Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have drawn a lot of attentions recently in the legal domain due to its emergent ability to tackle a variety of legal tasks. However, it is still unknown if LLMs are able to analyze a legal case and perform reasoning in the same manner as lawyers. Therefore, we constructed a novel corpus consisting of scenarios pertain to Contract Acts Malaysia and Australian Social Act for Dependent Child. ChatGPT is applied to perform analysis on the corpus using the IRAC method, which is a framework widely used by legal professionals for organizing legal analysis. Each scenario in the corpus is annotated with a complete IRAC analysis in a semi-structured format so that both machines and legal professionals are able to interpret and understand the annotations. In addition, we conducted the first empirical assessment of ChatGPT for IRAC analysis in order to understand how well it aligns with the analysis of legal professionals. Our experimental results shed lights on possible future research directions to improve alignments between LLMs and legal experts in terms of legal reasoning.
Legal NLP remains underdeveloped in regions like India due to the scarcity of structured datasets. We introduce IndianBailJudgments-1200, a new benchmark dataset comprising 1200 Indian court judgments on bail decisions, annotated across 20+ attributes including bail outcome, IPC sections, crime type, and legal reasoning. Annotations were generated using a prompt-engineered GPT-4o pipeline and verified for consistency. This resource supports a wide range of legal NLP tasks such as outcome prediction, summarization, and fairness analysis, and is the first publicly available dataset focused specifically on Indian bail jurisprudence.
Advanced intelligent systems, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), are significantly reshaping financial practices through advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, the extent to which these models effectively capture and apply domain-specific financial knowledge remains uncertain. Addressing a critical gap in the expansive Indian financial context, this paper introduces CA-Ben, a Chartered Accountancy benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the financial, legal, and quantitative reasoning capabilities of LLMs. CA-Ben comprises structured question-answer datasets derived from the rigorous examinations conducted by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), spanning foundational, intermediate, and advanced CA curriculum stages. Six prominent LLMs i.e. GPT 4o, LLAMA 3.3 70B, LLAMA 3.1 405B, MISTRAL Large, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Microsoft Phi 4 were evaluated using standardized protocols. Results indicate variations in performance, with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o outperforming others, especially in conceptual and legal reasoning. Notable challenges emerged in numerical computations and legal interpretations. The findings emphasize the strengths and limitations of current LLMs, suggesting future improvements through hybrid reasoning and retrieval-augmented generation methods, particularly for quantitative analysis and accurate legal interpretation.
Legal decisions are increasingly evaluated for fairness, consistency, and bias using machine learning (ML) techniques. In high-stakes domains like refugee adjudication, such methods are often applied to detect disparities in outcomes. Yet it remains unclear whether statistical methods can meaningfully assess fairness in legal contexts shaped by discretion, normative complexity, and limited ground truth. In this paper, we empirically evaluate three common ML approaches (feature-based analysis, semantic clustering, and predictive modeling) on a large, real-world dataset of 59,000+ Canadian refugee decisions (AsyLex). Our experiments show that these methods produce divergent and sometimes contradictory signals, that predictive modeling often depends on contextual and procedural features rather than legal features, and that semantic clustering fails to capture substantive legal reasoning. We show limitations of statistical fairness evaluation, challenge the assumption that statistical regularity equates to fairness, and argue that current computational approaches fall short of evaluating fairness in legally discretionary domains. We argue that evaluating fairness in law requires methods grounded not only in data, but in legal reasoning and institutional context.
Law has long been a domain that has been popular in natural language processing (NLP) applications. Reasoning (ratiocination and the ability to make connections to precedent) is a core part of the practice of the law in the real world. Nevertheless, while multiple legal datasets exist, none have thus far focused specifically on reasoning tasks. We focus on a specific aspect of the legal landscape by introducing a corporate governance reasoning benchmark (CHANCERY) to test a model's ability to reason about whether executive/board/shareholder's proposed actions are consistent with corporate governance charters. This benchmark introduces a first-of-its-kind corporate governance reasoning test for language models - modeled after real world corporate governance law. The benchmark consists of a corporate charter (a set of governing covenants) and a proposal for executive action. The model's task is one of binary classification: reason about whether the action is consistent with the rules contained within the charter. We create the benchmark following established principles of corporate governance - 24 concrete corporate governance principles established in and 79 real life corporate charters selected to represent diverse industries from a total dataset of 10k real life corporate charters. Evaluations on state-of-the-art (SOTA) reasoning models confirm the difficulty of the benchmark, with models such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4o achieving 64.5% and 75.2% accuracy respectively. Reasoning agents exhibit superior performance, with agents based on the ReAct and CodeAct frameworks scoring 76.1% and 78.1% respectively, further confirming the advanced legal reasoning capabilities required to score highly on the benchmark. We also conduct an analysis of the types of questions which current reasoning models struggle on, revealing insights into the legal reasoning capabilities of SOTA models.
