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consumer legal aid organizations

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

JudgmentLens helps non-experts understand complex legal judgments faster

JudgmentLens: Human-AI Sensemaking of Complex Legal Judgments

Abstract: Judicial judgments are increasingly available, yet dense language and distributed relationships among facts, evidence, reasoning, and rulings remain difficult for non-experts to interpret. Through a mixed-methods formative study with Chinese non-expert readers (survey N=34; interviews N=6), we identified structural, interpretive, verification, and action breakdowns. We developed JudgmentLens, an AI-augmented reading system combining persistent case representations, adaptive explanations, and traceable links from generated interpretations to judgment passages. In a counterbalanced within-subject evaluation (N=16), participants completed tasks faster with JudgmentLens than with conventional PDF reading and reported lower workload and greater self-reported decision understanding, while rubric-scored comprehension did not differ reliably. An exploratory PDF+DeepSeek probe suggested that conversational AI supported formulated questions while leaving question formulation, answer integration, and source checking largely to users. We contribute an empirical account of non-expert judgment sensemaking and design strategies for inspectable, source-grounded AI mediation.

Mon 7 SeptHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Legal judgments are often hard for people without legal training to understand because they are written in complicated language and have many connected parts. The authors studied how non-experts in China tried to make sense of these judgments and found several common difficulties. They created JudgmentLens, a reading system that uses AI to provide clear explanations and shows exactly where the explanations come from in the text. People using JudgmentLens completed understanding tasks faster and felt less mental effort than reading normal PDFs, though their measured comprehension was about the same.
Open → 2609.07607v1