Contract & Legal Document OCR — Clause Extraction, Party Identification, Structuring
Legal-BERT + LayoutLMv3 + CUAD dataset to convert contracts into structured data
Contract Processing Pipeline
Step 1: OCR — contract image/PDF → text (use PaddleOCR, Marker, etc.)
Step 2: NLU — text → structured data (clauses, parties, deadlines, amounts)
Step 1 uses regular OCR. The key is Step 2 — understanding legal text.
Legal-BERT
BERT pre-trained on 12GB of legal text. Better at understanding legal terminology.
CUAD Dataset
500+ real contracts, 13,000 expert annotations, 41 label categories (termination, liability cap, IP ownership, etc.).
LayoutLMv3
Understands text + layout position + image together. Knows where signature blocks, date fields, clause numbers are.
Practical Pipeline
Contract PDF → Marker (text) → Legal-BERT + CUAD (clause classification) → structured JSON
Key Concepts
Extract contract text with OCR — general tools like Marker/PaddleOCR suffice
Legal language understanding with Legal-BERT — BERT pre-trained on 12GB legal text
Fine-tune with CUAD dataset — learn to classify 41 clause categories
Document structure understanding with LayoutLMv3 — process text+position+image together