This study uses Jordanian law as a case study to explore the fine-tuning of the Llama-3.1 large language model for Arabic question-answering. Two versions of the model- Llama-3.1-8B-bnb-4bit and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-bnb-4bit-were fine-tuned using parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) with LoRA adapters and 4-bit quantized models, leveraging the Unsloth framework for accelerated and resource-efficient training. A custom dataset of 6000 legal question-answer pairs was curated from Jordanian laws and formatted into structured prompts. Performance was evaluated using the BLEU and the ROUGE metrics to compare the fine-tuned models to their respective base versions. Results demonstrated improved legal reasoning and accuracy while achieving resource efficiency through quantization and optimized fine-tuning strategies. This work underscores the potential of adapting large language models for Arabic legal domains and highlights effective techniques for fine-tuning domain-specific tasks.
Syllogistic reasoning is crucial for sound legal decision-making, allowing legal professionals to draw logical conclusions by applying general principles to specific case facts. While large language models (LLMs) can answer legal questions, they often struggle with explicit syllogistic reasoning. Their outputs tend to be implicit, unstructured, and consequently, less explainable and trustworthy. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SyLeR, a novel framework designed to enable LLMs to perform explicit syllogistic legal reasoning. SyLeR employs a tree-structured hierarchical retrieval mechanism to synthesize relevant legal statutes and precedents, thereby constructing comprehensive major premises. This is followed by a two-stage fine-tuning process: an initial supervised fine-tuning warm-up establishes a foundational understanding of syllogistic reasoning, while reinforcement learning, guided by a structure-aware reward mechanism, refines the model's capacity to generate diverse, logically sound, and well-structured reasoning paths. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate SyLeR's performance. Our evaluations spanned diverse dimensions, including both in-domain and cross-domain user groups (legal laypersons and practitioners), multiple languages (Chinese and French), and various LLM backbones (legal-specific and open-domain LLMs). The results consistently demonstrate that SyLeR significantly enhances response accuracy and reliably produces explicit, explainable, and trustworthy legal reasoning.
Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) compliance assessment demands dynamic real-time decision-making under complicated regulations and complex human-machine-environment interactions. While large language models (LLMs) hold significant potential for decision intelligence and contextual dialogue, their capacity for domain-specific knowledge in HSE and structured legal reasoning remains underexplored. We introduce HSE-Bench, the first benchmark dataset designed to evaluate the HSE compliance assessment capabilities of LLM. HSE-Bench comprises over 1,000 manually curated questions drawn from regulations, court cases, safety exams, and fieldwork videos, and integrates a reasoning flow based on Issue spotting, rule Recall, rule Application, and rule Conclusion (IRAC) to assess the holistic reasoning pipeline. We conduct extensive evaluations on different prompting strategies and more than 10 LLMs, including foundation models, reasoning models and multimodal vision models. The results show that, although current LLMs achieve good performance, their capabilities largely rely on semantic matching rather than principled reasoning grounded in the underlying HSE compliance context. Moreover, their native reasoning trace lacks the systematic legal reasoning required for rigorous HSE compliance assessment. To alleviate these, we propose a new prompting technique, Reasoning of Expert (RoE), which guides LLMs to simulate the reasoning process of different experts for compliance assessment and reach a more accurate unified decision. We hope our study highlights reasoning gaps in LLMs for HSE compliance and inspires further research on related tasks.
Long-form legal reasoning remains a key challenge for large language models (LLMs) in spite of recent advances in test-time scaling. We introduce LEXam, a novel benchmark derived from 340 law exams spanning 116 law school courses across a range of subjects and degree levels. The dataset comprises 4,886 law exam questions in English and German, including 2,841 long-form, open-ended questions and 2,045 multiple-choice questions. Besides reference answers, the open questions are also accompanied by explicit guidance outlining the expected legal reasoning approach such as issue spotting, rule recall, or rule application. Our evaluation on both open-ended and multiple-choice questions present significant challenges for current LLMs; in particular, they notably struggle with open questions that require structured, multi-step legal reasoning. Moreover, our results underscore the effectiveness of the dataset in differentiating between models with varying capabilities. Adopting an LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm with rigorous human expert validation, we demonstrate how model-generated reasoning steps can be evaluated consistently and accurately. Our evaluation setup provides a scalable method to assess legal reasoning quality beyond simple accuracy metrics. Project page: https://lexam-benchmark.github.io/
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but often require extensive fine-tuning and large datasets for specialized domains like law. General-purpose pre-training may not capture legal nuances, and acquiring sufficient legal data is challenging. We introduce SynLexLM, a novel approach to efficiently pre-train a legal LLM. Our method employs curriculum learning, progressing from simple to complex legal texts and queries, combined with synthetic data augmentation using models like Gemini Pro to address data scarcity. We aim to achieve improved performance on legal benchmarks (BigLaw-Bench, EUR-Lex-Sum) compared to traditional models and fine-tuned versions. Preliminary work involves generating synthetic QA pairs reflecting legal reasoning. This work aims to enhance legal document analysis and research tools, potentially democratizing access to advanced legal AI.
