The burdensome impact of a skewed judges-to-cases ratio on the judicial system manifests in an overwhelming backlog of pending cases alongside an ongoing influx of new ones. To tackle this issue and expedite the judicial process, the proposition of an automated system capable of suggesting case outcomes based on factual evidence and precedent from past cases gains significance. This research paper centres on developing a graph neural network-based model to address the Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) problem, recognizing the intrinsic graph structure of judicial cases and making it a binary node classification problem. We explored various embeddings as model features, while nodes such as time nodes and judicial acts were added and pruned to evaluate the model's performance. The study is done while considering the ethical dimension of fairness in these predictions, considering gender and name biases. A link prediction task is also conducted to assess the model's proficiency in anticipating connections between two specified nodes. By harnessing the capabilities of graph neural networks and incorporating fairness analyses, this research aims to contribute insights towards streamlining the adjudication process, enhancing judicial efficiency, and fostering a more equitable legal landscape, ultimately alleviating the strain imposed by mounting case backlogs. Our best-performing model with XLNet pre-trained embeddings as its features gives the macro F1 score of 75% for the LJP task. For link prediction, the same set of features is the best performing giving ROC of more than 80%

Although our computational techniques and hardware resources have advanced greatly these past few decades, given the rise of large language models which have applications in multiple sectors, the environmental impact of training and developing NLP models, particularly on a large scale, could have detrimental consequences on the environment. This is due to the energy usage (whether carbon neutral or not) [1, 2] possibly contributing directly or indirectly to the effects of climate change. With experiments on total time expected for models such as Transformer, BERT, and GPT-2 to train and the subsequent cost of training, Strubell et al. [2] provides substantial evidence that researchers need to increasingly prioritize computationally efficient hardware and algorithms. There has been research to suggest that large language models could be outperformed by their less computationally intensive counterparts on multiple tasks with the help of fine-tuning [3] and techniques such as using random search for hyperparameter search [1, 4-6] or pruning [7, 8]. Additionally, as performance across different tasks tends to vary based on the languages used, data availability, model architectures among other factors, it is likely that training models to a certain performance level for some languages are less carbon-intensive than others. This is speculation is substantiated by the correlation found between morphological ambiguity of languages and the performance of language models on European languages [9]. The primary objective of our work is to measure the differences in carbon emissions released between multiple language pairs and assess the contributions of various components, within the two architectures we've used, to the carbon We are grateful to the Research Society MIT, Manipal for supporting this work, and we attribute equal contribution to all the authors of this paper.