LLM-as-a-Judge: Rapid Evaluation of Legal Document Recommendation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

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Main Authors: Pradhan, Anu, Ortan, Alexandra, Verma, Apurv, Seshadri, Madhavan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Pradhan, Anu
Ortan, Alexandra
Verma, Apurv
Seshadri, Madhavan
author_facet Pradhan, Anu
Ortan, Alexandra
Verma, Apurv
Seshadri, Madhavan
contents The evaluation bottleneck in recommendation systems has become particularly acute with the rise of Generative AI, where traditional metrics fall short of capturing nuanced quality dimensions that matter in specialized domains like legal research. Can we trust Large Language Models to serve as reliable judges of their own kind? This paper investigates LLM-as-a-Judge as a principled approach to evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems in legal contexts, where the stakes of recommendation quality are exceptionally high. We tackle two fundamental questions that determine practical viability: which inter-rater reliability metrics best capture the alignment between LLM and human assessments, and how do we conduct statistically sound comparisons between competing systems? Through systematic experimentation, we discover that traditional agreement metrics like Krippendorff's alpha can be misleading in the skewed distributions typical of AI system evaluations. Instead, Gwet's AC2 and rank correlation coefficients emerge as more robust indicators for judge selection, while the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test with Benjamini-Hochberg corrections provides the statistical rigor needed for reliable system comparisons. Our findings suggest a path toward scalable, cost-effective evaluation that maintains the precision demanded by legal applications, transforming what was once a human-intensive bottleneck into an automated, yet statistically principled, evaluation framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12382
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLM-as-a-Judge: Rapid Evaluation of Legal Document Recommendation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Pradhan, Anu
Ortan, Alexandra
Verma, Apurv
Seshadri, Madhavan
Computation and Language
H.3.3; I.2.7; I.2.6
The evaluation bottleneck in recommendation systems has become particularly acute with the rise of Generative AI, where traditional metrics fall short of capturing nuanced quality dimensions that matter in specialized domains like legal research. Can we trust Large Language Models to serve as reliable judges of their own kind? This paper investigates LLM-as-a-Judge as a principled approach to evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems in legal contexts, where the stakes of recommendation quality are exceptionally high. We tackle two fundamental questions that determine practical viability: which inter-rater reliability metrics best capture the alignment between LLM and human assessments, and how do we conduct statistically sound comparisons between competing systems? Through systematic experimentation, we discover that traditional agreement metrics like Krippendorff's alpha can be misleading in the skewed distributions typical of AI system evaluations. Instead, Gwet's AC2 and rank correlation coefficients emerge as more robust indicators for judge selection, while the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test with Benjamini-Hochberg corrections provides the statistical rigor needed for reliable system comparisons. Our findings suggest a path toward scalable, cost-effective evaluation that maintains the precision demanded by legal applications, transforming what was once a human-intensive bottleneck into an automated, yet statistically principled, evaluation framework.
title LLM-as-a-Judge: Rapid Evaluation of Legal Document Recommendation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
topic Computation and Language
H.3.3; I.2.7; I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12382