Legal practice is intrinsically rooted in the fabric of language, yet legal
practitioners and scholars have been slow to adopt tools from natural language
processing (NLP). At the same time, the legal system is experiencing an access
to justice crisis, which could be partially alleviated with NLP. In this
position paper, we argue that the slow uptake of NLP in legal practice is
exacerbated by a disconnect between the needs of the legal community and the
focus of NLP researchers. In a review of recent trends in the legal NLP
literature, we find limited overlap between the legal NLP community and legal
academia. Our interpretation is that some of the most popular legal NLP tasks
fail to address the needs of legal practitioners. We discuss examples of legal
NLP tasks that promise to bridge disciplinary disconnects and highlight
interesting areas for legal NLP research that remain underexplored.

通过对最近法律自然语言处理（NLP）文献中的趋势的回顾，我们发现法律 NLP 社区与法学界之间的重叠有限。我们认为，一些最流行的法律 NLP 任务未能解决法律从业人员的需求，因此我们探讨了一些能够弥合学科鸿沟的法律 NLP 任务示例，并突出了一些尚未充分探索的有趣领域。