Warm congratulations to Masha Medevedeva and Pauline McBride (past and current postdoctoral researchers with COHUBICOL, respectively) on receiving the Best Presentation Award for the presentation of their paper ‘Legal Judgment Prediction: If You Are Going to Do It, Do It Right’ at NLLP Workshop 2023

Their paper draws attention to the flawed experimental set-up in all but a very small percentage of papers that claim to do Legal Judgment Prediction (12 out of 171 papers). The result: over-inflated performance scores, systems which lack real-world utility and a false impression of the maturity of LJP research.

The authors hope an application-centric approach to evaluation of these systems will result in better research in the field. Commenting on the award, Medvedeva said ‘We’re very grateful to the organisers of the Workshop and the sponsors for this generous award and we truly hope that our paper will contribute to doing legal judgment prediction right’. We hope so too!