Structured Persuasive Writing Support in Legal Education: A Model and Tool for G erman Legal Case Solutions (2023)

Abstract: We present an annotation approach for capturing structured components and arguments inlegal case solutions of German students. Based on the appraisal style, which dictates the structured way of persuasive writing in German law, we propose an annotation scheme with annotation guidelines that identify structured writing in legal case solutions. We conducted an annotation study with two annotators and annotated legal case solutions to capture the structures of a persuasive legal text. Based on our dataset, we trained three transformer-based models to show that the annotated components can be successfully predicted, e.g. to provide users with writing assistance for legal texts. We evaluated a writing support system in which our models were integrated in an online experiment with law students and found positive learning success and users’ perceptions. Finally, we present our freely available corpus of 413 law student case studies to support the development of intelligent writing support systems.

## introduction writing persuasive texts plays a major role in law education @xcite . as a part of their training for learning how to write legal opinions, law students are typically challenged to solve legal problems or case studies in the form of persuasive case solutions @xcite . to write a persuasive legal case solution, students in german law courses must be able to follow the structural requirements of the appraisal style (see figure 1 ) @xcite and justify their derived conclusions argumentatively via legal claims and premises (see section 2). to learn a skill such as writing a persuasive case solution, individual feedback is important to the learning process @xcite . individualized feedback for students during their writing or learning processes is lacking, particularly in the field of law. the characteris-tic large-scale learning scenarios in legal studies, which result in a low supervision ratio, are part of the reason for this. organizational restrictions are another cause of the absence of personal feedback. for instance, there aren't enough lecturers who can assess students' case solutions @xcite . at the same time, technical solutions that could help students improve their legal writing fall short of expectations @xcite . one promising solution to better support students in their writing process and to overcome the limitations in law courses would be the use of writing support systems that could provide individualized feedback to students @xcite . ## related work persuasive writing in law courses classically, students are asked to solve legal problems or case studies in the form of persuasive case solutions @xcite . in these case solutions, students are forced to use specialized and highly concept-driven knowledge. the theoretical knowledge specializes more in the correct application of paragraphs and the setting of priorities in the case solution. in contrast, the concept-driven knowledge is largely composed of the concepts of writing case solutions in a structured way. to do this, students must follow established legal concepts. among the most important concepts in german jurisprudence are the appraisal style and the judgment style, whereby the appraisal style is primarily important for legal education @xcite . since the term "appraisal style" is a peculiarity of the german legal language, there is no direct equivalent in english. we define the term appraisal style as "the form and writing style of a legal opinion" @xcite . the appraisal style is used to solve complex legal problems. the four elements of appraisal style are briefly explained in corpora in the legal field although law is a promising discipline for annotating the components of legal writing and arguments due to its fixed logical structure @xcite , evaluated open-access corpora for law are rare @xcite @xcite . there are, however, some publicly accessible corpora. @xcite present a corpus of 188 annotated english court opinions. to construct a system for automatic summarizing of court judgments, they annotated rhetorical status, significance, and linguistic markup. other annotated corpora deal explicitly with the annotation of argumentation structures in court decisions @xcite or legal cases @xcite . @xcite present a corpus of english-language judicial cases gathered from the european court of human rights (echr). they chose 55 papers at random, which included 25 court decisions and 29 admissibility reports. the texts were annotated and studied systematically in two layers (argumentative and non-argumentative sentences). a following study showed that the detection of argumentative sentences in court decisions is possible. work such as that of @xcite has focused on identifying successful and failed patterns of reasoning in u.s. court decisions. patterns of reasoning are identified and used to illustrate the difficulty of developing a type or annotation system for characterizing these patterns. the corpus is based on legal cases of vaccine-injury compensations. there are several german corpora in addition to the largely english-language corpora for recognizing decisions and legal cases. @xcite created a corpus based on bavarian court of justice decisions. they discover argumentation structures in judgments using 200 court decisions. other research groups focused on the identification of arguments in the german federal constitutional court's decision corpus @xcite and the development of a german referent corpus comprised of articles from legal journals, decision texts, and norm texts @xcite . a number of corpora have previously been proposed in research to enhance students' structured and persuasive writing in real-world applications, including @xcite and @xcite . @xcite produced a corpus based on student essays for building and implementing systems to promote persuasive writing for adaptive feedback using argumentation mining (am) approaches. further research uses the corpus as a model to annotate persuasive writings @xcite or construct a model for assessing persuasive essays @xcite . however, the existing literature does not adequately transfer corpora for structured writing or reasoning to other educational domains, like law or to other languages. to summarize, we see that literature falls short of annotated corpora, which can be used to model components in student-written legal case solutions. without the availability of these corpora, the design of adaptive nlp-based applications for lawful writing is naturally hindered. to the best of our knowledge, there is only one approach by @xcite that aims to detect the components of legal writing, but the approach focuses on court decisions and the judgment style. therefore, we aim to address this literature gap by presenting and evaluating an annotation scheme as well as an annotated corpus built on student-written texts with the objective of developing an intelligent writing support system for students in law courses. ## application of the corpus modelling components and relations of legal case solutions after constructing and analyzing our corpus, we leveraged the novel data to train different ml-models. the detection of the components and relations of legal case solutions is a multiclass classification task. the first task is to classify the single components of the appraisal style. each sentence can be either a major claim, a definition, a subsumption, a conclusion or non-component. the second task is the classification of sentences that refer to the component subsumption. each sentence that is a subsumption can be a legal claim, a premise, or a none within the subsumption. the third task is to classify the relations between the legal claims and the premises in a subsumption foot_3 . to perform the classifications, we trained three different text models, we used bert, roberta, distilbert and distilroberta (see through extensive experiments, we determined that our models performed adequately with the default parameters. we acknowledge the significance of hyperparameter selection and firmly believe that our approach was effective for our specific task and dataset, as demonstrated by competitive results when compared to state-of-the-art models (wambsganss and niklaus, 2022). ## conclusion in this research, we offer a novel scheme for annotating structured elements and arguments in student-written case solutions. we used the scheme to create a corpus of 413 students' written legal case solutions, which consists of 25,103 sentences and 310,363 words. furthermore, we present an annotation study based on 100 case solutions and show that the annotation of student-written case solutions is possible. finally, we integrated and evaluated three trained bert-models based on our corpus in a writing support system. in order to improve teaching in large-scale learning settings, we expect that integrating the provided annotation scheme and our argumentation corpus would encourage the creation of writing support systems.