This paper presents a domain-specific implementation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tailored to the Fair Use Doctrine in U.S. copyright law. Motivated by the increasing prevalence of DMCA takedowns and the lack of accessible legal support for content creators, we propose a structured approach that combines semantic search with legal knowledge graphs and court citation networks to improve retrieval quality and reasoning reliability. Our prototype models legal precedents at the statutory factor level (e.g., purpose, nature, amount, market effect) and incorporates citation-weighted graph representations to prioritize doctrinally authoritative sources. We use Chain-of-Thought reasoning and interleaved retrieval steps to better emulate legal reasoning. Preliminary testing suggests this method improves doctrinal relevance in the retrieval process, laying groundwork for future evaluation and deployment of LLM-based legal assistance tools.
Organizations developing machine learning-based (ML) technologies face the complex challenge of achieving high predictive performance while respecting the law. This intersection between ML and the law creates new complexities. As ML model behavior is inferred from training data, legal obligations cannot be operationalized in source code directly. Rather, legal obligations require "indirect" operationalization. However, choosing context-appropriate operationalizations presents two compounding challenges: (1) laws often permit multiple valid operationalizations for a given legal obligation-each with varying degrees of legal adequacy; and, (2) each operationalization creates unpredictable trade-offs among the different legal obligations and with predictive performance. Evaluating these trade-offs requires metrics (or heuristics), which are in turn difficult to validate against legal obligations. Current methodologies fail to fully address these interwoven challenges as they either focus on legal compliance for traditional software or on ML model development without adequately considering legal complexities. In response, we introduce a five-stage interdisciplinary framework that integrates legal and ML-technical analysis during ML model development. This framework facilitates designing ML models in a legally aligned way and identifying high-performing models that are legally justifiable. Legal reasoning guides choices for operationalizations and evaluation metrics, while ML experts ensure technical feasibility, performance optimization and an accurate interpretation of metric values. This framework bridges the gap between more conceptual analysis of law and ML models' need for deterministic specifications. We illustrate its application using a case study in the context of anti-money laundering.
The recent advances in Legal Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the landscape of legal research and practice by automating tasks, enhancing research precision, and supporting complex decision-making processes. However, effectively adapting LLMs to the legal domain remains challenging due to the complexity of legal reasoning, the need for precise interpretation of specialized language, and the potential for hallucinations. This paper examines the efficacy of Domain-Adaptive Continual Pre-Training (DACP) in improving the legal reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Through a series of experiments on legal reasoning tasks within the Taiwanese legal framework, we demonstrate that while DACP enhances domain-specific knowledge, it does not uniformly improve performance across all legal tasks. We discuss the trade-offs involved in DACP, particularly its impact on model generalization and performance in prompt-based tasks, and propose directions for future research to optimize domain adaptation strategies in legal AI.
We introduce KFinEval-Pilot, a benchmark suite specifically designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) in the Korean financial domain. Addressing the limitations of existing English-centric benchmarks, KFinEval-Pilot comprises over 1,000 curated questions across three critical areas: financial knowledge, legal reasoning, and financial toxicity. The benchmark is constructed through a semi-automated pipeline that combines GPT-4-generated prompts with expert validation to ensure domain relevance and factual accuracy. We evaluate a range of representative LLMs and observe notable performance differences across models, with trade-offs between task accuracy and output safety across different model families. These results highlight persistent challenges in applying LLMs to high-stakes financial applications, particularly in reasoning and safety. Grounded in real-world financial use cases and aligned with the Korean regulatory and linguistic context, KFinEval-Pilot serves as an early diagnostic tool for developing safer and more reliable financial AI systems.
Recently, Test-Time Scaling Large Language Models (LLMs), such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1, have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across various domains and tasks, particularly in reasoning. While these models have shown impressive performance on general language tasks, their effectiveness in specialized fields like legal remains unclear. To address this, we present a preliminary evaluation of LLMs in various legal scenarios, covering both Chinese and English legal tasks. Our analysis includes 9 LLMs and 17 legal tasks, with a focus on newly published and more complex challenges such as multi-defendant legal judgments and legal argument reasoning. Our findings indicate that, despite DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1 being among the most powerful models, their legal reasoning capabilities are still lacking. Specifically, these models score below 80\% on seven Chinese legal reasoning tasks and below 80\% on two English legal reasoning tasks. This suggests that, even among the most advanced reasoning models, legal reasoning abilities remain underdeveloped.
