# LawGPT: A Chinese Legal Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04614 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04614/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10305/) (2023)
- [Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10403/) (2022)
- [Efficient and Effective Text Encoding for Chinese LLaMA and Alpaca](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08177/) (2023)
- [FinGPT: Open-Source Financial Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06031/) (2023)
- [Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02059/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Knowledge-Enhanced Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04389/) (2020)
- [LawBench: Benchmarking Legal Knowledge of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16289/) (2023)
- [JEC-QA: A Legal-Domain Question Answering Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12011/) (2019)
- [Lawformer: A Pre-trained Language Model for Chinese Legal Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03887/) (2021)
- [SAILER: Structure-aware Pre-trained Language Model for Legal Case Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11370/) (2023)
- [Learning to Predict Charges for Criminal Cases with Legal Basis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09168/) (2017)
- [Lawyer LLaMA Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15062/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models in Education: Vision and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13160/) (2023)
- [Legal Judgment Prediction via Multi-Perspective Bi-Feedback Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03969/) (2019)
- [A Brief Report on LawGPT 1.0: A Virtual Legal Assistant Based on GPT-3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05729/) (2023)
- [AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02959/) (2024)
- [CJRC: A Reliable Human-Annotated Benchmark DataSet for Chinese Judicial Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.09156/) (2019)
- [LAiW: A Chinese Legal Large Language Models Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05620/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [FLEX: Continuous Agent Evolution via Forward Learning from Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06449/) (2025)
- [GoldCoin: Grounding Large Language Models in Privacy Laws via Contextual Integrity Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11149/) (2024)
- [An overview of domain-specific foundation model: key technologies, applications and challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04267/) (2024)
- [Privacy Checklist: Privacy Violation Detection Grounding on Contextual Integrity Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10053/) (2024)
- [LawLuo: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Multi-Round Chinese Legal Consultation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16252/) (2024)
- [MoA-VR: A Mixture-of-Agents System Towards All-in-One Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08508/) (2025)
- [Robust Semi-Supervised Learning in Open Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18256/) (2024)
- [Bailicai: A Domain-Optimized Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Medical Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21055/) (2024)
- [GLARE: Agentic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16383/) (2025)
- [LegalOne: A Family of Foundation Models for Reliable Legal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00642/) (2026)
- [LegalGraphRAG: Multi-Agent Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Legal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28120/) (2026)
- [Legal Evalutions and Challenges of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10137/) (2024)
- [A Short Survey on Small Reasoning Models: Training, Inference, Applications and Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09100/) (2025)
- [GEE-OPs: An Operator Knowledge Base for Geospatial Code Generation on the Google Earth Engine Platform Powered by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05587/) (2024)
- [From Query to Counsel: Structured Reasoning with a Multi-Agent Framework and Dataset for Legal Consultation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10470/) (2026)
- [CoAL-RAG: A Complexity-Aware Legal Retrieval-Augmented Generation Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17536/) (2026)
- [GAIus: Combining Genai with Legal Clauses Retrieval for Knowledge-based Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01259/) (2025)
- [AnyTaskTune: Advanced Domain-Specific Solutions through Task-Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07094/) (2024)
- [A Data Synthesis Method Driven by Large Language Models for Proactive Mining of Implicit User Intentions in Tourism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11533/) (2025)
- [CLaw: Benchmarking Chinese Legal Knowledge in Large Language Models - A Fine-grained Corpus and Reasoning Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21208/) (2025)
- [ASVRI-Legal: Fine-Tuning LLMs with Retrieval Augmented Generation for Enhanced Legal Regulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03563/) (2025)
- [EfficientXpert: Efficient Domain Adaptation for Large Language Models via Propagation-Aware Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19935/) (2025)
- [CLASE: A Hybrid Method for Chinese Legalese Stylistic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12639/) (2026)
- [Interpretable Traffic Responsibility from Dashcam Video via Legal Multi Agent Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17930/) (2026)
- [Research on Predicting Public Opinion Event Heat Levels Based on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18548/) (2024)
- [Fusing Bidirectional Chains of Thought and Reward Mechanisms A Method for Enhancing Question-Answering Capabilities of Large Language Models for Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08167/) (2025)
- [ICH-Qwen: A Large Language Model Towards Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23831/) (2025)
- [Nyay-Darpan: Enhancing Decision Making Through Summarization and Case Retrieval for Consumer Law in India](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06090/) (2025)
- [Finetune Once: Decoupling General & Domain Learning with Dynamic Boosted Annealing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26242/) (2025)
- [Chinese Labor Law Large Language Model Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09972/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs), including both proprietary and open-source models, have showcased remarkable capabilities in addressing a wide range of downstream tasks. Nonetheless, when it comes to practical Chinese legal tasks, these models fail to meet the actual requirements. Proprietary models do not ensure data privacy for sensitive legal cases, while open-source models demonstrate unsatisfactory performance due to their lack of legal knowledge. To address this problem, we introduce LawGPT, the first open-source model specifically designed for Chinese legal applications. LawGPT comprises two key components: legal-oriented pre-training and legal supervised fine-tuning. Specifically, we employ large-scale Chinese legal documents for legal-oriented pre-training to incorporate legal domain knowledge. To further improve the model's performance on downstream legal tasks, we create a knowledge-driven instruction dataset for legal supervised fine-tuning. Our experimental results demonstrate that LawGPT outperforms the open-source LLaMA 7B model. Our code and resources are publicly available at https://github.com/pengxiao-song/LaWGPT and have received 5.7K stars on GitHub.