task domain adaptation
  Răzvan-Alexandru Smădu, Ion-Robert Dinică, Andrei-Marius Avram et al. · Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022 · 2022
• Automated semantic analysis, legal assessment, and summarization of standard form contracts
  Daniel Braun · 2021
• NLP for consumer protection: Battling illegal clauses in German terms and conditions in online shopping
  Daniel Braun and Florian Matthes · Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact · 2021

Open legal data and legal tech (7)

• The Path to an Open Digital Platform for Legal Information Case of Kingdom of Morocco
  Anass Smaili · International Conference on Advanced Technologies for Humanity · 2023
• Model-driven development of akoma ntoso application profiles: a conceptual framework for model-based generation of xml subschemas
  Amelie Flatt, Arne Langner and Olof Leps · Springer Nature · 2023
• Building Ontology and Data Infrastructure for Semantic Web Applications
  Matias Frosterus · Aalto University · 2023
• Exploring Nonprofit and government agency AI policies and Regulations: Systems Leadership
  Sevinj Iskandarova and Margaret F Sloan · 2023 IEEE Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (GCAIoT) · 2023
• Model-Driven Development of AKN Application Profiles: Background and Requirements
  Amelie Flatt, Arne Langner and Olof Leps · Model-Driven Development of Akoma Ntoso Application Profiles: A Conceptual Framework for Model-Based Generation of XML Subschemas · 2022
• Legal informatics tools for evidence-based policy creation in parliaments
  Fotios Fitsilis, Dimitris Koryzis and Günther Schefbeck · International Journal of Parliamentary Studies · 2022
• Legal tech and lawtech: Towards a framework for technological trends in the legal services industry
  Ciaran M Harper and S Sarah Zhang · Market engineering: insights from two decades of research on markets and information · 2021

Missing a paper?

The list is generated from openlegaldata/oldp-citations. If you use Open Legal Data in your research and your paper is missing, open a pull request there or write to hello@openlegaldata.io.

Cite Open Legal Data

If you use the platform, the API or the datasets, please cite our paper:

@inproceedings{ostendorff2020oldp,
  author    = {Ostendorff, Malte and Blume, Till and Ostendorff, Saskia},
  title     = {Towards an Open Platform for Legal Information},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 2020},
  series    = {JCDL '20},
  year      = {2020},
  pages     = {385--388},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  doi       = {10.1145/3383583.3398616},
}