LegalBench is a collaborative benchmark intended to evaluate English large language models on legal reasoning and legal text-based tasks. LegalBench currently consists of more than 40 tasks, which are described in detail here. A draft proposal describing the organization of an initial seed set of tasks is available as a preprint here. This repository currently contains demonstrative samples for each submitted task. Due to concerns about train-test leakage with large language models trained on Github/web corpora, we're currently assessing how best to make the benchmark available to the community. If you'd like to evaluate on LegalBench, please reach out.
In May 2023, we will be writing a paper describing the organization of LegalBench. Anyone who submits a task to LegalBench will be invited to join the paper as a co-author provided that:
- The task consists of at least 50 samples, and input samples should be fewer than 2000 words.
- The task is submitted before April 30th (2023).
The remainder of this README provides more information on potential tasks that can be added, how tasks should be submitted, and how LegalBench can be used.
- About us
- Contributing a task
- Evaluating on LegalBench tasks
- Contributors
- Licenses
- Citing this work
- Contact
We're an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and lawyers spanning academia and industry, interested in understanding the types of legal tasks that modern language models are capable of solving. To do so, we've been accumulating and constructing a diverse collection of legal NLP tasks---all of which are available in this repository. We have two goals for this project:
- First, we'd like to use these datasets to continually evaluate large language models for tasks involving legal reasoning and legal text. In particular, we're excited by the idea that the unique challenges posed by legal text may inspire new algorithmic innovations.
- Second, we'd like to use these datasets to guide legal practitioners and academics as they seek to understand to the safety and reliability implications of these models in their daily workflows.
Our approach to building LegalBench is inspired by contemporaneous open-science efforts for democratizing participation in machine learning development (e.g HELM, BigBench).
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to Neel Guha ([email protected]).
We are currently in the process of adding more tasks to LegalBench. If you are interested in developing a task, know of an existing legal reasoning/legal text analysis dataset, or possess data that is relevant to legal reasoning, then we would be delighted to add your task/dataset to LegalBench. Our view of what constitutes "legal reasoning" is broad---any task involving legal text, laws of any jurisdiction, or reasoning skill relevant to the law can be added.
Due to the length limitations of most large language models, we prefer tasks which operate on sequences of text that are less than 2000 words. For tasks involving longer documents---like contract clause extraction---we encourage you to reframe the task as a classification task, by chunking the long document into subparts.
Examples of tasks that could be added to LegalBench include:
- Tasks which require a model to apply specific legal rule(s) to a hypothetical pattern of facts. For instance:
- Asking the model to determine if a particular set of contacts give rise to personal jurisdiction?
- Asking the model to determine from a set of facts describing a contractual relationship which party would be liable for breaching the contract.
- Asking the model to determine whether a proposed federal statute would be a permissible exercise of power under the Commerce Clause.
- Tasks which require a model to answer questions about the law in different jurisdiction.
- Asking the model to provide the holding statements for different cases.
- Asking the model to explain different common law tests.
- Asking the model to explain differences in law between two jurisdictions.
- Asking the model to identify the legal authority for different laws.
- Tasks which require a model to classify legal texts.
- Asking the model to classify whether or not a contractual provision creates some type of right between the parties.
- Asking the model to classify whether a provision in a legal agreement would be oppressive and unenforceable under the laws of a jurisdiction.
- Asking the model to classify if a piece of statutory text performs a certain function (e.g., creates a private right, discusses notice requirements, allows for fee-shifting, etc.)
- Tasks which require the model to perform types of reasoning common or unique to legal practice.
- Asking the model to determine the Bluebook signal that should preface a particular parenthetical.
- Asking the model to evaluate which premise most strongly supports a legal argument.
Task submissions consist of a:
- Task data. This may be submitted as one file, or optionally, as a train and test file.
- A description of the task.
- [Optional] A prompt to use for the task. If no prompt is submitted, then we will craft one for you.
We accept new tasks via Google Forms. A step-by-step walkthrough is provided here.
Note: smaller and manually crafted data sets are accepted! We ask only that the data set be at least 50 samples.
