Papers for

legal document managers

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.

Detecting and measuring privacy risks in medical report texts

The Text Beside the Image: Detection, Utility and Leakage for Trustworthy Multimodal Medical Data and Beyond

Abstract: Medical images are released with the reports that describe them, and protecting the image does not protect the report. This paper measures the text component of such releases. We measure identifier detection, downstream utility and residual identity leakage on the same documents, with the pseudonymisation policy as the variable under test: 15 detectors, three release conditions and four corpora of medical reports, legal judgments, news and other genres, and e-mail, in German, English, Chinese and Arabic. A fixed 13-detector union reaches a person sensitivity of 0.9998 at specificity 0.8686 on the medical reports, 0.9958 at 0.8504 on the legal judgments, 0.9352 at 0.9318 on news and other genres, and 0.9906 at 0.6235 on e-mail. With this ensemble, frequency matching with a public name list recovers zero identities by alignment across the four corpora; the names it got right were ones the detector missed, left in clear text. Cross-document linkage ranks the correct person first for 0.93% of e-mail queries without training and 3.94% with it, against 1/3697 chance and 71.98% on unmodified text. On the medical reports it recovers nothing without training and 0.71% of 138 queries with it, against 1/207 chance and a 2.73% ceiling on unmodified text.

Sun 27 SeptComputation and LanguageComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Medical reports often come with images, but protecting the images alone doesn’t protect the text which can reveal private details. The authors studied how well current technology detects personal information in these medical texts across different languages and genres. They tested multiple ways to hide identities and found detection can be very accurate, though some risks of linking people across documents remain. Their work helps understand how to balance privacy and usefulness in shared medical and other sensitive texts.
Open → 2609.33280v1

Blockchain notarizes live changes in shared digital documents

Fluid Notarization: Verifiable Evolution of Concurrently Edited Structured Documents

Abstract: Traditional blockchain-based document notarization follows a snapshot-oriented model in which each document revision is represented as an independent state anchored on-chain through a cryptographic reference. While effective for immutable artifacts, this approach becomes inadequate when documents evolve through collaborative editing. Concurrent modifications create divergent document versions that must be reconciled outside the notarization layer, while even minor changes require generating and distributing new document snapshots. Conversely, collaborative replication frameworks such as CRDTs provide deterministic reconciliation of concurrent updates, but do not inherently provide independently verifiable evidence of when contributions were published. This paper introduces Fluid Notarization, a notarization paradigm in which document evolution itself becomes the object of notarization. Rather than certifying isolated states, Fluid Notarization certifies a graph of causally related evolution artifacts generated by a JSON-native delta-CRDT. The proposed model builds upon Melda, which represents document changes as compact, content-addressed deltas linked through causal dependencies. Blockchain notarization is reduced to recording identifiers of these evolution artifacts, while synchronization, reconstruction, and conflict resolution remain entirely off-chain. The resulting architecture combines two complementary guarantees: deterministic convergence provided by the CRDT and independently auditable proof-of-existence, provenance, and publication evidence provided by the blockchain. A prototype implementation and validation scenario based on collaboratively edited electronic health records demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and highlight the advantages of notarizing document evolution rather than successive document snapshots.

Wed 16 SeptDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster ComputingCryptography and Security
The gist
Traditional blockchain methods record each version of a document separately, which is inefficient for documents edited by many people at once. The authors propose a new approach called Fluid Notarization that records the history of changes, not just snapshots. This makes it easier to verify when changes were made and ensures all edits merge correctly without confusion. They tested this idea using electronic health records to show it works in real situations.
Open → 2609.18886v1