From jargon to clarity: bridging understanding through graded simplification of legal data - Artificial Intelligence and Law
Abstract Legal documents are notorious for their length, density, and jargon-heavy language, making them challenging to navigate and comprehend. This highlights a strong need for clear and accessible documentation for a diverse audience. Text simplification at multiple levels, tailored to individuals with diverse backgrounds and expertise, is essential in making legal content universally accessible. To this effect, in this work, we focus on paragraph-level simplification of legal contracts and introduce Graded Simplification for Legal Data, a framework that adapts contract clauses across three competency levels: Skilled, Intermediate, and Basic. We employ Large language models (LLMs) to perform graded simplification, supported by a Token efficient Compression mechanism that incrementally encodes document context across paragraphs within fixed tokens, making it well suited to lengthy contracts. To address the challenge of reliably evaluating legal simplification at scale, we design a multi-criteria evaluation framework that jointly assesses readability, lexical simplicity, semantic preservation, and entailment. This framework enables the creation of our key resource, the SimpLegal dataset, an English-language preference dataset of paragraph-level contract simplifications. Using this dataset for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), we achieve notable gains (\(\uparrow \)5 points) in readability and simplicity over zero-shot prompting-based baselines. Collectively, these contributions underscore the importance of graded, paragraph-level simplification for contracts and demonstrate that small and medium-scale LLMs, when fine-tuned on preference data, can achieve performance comparable to larger models, providing a scalable pathway for accessible and comprehensible legal documentation. Our code and dataset are made available at https://github.com/GSLD-SimpLegal/FromJargonToClarity.git. This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access. Access this article Log in via an institution Subscribe and save Springer+ from $39.99 /Month Starting from 10 chapters or articles per month Access and download chapters and articles from more than 300k books and 2,500 journals Cancel anytime View plans Buy Now Buy article PDF USD 39.95 Price excludes VAT (USA) Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. Instant access to the full article PDF. Institutional subscriptions Fig. 1Fig. 2Fig. 3Fig. 4 Explore related subjects Discover the latest articles, books and news in related subjects, suggested using machine learning. Natural Language Processing Techniques for Sentiment Analysis Data Availability The link to code and data has been shared in the manuscript. Noteshttps://www.sec.gov/edgar/search-and-accesshttps://github.com/GSLD-SimpLegal/FromJargonToClarity.git.https://openai.com/chatgptIn our experiments, we observed that the models typically converge to their best response by the third or fourth iteration. We set \(i=2\) and \(j=10\), balancing computational constraints and convergence.Empirically, scores between 0.3–0.5 indicated semantic drift; thus, 0.6 was adopted as a stricter cutoff.https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.cohen_kappa_score.html (Cohen’s Kappa implementation in scikit-learn)https://github.com/LexPredict/lexpredict-lexnlp96 candidates \(\times \) 6K paragraphs = 576K total candidate paragraphstop 15 responses selected, (\(6000 \times 15\)); not all pairs were retained, final set ~65000https://pypi.org/project/textstat/ (textstat library for readability metrics)https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.metrics.cohen_kappa_score.html (Cohen’s Kappa implementation in scikit-learn)https://pingouin-stats.org/generated/pingouin.intraclass_corr.html (Intraclass Correlation Coefficient implementation in Pingouin)https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-InstructWe reused publicly available implementations where possible and otherwise implemented faithful reproductions based on the methodologies described in the original papers.ReferencesAbend O, Rappoport A (2013) Universal conceptual cognitive annotation (UCCA). 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PMLRDownload referencesAuthor informationAuthors and AffiliationsLTRC, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, Hyderabad, IndiaHiranmai Sri Adibhatla, Ananya Mukherjee & Manish ShrivastavaAuthorsHiranmai Sri AdibhatlaView author publicationsSearch author on:PubMed Google ScholarAnanya MukherjeeView author publicationsSearch author on:PubMed Google ScholarManish ShrivastavaView author publicationsSearch author on:PubMed Google ScholarContributionsH.S. played a major role in data collection, conducting experiments and preparing the manuscript. A.M. helped in evaluation framework and manuscript editing. M.S. provided guidance and reviewed the manuscript.Corresponding authorCorrespondence to Hiranmai Sri Adibhatla.Ethics declarations Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests. Additional informationPublisher's NoteSpringer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.A AppendixA Appendix1.1 A.1 Examples of simplification across gradesThis section contains Table 8, a collection of whole clauses and illustrates how simplification is performed across the three defined grades. Looking at the second example in detail, the original sentence “Executive agrees that Executive shall not directly or indirectly solicit an employee of the Company to terminate their employment relationship with the Company”, the core semantic intent is to prohibit attempts to induce an employee to leave the company. In the Basic version it is simplified to “You promise not to try to get an employee to quit their jobs. You won’t do it on your own or help someone else do it”, this intent is preserved through explicit phrasing such as “try to get an employee to quit” and “help someone else do it,” which together capture both the action and indirect solicitation aspects of the original clause.Table 8 Clause and Its simplified variantsFull size table1.2 A.2 Implementation detailsThis section outlines the implementation details of our approach. The models employed, along with their configurations, are summarized in Table 9, while the evaluation metrics and their corresponding signatures are presented in Table 10, ensuring transparency in model selection and reproducibility of results.Table 9 Model details and hyperparametersFull size tableTable 10 Signatures and source code details of automatic evaluation metricsFull size table1.3 A.3 Simplification settingsThe Table 11 details different context lengths (no context i.e paragraph-only, and paragraph with token-restricted context), variant types, simplification grades, and models, where each unique combination results in a generated simplificationTable 11 Combinatorial overview of simplification settings, showing context length, variant type, grade, and model for each generated simplificationFull size table1.4 A.4 PromptsPrompts designed to guide the models effectively are detailed here. Prompts help define the task clearly, ensuring that the model focuses on the intended aspects of the text. This section includes prompts corresponding to three levels of simplification (Figs. 5, and 6), allowing for graded outputs that vary in detail and complexity. Furthermore, it provides a dedicated prompt (Fig. 7 for multi-criteria evaluation, enabling the assessment of outputs along different dimensions such as readability, simplicity, and fidelity to the original text.Fig. 5Prompt template used for simplification of skilled and basic gradesFull size imageFig. 6Prompt template used for simplification of intermediate gradeFull size imageFig. 7Prompt for self-evaluation of simplified legal text across different grade levelsFull size imageRights and permissionsSpringer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.Reprints and permissionsAbout this articleCite this articleSri Adibhatla, H., Mukherjee, A. & Shrivastava, M. From jargon to clarity: bridging understanding through graded simplification of legal data. Artif Intell Law (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-026-09503-yDownload citationReceived: 02 October 2025Accepted: 26 January 2026Published: 03 March 2026Version of record: 03 March 2026DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-026-09503-yShare this articleAnyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:Get shareable linkSorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.Copy shareable link to clipboard Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative KeywordsText-simplificationLLMToken-efficientLegalPreference-optimization Profiles Hiranmai Sri Adibhatla View author profile Manish Shrivastava View author profile