Judgment outcome extraction for Swiss court rulings

Apart from the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland, there do not exist extracted judgment outcomes for Swiss court decisions. Although court decisions abide to a general structure, the underlying pattern and composition of words used to convey the final judgment may vary from court to court. This work will focus on analyzing said structure of judicial cases and explore to what extend a rule-based matching system can correctly identify the judgment outcomes across different courts in Switzerland. We present an overview of the entire pipeline which ranges from scraping the documents to the eventual extraction of the judgment outcome. We introduce an automated ex- traction system for commonly used patterns across different case doc- uments which greatly reduces the required manual effort and analy- sis of such. With a coverage of 94.53% extracted judgment outcomes out of 613’629 rulings and a near perfect verification result, we have shown that a rule-based matching system is an excellent method of choice.