While the validity of LLMs' use in the legal context remains subject to ethical and legal debate, legal professionals are already experimenting with personal LLMs, if only for translation and reformulation. However, even such a seemingly innocuous use can introduce biases through case processing speed if LLM assistants selectively refuse assistance on certain topics.
arXiv:2606. 24585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While the validity of LLMs' use in the legal context remains subject to ethical and legal debate, legal professionals are already experimenting with personal LLMs, if only for translation and reformulation.
arXiv:2604. 26233v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are proposed as legal decision assistants, and even first-instance decision-makers, across a range of judicial and administrative contexts, it becomes essential to explore how they answer legal questions, and in particular the factors that lead them to decide difficult questions.
arXiv:2608.21409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In medicine, claims remain valid when supported by empirical evidence grounded in stable biological reality. In law, by contrast, truth is contingent...
arXiv:2606. 23375v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While the wider applicability of LLMs in the legal field is currently debated due to their reliability and the gravity of any errors, narrow uses with well-understood and mitigated risks have emerged.
The paper argues that hallucinations by legal language models should be judged as failures of legal warrant rather than mere factual or citation errors. It defines claim-authority warrant as a context-sensitive relationship between a legal claim and applicable, current authority, and proposes that evaluating warrant can uncover failures missed by traditional accuracy or citation metrics. The authors outline a pilot study, benchmark specifications, and a research agenda to assess whether legal AI systems’ claims are properly licensed by law.
arXiv:2609.23083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The distinction between the spirit and letter of the law is a central issue across research and everyday life, and a growing concern for building safe,...
arXiv:2609.38260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Values such as honesty, autonomy, and confidentiality are often regarded as general principles underpinning AI alignment. However, what it means to a...
As large language models are increasingly deployed as tool-augmented legal agents, they introduce agentic hallucinations where tool-call and reasoning errors cascade into fabricated holdings and misci...
LexAgentHallu is a new benchmark that profiles hallucinations in legal agents across multi-step interactions. It contains 3,414 instances spanning 17 legal categories and 6 task types, each annotated with a dual-layer taxonomy of 7 high-level and 27 fine-grained hallucination categories. The benchmark introduces fine-grained metrics to quantify and localize failures along an agent’s execution path, revealing patterns such as the Right-Answer-Wrong-Reason effect and clustered hallucination subclasses.
The study examines whether large language models truly base legal verdicts on the statutes or precedents they cite. By fixing case facts and swapping the cited authority with an unrelated one, researchers found that while models correctly name the authority 66.7%-100% of the time, the resulting verdict often remains unchanged—only 0.0%-21.7% of the time on CaseHOLD, 30.0%-76.7% on ECHR and SCOTUS, and 43.3%-50.0% on ContractNLI. Even a purpose‑built legal‑reasoning model and larger scales did not close this gap, and adversarial instructions further exposed vulnerabilities in verdict consistency.
The study examines whether large language models (LLMs) can perform legally meaningful reasoning by testing OpenAI GPT 5.4 on European Court of Human Rights case forecasting. Using various prompting strategies, the authors find that the model produces structurally complete but substantively shallow analyses, and that LLM-as-a-Judge evaluators are internally consistent yet only weakly aligned with human annotators. The expert-curated prompt yields more comprehensive reasoning but does not improve prediction accuracy, leading the authors to caution against relying solely on automated LLM evaluation or using task accuracy as a proxy for reasoning quality.
arXiv:2605.27110v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work, we propose BAIT (Boundary-Aware Iterative Trap), a three-step jailbreak framework that elicits malicious information through in...