arXiv:2608. 08512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evolving documents, such as laws, tax codes, and software documentation, are amended, replaced, and sometimes reverted over time, so a question has different correct answers at different dates.
By Mahbub E Sobhani, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Fahmid Hasan Chowdhury, Md Adnan Arefeen, Farig Sadeque, Md. Faizul Bari, Swakkhar Shatabda
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: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
The paper introduces three retrieval methods for Polish statutory law that use language‑model annotations attached to articles as surrogates. The methods—ASCR, ASCR‑H, and DTF—vary in cost and quality, with ASCR‑H achieving the highest rank‑one accuracy on bar exam questions, while DTF offers competitive performance with lower latency and cost. Extensive evaluation against 14 baselines on 300 exam questions demonstrates significant improvements in head‑rank accuracy and discusses limitations such as coverage asymmetry and negative results for lemmatisation, pseudo‑relevance feedback, and query rewriting.
By Orkun Yi\u{g}it Cengiz
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for legal research, but their fixed training cutoffs and reliance on static knowledge clash with the evolving nature of statutory law. This study introduces a benchmark of 312 expert‑validated, time‑sensitive German statutory QA pairs that examine two temporal failure modes: post‑cutoff staleness and recency bias. Five LLMs were evaluated under four inference settings, and the results show that retrieval‑augmented approaches that enforce temporal validity significantly improve performance, while web search yields unstable gains and a pronounced recency bias.
By Max Prior, Andreas Schultz, Matthias Grabmair
arXiv:2607. 03325v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an automated pipeline that decomposes Italian tax-court judgments into individual legal issues and extracts, for each issue, a structured XML representation grounded in the IRAC framework and the legal syllogism.
By Giovanni Piccioli, Alessia Fidelangeli, Piera Santin, Pierpaolo Vivo