Legal document summarization: a short review

This mini review surveys published work on automatic summarization of legal judgments. We focus on how natural language processing handles argument structure, discourse, and the role of citations and precedent when systems generate shorter versions of a case. The field began with extractive methods and classical machine learning, and moved through graph-based and neural models, and to recent transformer architectures and large language models (LLMs). Some of the recent papers pair LLMs with retrieval augmentation so that outputs are faithful to the source text. A scheme is repeated in the domain that whether researchers should work at sentence or clause level, how rhetorical roles are defined, and how to judge a summary when fluent wording can still misrepresent the judgment. Many limitations still exist where many studies rely on general-domain setups or small, jurisdiction-specific corpora; citations are often treated as meta-data rather than part of the argument; and evaluation still depends heavily on overlap with reference summaries, which only partly reflects legal quality. It is also non-practical to compare results when datasets and benchmarks differ from one country to another. We situate this review next to wider surveys of legal summarization and with LLMs in law, but with only the judgment documents. Finally, we guide in future directions with more languages and jurisdictions, summaries that users can trace back to the judgment, and evaluation that mixes automatic scores with expert review where it is practical.