Legal Format Validator checks legal documents for formatting compliance with jurisdiction-specific rules. Given a document, it identifies formatting violations: incorrect margins, font, spacing, missing caption elements, missing verification blocks, missing certificate of service, improper signature blocks, and prohibited content.
Designed to work alongside the legal-format-guard.sh hook as an ML-powered format checker that catches nuanced formatting issues the regex-based hook might miss.
Intended Use
Primary: Validate document formatting before filing in GLACIER Stage 5
Secondary: Quality assurance for all legal document output
Integration: Supplements legal-format-guard.sh with ML-based validation
Task Type
text-classification -- Multi-label classification of formatting violations
Base Model
microsoft/deberta-v3-base -- Strong sequence classification with efficient inference
Training Data
Source
Records
Description
Accepted Court Filings
~200K
Successfully filed documents (positive examples)
Rejected Filings
~50K
Filings rejected by clerk for formatting issues
Format Rule Annotations
~100K
Expert-labeled formatting violations
Synthetic Violations
~300K
Programmatically generated format violations
Validation Checks (Labels)
CAPTION_MISSING -- No court caption
CAPTION_INCORRECT -- Caption has wrong court, parties, or case number
VERIFICATION_MISSING -- No verification block (required in FL/MS)
COS_MISSING -- No Certificate of Service
COS_INCOMPLETE -- COS missing required information
SIGNATURE_MISSING -- No signature block
SIGNATURE_IMPROPER -- Signature block format incorrect
EXHIBIT_MISMATCH -- Referenced exhibit not attached or wrong number
Benchmark Criteria (90%+ Target)
Metric
Target
Description
Violation Detection Recall
>= 95%
Must catch nearly all formatting violations
False Positive Rate
<= 5%
Must not flag compliant documents
AI_ATTRIBUTION Recall
100%
Zero tolerance for AI attribution in filings
PUNITIVE_VIOLATION Recall
100%
Zero tolerance for improper punitive demands
Latency
< 1s
Per-document validation time
GLACIER Pipeline Integration
STAGE 4 (First Draft) --> format-validator runs after document generation
STAGE 5 (WDC #2) --> format-validator is part of the full audit
STAGE 6 (Final Draft) --> format-validator confirms all fixes applied
Relationship to legal-format-guard.sh: The shell hook performs regex-based checks (fast, deterministic). This model handles semantic checks that regex cannot (e.g., "is this caption actually correct for this case?" or "does this verification block reference the right statute?").
Training Configuration
Epochs: 8
Learning rate: 2e-5
Batch size: 16
Max sequence length: 2048
Loss: Binary cross-entropy (multi-label)
Hardware: AWS SageMaker ml.g5.2xlarge
Limitations
Training data is heavily weighted toward FL and MS; other jurisdictions may have gaps
Cannot check actual font rendering (only textual indicators of font specification)
Margin and spacing validation works on markdown/text indicators, not PDF measurement
New local rules not in training data will not be caught
