Explicitly Integrating Judgment Prediction with Legal Document Retrieval: A Law-Guided Generative Approach

Legal document retrieval and judgment prediction are crucial tasks in intelligent legal systems. In practice, determining whether two documents share the same judgments is essential for establishing their relevance in legal retrieval. However, existing legal retrieval studies either ignore the vital role of judgment prediction or rely on implicit training objectives, expecting a proper alignment of legal documents in vector space based on their judgments. Neither approach provides explicit evidence of judgment consistency for relevance modeling, leading to inaccuracies and a lack of transparency in retrieval. To address this issue, we propose a law-guided method, namely GEAR, within the generative retrieval framework. GEAR explicitly integrates judgment prediction with legal document retrieval in a sequence-to-sequence manner. Experiments on two Chinese legal case retrieval datasets show the superiority of GEAR over state-of-the-art methods while maintaining competitive judgment prediction performance. Moreover, we validate its robustness across languages and domains on a French statutory article retrieval dataset.