Evaluation of Large Language Models in Legal Applications: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Hu, Yiran, Liu, Huanghai, Wang, Chong, Li, Kunran, Wu, Tien-Hsuan, Li, Haitao, Xu, Xinran, Huo, Siqing, Su, Weihang, Zheng, Ning, Zheng, Siyuan, Ai, Qingyao, Liu, Yun, Bian, Renjun, Liu, Yiqun, Clarke, Charles L. A., Shen, Weixing, Kao, Ben
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Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Hu, Yiran
Liu, Huanghai
Wang, Chong
Li, Kunran
Wu, Tien-Hsuan
Li, Haitao
Xu, Xinran
Huo, Siqing
Su, Weihang
Zheng, Ning
Zheng, Siyuan
Ai, Qingyao
Liu, Yun
Bian, Renjun
Liu, Yiqun
Clarke, Charles L. A.
Shen, Weixing
Kao, Ben
author_facet Hu, Yiran
Liu, Huanghai
Wang, Chong
Li, Kunran
Wu, Tien-Hsuan
Li, Haitao
Xu, Xinran
Huo, Siqing
Su, Weihang
Zheng, Ning
Zheng, Siyuan
Ai, Qingyao
Liu, Yun
Bian, Renjun
Liu, Yiqun
Clarke, Charles L. A.
Shen, Weixing
Kao, Ben
contents Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly integrated into legal applications, including judicial decision support, legal practice assistance, and public-facing legal services. While LLMs show strong potential in handling legal knowledge and tasks, their deployment in real-world legal settings raises critical concerns beyond surface-level accuracy, involving the soundness of legal reasoning processes and trustworthy issues such as fairness and reliability. Systematic evaluation of LLM performance in legal tasks has therefore become essential for their responsible adoption. This survey identifies key challenges in evaluating LLMs for legal tasks grounded in real-world legal practice. We analyze the major difficulties involved in assessing LLM performance in the legal domain, including outcome correctness, reasoning reliability, and trustworthiness. Building on these challenges, we review and categorize existing evaluation methods and benchmarks according to their task design, datasets, and evaluation metrics. We further discuss the extent to which current approaches address these challenges, highlight their limitations, and outline future research directions toward more realistic, reliable, and legally grounded evaluation frameworks for LLMs in legal domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_15267
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluation of Large Language Models in Legal Applications: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions
Hu, Yiran
Liu, Huanghai
Wang, Chong
Li, Kunran
Wu, Tien-Hsuan
Li, Haitao
Xu, Xinran
Huo, Siqing
Su, Weihang
Zheng, Ning
Zheng, Siyuan
Ai, Qingyao
Liu, Yun
Bian, Renjun
Liu, Yiqun
Clarke, Charles L. A.
Shen, Weixing
Kao, Ben
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly integrated into legal applications, including judicial decision support, legal practice assistance, and public-facing legal services. While LLMs show strong potential in handling legal knowledge and tasks, their deployment in real-world legal settings raises critical concerns beyond surface-level accuracy, involving the soundness of legal reasoning processes and trustworthy issues such as fairness and reliability. Systematic evaluation of LLM performance in legal tasks has therefore become essential for their responsible adoption. This survey identifies key challenges in evaluating LLMs for legal tasks grounded in real-world legal practice. We analyze the major difficulties involved in assessing LLM performance in the legal domain, including outcome correctness, reasoning reliability, and trustworthiness. Building on these challenges, we review and categorize existing evaluation methods and benchmarks according to their task design, datasets, and evaluation metrics. We further discuss the extent to which current approaches address these challenges, highlight their limitations, and outline future research directions toward more realistic, reliable, and legally grounded evaluation frameworks for LLMs in legal domains.
title Evaluation of Large Language Models in Legal Applications: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15267