BLT: Can Large Language Models Handle Basic Legal Text?

We find that the best publicly available LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude currently perform poorly on basic legal text handling. This motivates the creation of a benchmark consisting of examples that lawyers and paralegals would expect LLMs to handle zero-shot, such as looking up the text at a line of a w...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2024-10
Main Authors: Blair-Stanek, Andrew, Holzenberger, Nils, Benjamin Van Durme
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Large language models
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We find that the best publicly available LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude currently perform poorly on basic legal text handling. This motivates the creation of a benchmark consisting of examples that lawyers and paralegals would expect LLMs to handle zero-shot, such as looking up the text at a line of a witness deposition or at a subsection of a contract. LLMs' poor performance on this benchmark casts into doubt their reliability as-is for legal practice. However, fine-tuning on our training set brings even a small model to near-perfect performance. This benchmark will be useful for fine-tuning LLMs for downstream legal tasks, as well as for tracking LLMs' reliability as-is for basic legal tasks.
ISSN:2331-8422