arXiv:2505. 02763v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One of the central promises of legal AI is to automate drudgery -- the formal, repetitive tasks of lawyers' work that consume time without calling for much discretion.
By Matthew Dahl, Eric Mart\'inez
arXiv:2608.03756v2 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: A common task in legal Information Retrieval (IR) is to find relevant legal sources from case-law collections. While legal practice often requires pi...
By Theresia Veronika Rampisela, Henrik Palmer Olsen, Giovanni Colavizza
The paper introduces an automated pipeline that converts court decisions into legal commentaries for specific German Civil Code sections, using paragraph extraction, summarization, keyword clustering, and large language models to generate headings and citation-rich sections. The system processes 4,555 decisions from the German Federal Court of Justice, evaluates the output on relevance, heading match, citation faithfulness, cluster distinction, and logical ordering, and demonstrates that rapid, low-cost commentary generation is feasible while noting limitations due to source restrictions and legal reasoning norms.
By Max Prior, Niklas Wais, Matthias Grabmair
arXiv:2608. 09393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We identify and quantify temporal misgrounding: the systematic retrieval and citation of the currently in-force version of a legal article when the applicable version is an earlier or future one.
By Rose Cymbler, Daniel Guez, Laurent Fabre
Legal argument mining supports passage classification, retrieval, and argument completion. This work introduces an expert-annotated dataset of 42 U.S. federal tax opinions on corporate reorganizations...
arXiv:2605. 21071v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) is shifting semantic search toward a question-answering paradigm, where users ask questions and LLMs generate responses.
By Souvick Das, Sallam Abualhaija, Domenico Bianculli
LexIssue introduces a benchmark for identifying disputed legal issues in Chinese civil litigation, comprising 430 real‑world cases and 1,303 expert‑annotated issues. The dataset is built around a hierarchical schema that links free‑form issue descriptions to structured legal categories, enabling two complementary tasks: issue generation and issue classification. A retrieval‑augmented knowledge base covering 27 causes of action and 441 issue entries is provided, and experiments show that incorporating this knowledge consistently improves model performance on the tasks.
By Huiyuan Xie, Yuqin Huang, Zhicheng Hao, Yida Cai, Shaochun Wang, Zhenghao Liu, Yuxiao Ye
The paper introduces an expert‑annotated dataset of 42 U.S. federal tax opinions on corporate reorganizations under I.R.C. §368, marking the first tree‑structured argument corpus in this domain. Each legal passage is labeled with one of five functional categories—Rule, Analysis, Conclusion, Background Facts, and Procedural History—and can be linked into directed support trees. Experiments demonstrate that functional labels are learnable and that supervised fine‑tuning improves within‑case retrieval, though cross‑case generalization remains weak.
By Luis Brena, William Jurayj, Gregory Deyesu, Zaid Al-Huneidi, Andrew Blair-Stanek, Benjamin Van Durme
LEGO is a dual‑module framework that combines a Legal Expert GraphRAG system with an expert Chain‑of‑Thought approach to enhance complex legal reasoning. The GraphRAG component uses an expert‑annotated civil code graph and a greedy normative‑coverage retrieval algorithm to extract relevant provision subgraphs, while the Chain‑of‑Thought module structures retrieved provisions and case facts into a Provision‑Fact‑Conclusion reasoning flow. Using a Qwen3‑8B backbone, LEGO achieves 40.53% exact‑match accuracy on LawExamQA_Civil, surpassing baseline RAG and CoT models and matching larger models on multi‑hop and open‑ended benchmarks, with ablation studies confirming the complementary benefits of both modules.
By Qingjing Chen, Junkai Zhang, Shaochun Wang, Jiahao Ding, Siyuan Zheng, Yukun Yan, Zhi Zheng, Antonino Rotolo, Yun Liu, Weixing Shen
arXiv:2603. 22973v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Applying computational methods to law at scale requires separating genuine legal reasoning from surface similarity.
By Avrile Floro (UPHF), Tamara Dhorasoo (UPHF), Soline Pellez (UPHF), Nils Holzenberger
Legal Research Bench (LRB) is a new benchmark comprising 413 open-ended U.S. legal research questions, each paired with a gold answer, supporting authorities, and a binary grading rubric. The study evaluates thirteen advanced language‑model agents using web search, case‑law search, page parsing, and retrieval tools, scoring responses only when all required criteria are met and cited authorities verify. Results show that even the best model, Claude Opus 4.8, achieves full correctness on only 42.9% of questions, with performance varying by legal area and task complexity, and no clear link between more tool calls or inference cost and higher accuracy.
By Katrina Drozdov, Oliver Chen, Langston Nashold, Rayan Krishnan
CoAL‑RAG is a complexity‑aware legal retrieval‑augmented generation method that adapts its retrieval strategy based on a multi‑dimensional evaluation of question essence and retrieval consistency. It quantifies reasoning demand from the logical structure of a question and uses the discrepancy between semantic and keyword retrieval to gauge problem complexity, thereby selecting the most suitable retrieval approach and filtering context dynamically. Experiments show that CoAL‑RAG outperforms baseline models on Chinese legal benchmarks (SocialLawQA, LawBench) with a 42.5% BLEU improvement and 3.6× ROUGE‑L, while also achieving strong cross‑jurisdictional performance on English datasets (LexGLUE, CaseHold).
By Jin Su, Zhuofeng Zhao, Huanhuan Wang, Hao Chen