Language model evaluations often fail to characterize consequential failure modes, forcing experts to inspect outputs and build new benchmarks. We introduce task elicitation, a method that automatically builds new evaluations to profile model behavior. Task elicitation finds hundreds of natural-language tasks -- an order of magnitude more than prior work -- where frontier models exhibit systematic failures, in domains ranging from forecasting to online harassment. For example, we find that Sonnet 3.5 over-associates quantum computing and AGI and that o3-mini is prone to hallucination when fabrications are repeated in-context.
Legal case documents play a critical role in judicial proceedings. As the number of cases continues to rise, the reliance on manual drafting of legal case documents is facing increasing pressure and challenges. The development of large language models (LLMs) offers a promising solution for automating document generation. However, existing benchmarks fail to fully capture the complexities involved in drafting legal case documents in real-world scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce CaseGen, the benchmark for multi-stage legal case documents generation in the Chinese legal domain. CaseGen is based on 500 real case samples annotated by legal experts and covers seven essential case sections. It supports four key tasks: drafting defense statements, writing trial facts, composing legal reasoning, and generating judgment results. To the best of our knowledge, CaseGen is the first benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs in the context of legal case document generation. To ensure an accurate and comprehensive evaluation, we design the LLM-as-a-judge evaluation framework and validate its effectiveness through human annotations. We evaluate several widely used general-domain LLMs and legal-specific LLMs, highlighting their limitations in case document generation and pinpointing areas for potential improvement. This work marks a step toward a more effective framework for automating legal case documents drafting, paving the way for the reliable application of AI in the legal field. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/CSHaitao/CaseGen.
Legal services rely heavily on text processing. While large language models (LLMs) show promise, their application in legal contexts demands higher accuracy, repeatability, and transparency. Logic programs, by encoding legal concepts as structured rules and facts, offer reliable automation, but require sophisticated text extraction. We propose a neuro-symbolic approach that integrates LLMs' natural language understanding with logic-based reasoning to address these limitations. As a legal document case study, we applied neuro-symbolic AI to coverage-related queries in insurance contracts using both closed and open-source LLMs. While LLMs have improved in legal reasoning, they still lack the accuracy and consistency required for complex contract analysis. In our analysis, we tested three methodologies to evaluate whether a specific claim is covered under a contract: a vanilla LLM, an unguided approach that leverages LLMs to encode both the contract and the claim, and a guided approach that uses a framework for the LLM to encode the contract. We demonstrated the promising capabilities of LLM + Logic in the guided approach.
The Four-Element Theory is a fundamental framework in criminal law, defining the constitution of crime through four dimensions: Subject, Object, Subjective aspect, and Objective aspect. This theory is widely referenced in legal reasoning, and many Large Language Models (LLMs) attempt to incorporate it when handling legal tasks. However, current approaches rely on LLMs' internal knowledge to incorporate this theory, often lacking completeness and representativeness. To address this limitation, we introduce JUREX-4E, an expert-annotated knowledge base covering 155 criminal charges. It is structured through a progressive hierarchical annotation framework that prioritizes legal source validity and employs diverse legal interpretation methods to ensure comprehensiveness and authority. We evaluate JUREX-4E on the Similar Charge Distinction task and apply it to Legal Case Retrieval, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving LLM performance. Experimental results validate the high quality of JUREX-4E and its substantial impact on downstream legal tasks, underscoring its potential for advancing legal AI applications. Code: https://github.com/THUlawtech/JUREX
The application of large language models (LLMs) in the legal domain holds significant potential for information retrieval and question answering, yet Thai legal QA systems face challenges due to a lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks and the complexity of Thai legal structures. This paper introduces NitiBench, a benchmark comprising two datasets: the NitiBench-CCL, covering general Thai financial law, and the NitiBench-Tax, which includes real-world tax law cases requiring advanced legal reasoning. We evaluate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and long-context LLM-based approaches to address three key research questions: the impact of domain-specific components like section-based chunking and cross-referencing, the comparative performance of different retrievers and LLMs, and the viability of long-context LLMs as an alternative to RAG. Our results show that section-based chunking significantly improves retrieval and end-to-end performance, current retrievers struggle with complex queries, and long-context LLMs still underperform RAG-based systems in Thai legal QA. To support fair evaluation, we propose tailored multi-label retrieval metrics and the use of an LLM-as-judge for coverage and contradiction detection method. These findings highlight the limitations of current Thai legal NLP solutions and provide a foundation for future research in the field. We also open-sourced our codes and dataset to available publicly.