Lorenzo Bacci, Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi, and Maria Teresa Sagri, all of ITTIG/CNR, have published A Rule-based Parsing Approach for Detecting Case Law References in Italian Court Decisions, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 27-33.
Here is the abstract:
In this paper a procedure able to detect legal references in Italian court decisions, providing automatic document hyperlinking is described. It is based on the adoption of a naming convention for case law documents, based on the metadata typically used in citations. The parsing strategy in particular is based on regular expressions, able to extract, from legal citations, the metadata used in the adopted naming convention. In particular the parser is able to implement both the ECLI and the LEX naming conventions for case law material.
