arXiv Machine Learning

Schematize: An Agentic System for Generating and Refining Information-Extraction Schemas for Legal Research

arXiv AI
2d ago

Legal Research Bench: Measuring End-to-End Reliability in Long-Horizon Legal Research Agents

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

LEGO: Synergizing Expert GraphRAG and Expert Chain-of-Thought for Legal Reasoning

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 Computation and Language
Aug 27

Gavel: Agent Meets Checklist for Evaluating LLMs on Long-Context Legal Summarization

The paper introduces Gavel, a framework for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on long-context legal summarization tasks. Gavel includes a reference-based component (Gavel-Ref) with checklist, residual-fact, and writing-style checks, and a reference-free component (Gavel-Agent) that assesses factual coverage directly from source documents. Experiments on 12 frontier LLMs reveal that models tend to omit key information more than hallucinate, perform well on simple checklist items but struggle with rare, complex items, and their performance degrades with longer cases. Gavel-Agent cuts token usage by at least 36% compared to traditional methods while maintaining competitive accuracy, and it also generalizes effectively to the medical domain.

By Yao Dou, Benjamin Mamut, Wei Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Generating Legal Commentaries from Case Databases via Retrieval, Clustering, and Generation

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 AI
Sep 15

ClinAgent: A ReAct-Based Agent for Conversational Access to Clinical Trial Information

ClinAgent is a conversational system that uses a ReAct-based LLM agent to retrieve and synthesize clinical trial information from multiple sources such as ClinicalTrials.gov, PubMed, and a local dataset. The agent iteratively reasons over user queries, selects appropriate tools, and refines its actions to provide grounded, up-to-date responses in natural language across multi-turn interactions. Evaluation across three phases shows that DeepSeek (thinking mode) excels in planning quality while Gemini 3.0 Flash delivers the highest overall performance and expert ratings, demonstrating the promise of agentic AI for improving clinical trial data access.

By Antonino Vaccarella, Riccardo Cantini, Domenico Talia, Paolo Trunfio, Marianna Talia, Rosamaria Lappano, Marcello Maggiolini