Task data may be submitted as a single TSV (tab-separated value) file. The first row of the TSV file should contain a header for each column of data. Most tasks will have only two columns, corresponding to the task input and the correct task output (e.g., Unfair TOS). However, a task may have more than one column (e.g., Statutory Reasoning Assessment. Each remaining row in the file should correspond to a sample. The file should be named data.tsv.
If you wish to add metadata for each sample---to categorize subgroups in the dataset which implicate similar challenges---then add that as a column. For instance, Hearsay consists of a slice column, which describes the element of the hearsay rule being tested for each sample.
If you submit as one file, we will go through the process of splitting the file into a train and test set.
If you write your data in Excel or Google Sheets, then there is an option to export as a tsv file.
Alternatively, if you wish to split train and test yourself, then please submit two files. The first file should correspond to the train data, and should be named as train.tsv. The second file should correspond to test data, and be named test.tsv. Train files should consist of between 4-8 samples. Both files should have the same column names/schema.
Lastly, tasks should be accompanied by a description, which includes the following:
- What the task is.
- What types of legal reasoning the task evaluates.
- How the data was collected or created. If the task was adapted from an existing benchmark, then a reference to that paper should be included.
The base prompt file contains a prompt that can be used to solve the task. Below is an example of a prompt for the Hearsay task.
Hearsay is an out-of-court statement introduced to prove the truth of the matter asserted.
Q: On the issue of whether David is fast, the fact that David set a high school track record. Is there hearsay?
A: No
Q: On the issue of whether Rebecca was ill, the fact that Rebecca told Ronald that she was unwell. Is there hearsay?
A: Yes
Q: To prove that Tim was a soccer fan, the fact that Tim told Jimmy that "Real Madrid was the best soccer team in the world." Is there hearsay?
A: No
Q: When asked by the attorney on cross-examination, Alice testified that she had "never seen the plaintiff before, and had no idea who she was. Is there hearsay?
A: No
Q: On the issue of whether Martin punched James, the fact that Martin smiled and nodded when asked if he did so by an officer on the scene. Is there hearsay?
A: Yes
Q: {{text}} Is there hearsay?
A:
Text enclosed in brackets should correspond to column names in the task data files.
Update 3/16/23: Due to concerns about train-test leakage with large language models trained on Github and web corpora, we're disabling submission via pull-request. Please submit only via Google Forms.
Tasks may be submitted via Google Forms at this link.
- Tasks that have been previously published as parts of other works or benchmarks may be added to LegalBench. If you are doing so, please be sure to follow the licensing requirements imposed by the original publishers, and to include a citation to the original work (see more below).
- Task datasets should consist of at least 50 samples. However, if this is a barrier, please contact us and we can work with you to scale the dataset.
Please note that LegalBench is still under development, and we're continuing to tweak aspects of the datasets.
Update 3/16/23: Due to emerging concerns about train-test leakage with large language models trained on Github and large web corpora, we've decided to only make a small sample of points available for each task on this repository. If you wish to evaluate on LegalBench, please reach out to us and we'll share a copy of the datasets.
LegalBench tasks will be made available via Huggingface in June 2023.
The following individuals have contributed to LegalBench:
- Neel Guha
- Joel Niklaus
- Nils Holzenberger
- John Nay
- Julian Nyarko
- Daniel E. Ho
- Christopher Ré
LegalBench is a mix of created and transformed datasets. We ask that you follow the license of the dataset creator. Please see the task page for a list of tasks and licenses.
For now, please cite to the ArXiv paper. This will be updated in May 2023 when a paper with task contributors is released.
@misc{https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2209.06120,
doi = {10.48550/ARXIV.2209.06120},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.06120},
author = {Guha, Neel and Ho, Daniel E. and Nyarko, Julian and Ré, Christopher},
keywords = {Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI), FOS: Computer and information sciences, FOS: Computer and information sciences},
title = {LegalBench: Prototyping a Collaborative Benchmark for Legal Reasoning},
publisher = {arXiv},
year = {2022},
copyright = {arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license}
}
For questions, concerns, or comments, please reach out to Neel ([email protected]).
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