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Hi, As for benchmarks for law tasks: I also have a concern regarding how the more popular benchmarks (like the tasks in Harvey Legal Agent Benchmark) can accura
by District5524 13d ago
Hi,
As for benchmarks for law tasks: I also have a concern regarding how the more popular benchmarks (like the tasks in Harvey Legal Agent Benchmark) can accurately reflect actual work done by lawyers. Not only in civil law systems, but also in non-BigLaw type of work areas.
Most of the law tasks should inherently reflect the legal system they are based on. It is an oversimplification that lawyers in one country tend to do the same legal work as lawyers in another, that's a form of dishonest framing from LLM providers working in this area (it is that important for them to be able to scale and disregard traditional fragmentation of the legal services).
The legal systems of common law countries are quite similar in both how they do legal training and in many areas that are important for business. Like in contract law or tort. That means not only similar concepts and foundations (things first taught to law students), but also a similar approach to what is seen as a legal problem, and what kind of answers people expect from a lawyer. Also, what they understand under "legal research" - what do you actually research and what is expected from a qualified lawyer to know by heart, how are you expected to find the legal default in a detailed question, how certain that default is, what is up to professional judgment.
But even the differences within common law systems is huge in other areas that go beyond these basics. Like those affected by statutes, codes (like CFR or NYCRR) or even local regulations etc. The popular legal benchmarks do not dare going into these more detailed legal work directions. And these laws change frequently, and they are very different from one jurisdiction to another, even within the US, let alone in other countries building on English legal traditions.
(Nobody I know of is building a benchmark that affects these areas of law.)
And the diversity is even bigger within legal systems lumped together as "civil law systems". Even those based on Roman law, or on German jurisprudence in the 19th century... There is not much common in how French and German students study law, even if both are members of the EU and many areas of law are harmonised or subject to the same legal acts of the EU and the same EU Court of Justice.
If your LLM has access to up to date legal databases of those countries, commentaries etc., the answers are still surprisingly useful in research. That said, no professional should rely on those LLMs that merely use public legal databases, scraping latest laws and cases via self-operated MCP servers.
I think the main difference is how lawyers from a civil law system use the LLMs compared to someone from a common law system - and that is based on the different training they receive as law students, how they see "law" etc. Maybe there is no such a thing as absolute accuracy in the civil statutes either, but at least civil law lawyers have a stronger notion of "law is knowable". There is a higher likelihood of having one "correct" answer, even when talking about more lifelike, detailed questions.
(I'm qualified in both a civil and a common law system but not specifically in German law.)