  In this paper, we summarize the current state of the field of NLP & Law with
a specific focus on recent technical and substantive developments. To support
our analysis, we construct and analyze a nearly complete corpus of more than
six hundred NLP & Law related papers published over the past decade. Our
analysis highlights several major trends. Namely, we document an increasing
number of papers written, tasks undertaken, and languages covered over the
course of the past decade. We observe an increase in the sophistication of the
methods which researchers deployed in this applied context. Slowly but surely,
Legal NLP is beginning to match not only the methodological sophistication of
general NLP but also the professional standards of data availability and code
reproducibility observed within the broader scientific community. We believe
all of these trends bode well for the future of the field, but many questions
in both the academic and commercial sphere still remain open.
