DOCUMENT-CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM, METHOD AND SOFTWARE

Every year, professional classifiers at West Group manually classify over 350,000 headnotes, or abstracts of judicial opinions across approximately 82,000 separate classes of the Key Number System (130). Although most headnotes are classified from the memory of classifiers, a significant numbe r are difficult and thus costly to classify (130) manually. Accordingly, the inventors devised systems (120), methods, and software that facilitate manua l classification (120) of headnotes and documents generally hard-to-classify a nd particularly headnotes. One exemplary system provides a graphical user interface (114) that concurrently displays an unclassified headnote (140), a ranked list of one or more candidate classes, a candidate class in combinati on with adjacent classes of the classification system (100), and at least one classified headnote associated with one of the candidate classes.