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

Understand

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.