Systems, methods and computer program products for mining text documents to identify seminal issues and cases

A method to identify one or more seminal cases that address a particular legal issue, the method comprising:

• obtaining, by a processing device, an electronic legal document comprising a plurality of text from a repository;
• searching, by the processing device, the plurality of text of the electronic legal document for a plurality of reasons for citing comprising a plurality of legal issues text;
• searching, by the processing device, the plurality of reasons for citing to identify a plurality of seminal clues;
• generating, by the processing device, a data list from the plurality of reasons for citing having the plurality of seminal clues to identify a plurality of potential seminal cases;
• filtering, by the processing device, the data list containing the plurality of potential seminal cases to identify only seminal cases based on a calculated seminal reference frequency and generate a working corpus from the filtered data list;
• mining, by the processing device, the plurality of legal issues text from the plurality of reasons for citing of all the seminal cases in the working corpus to establish sentence data that contains a plurality of sentences comprising a plurality of legal discussions from the plurality of legal issues text of the seminal cases in the working corpus;
• assigning, by the processing device, a unique identifier to each sentence of the plurality of sentences that references the seminal cases;
• collecting, by the processing device, each sentence of the plurality of sentences from the sentence data and storing the collected sentences from the sentence data as temporary sentence data for each of the seminal cases in the working corpus;
• applying, by the processing device, a text clustering algorithm to the temporary sentence data to create a plurality of text clusters;
• selecting, by the processing device, a top cluster from the plurality of text clusters, wherein the top cluster comprises one or more sentences surrounding the plurality of legal discussions and the plurality of legal issues text identified with each of the seminal cases;
• and
• outputting, to a user display device, data corresponding to the seminal cases from the working corpus such that the data causes the user display device to distinguish the seminal cases when one or more of the seminal cases are returned as the result of a search.

A non-transitory, computer-readable storage medium that is operably by a computer to identify one or more seminal cases that address a particular legal issue, the non-transitory, computer-readable storage medium comprising one or more programming instructions stored thereon for causing a processing device to:

• obtain an electronic legal document comprising a plurality of text from a repository,
• search the plurality of text of the electronic legal document for a plurality of reasons for citing comprising a plurality of legal issues text,
• search the plurality of reasons for citing to identify a plurality of seminal clues and generate a data list from the plurality of reasons for citing having the plurality of seminal clues to identify a plurality of potential seminal cases,
• filter the data list containing the plurality of potential seminal cases to identify only seminal cases based on a calculated seminal reference frequency and generate a working corpus from the filtered data list, and
• output data corresponding to the seminal cases from the working corpus such that the data causes an external device to distinguish the seminal cases when one or more of the seminal cases are returned as the result of a search.