CUAD: 13,000 Expert-Annotated Labels in 510 Legal Contracts

CUAD contains 510 commercial legal contracts featuring over 13,000 expert-annotated labels across 41 specific clause categories. Developed by The Atticus Project and released in 2021, the dataset is designed to train and evaluate extractive question-answering models on complex legal prose.

Use Cases

• Training extractive QA models to identify 'Governing Law' or 'Change of Control' clauses in legal documents
• Benchmarking NLP models on complex legal language and long-form contract text
• Automating contract review workflows by extracting 41 specific legal categories

Strengths

• 13,000+ manual labels
• 41 distinct legal clause categories
• Expert-generated annotations by legal professionals

Limitations

• Small sample size of 510 contracts
• Geographic bias toward US commercial legal standards
• Monolingual English focus

Provenance

Source

The Atticus Project (Arxiv 2103.06268)

Collection Method

Expert manual annotation of commercial legal contracts

Freshness

Last updated May 2024; based on a 2021 research publication.

Geography

United States