The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
Law students are examined through open-text answers: case solutions, essays and memos that apply the law to a set of facts. Such answers are expensive to grade, human graders disagree widely on them,...
Small language models can grade open‑ended exam answers as reliably as much larger models when they use an explicit rubric. In experiments with six cost‑efficient model configurations, the rubric decouples grading from judge intelligence, with answer identity explaining 95.6% of score variance and judge identity only 0.2%. Removing rubric criteria or the official answer collapses reliability and inflates scores, showing the rubric’s essential role.
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.
arXiv:2601.08654v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rubric-based text evaluation increasingly relies on large language models (LLMs) as scalable judges, yet frozen black-box models can interpret the...
LabourCrew is a multi‑agent Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) framework designed for trustworthy statutory question answering in labour law. It introduces three grounding mechanisms: StatuteGraph, an evidence‑exchange ledger, and a calibrated trust gate that controls false‑accept rates. Evaluated on a Bangla Labour Act QA set, LabourCrew achieves a false‑accept rate of 0.081 and higher answer relevancy than existing RAG methods, demonstrating that calibrated abstention is key to auditable legal QA.
arXiv:2606. 18699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their performance on jurisdiction-specific legal reasoning remains underexplored.