This guide walks through how to leverage Claude’s advanced natural language processing capabilities to efficiently summarize legal documents, extracting key information and expediting legal research. With Claude, you can streamline the review of contracts, litigation prep, and regulatory work, saving time and ensuring accuracy in your legal processes.
Visit our summarization cookbook to see an example legal summarization implementation using Claude.
You want to review a high volume of documents efficiently and affordably
You require automated extraction of key metadata
You want to generate clear, concise, and standardized summaries
You need precise citations for your summaries
You want to streamline and expedite your legal research process
Factual correctness
Legal precision
Conciseness
Consistency
Readability
Bias and fairness
summarize_document
function that uses Claude to summarize the contents of a sublease agreement. The function accepts a text string and a list of details to extract as inputs. In this example, we call the function with the document_text
and details_to_extract
variables that were defined in the previous code snippets.
Within the function, a prompt is generated for Claude, including the document to be summarized, the details to extract, and specific instructions for summarizing the document. The prompt instructs Claude to respond with a summary of each detail to extract nested within XML headers.
Because we decided to output each section of the summary within tags, each section can easily be parsed out as a post-processing step. This approach enables structured summaries that can be adapted for your use case, so that each summary follows the same pattern.
ROUGE scores
BLEU scores
Contextual embedding similarity
LLM-based grading
Human evaluation
summarize_long_document
function builds upon the earlier summarize_document
function by splitting the document into smaller chunks and summarizing each chunk individually.
The code achieves this by applying the summarize_document
function to each chunk of 20,000 characters within the original document. The individual summaries are then combined, and a final summary is created from these chunk summaries.
Note that the summarize_long_document
function isn’t strictly necessary for our example pdf, as the entire document fits within Claude’s context window. However, it becomes essential for documents exceeding Claude’s context window or when summarizing multiple related documents together. Regardless, this meta-summarization technique often captures additional important details in the final summary that were missed in the earlier single-summary approach.