# When Large Language Models Meet Law: Dual-Lens Taxonomy, Technical Advances, and Ethical Governance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07748 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07748/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 201 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [RealToxicityPrompts: Evaluating Neural Toxic Degeneration in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11462/) (2020)
- [Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04359/) (2021)
- [Language (Technology) is Power: A Critical Survey of "Bias" in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14050/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05782/) (2023)
- [Defending Against Neural Fake News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12616/) (2019)
- [ERNIE: Enhanced Language Representation with Informative Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07129/) (2019)
- [Skip-Thought Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06726/) (2015)
- [LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00976/) (2021)
- [ERNIE 3.0: Large-scale Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02137/) (2021)
- [CUAD: An Expert-Annotated NLP Dataset for Legal Contract Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06268/) (2021)
- [Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02059/) (2019)
- [When Does Pretraining Help? Assessing Self-Supervised Learning for Law and the CaseHOLD Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08671/) (2021)
- [Demographic Dialectal Variation in Social Media: A Case Study of African-American English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08868/) (2016)
- [Challenges in Detoxifying Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07445/) (2021)
- [How Does NLP Benefit Legal System: A Summary of Legal Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12158/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models in Law: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03718/) (2023)
- [DISC-LawLLM: Fine-tuning Large Language Models for Intelligent Legal Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11325/) (2023)
- [Lawformer: A Pre-trained Language Model for Chinese Legal Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03887/) (2021)
- [Evolutionary Computation in the Era of Large Language Model: Survey and Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10034/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [From RAG to Agentic RAG for Faithful Islamic Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07528/) (2026)
- [Using Large Language Models for Legal Decision-Making in Austrian Value-Added Tax Law: A Comparative Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08468/) (2025)
- [LAMUS: A Large-Scale Corpus for Legal Argument Mining from U.S. Caselaw using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08286/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper establishes the first comprehensive review of Large Language Models (LLMs) applied within the legal domain. It pioneers an innovative dual lens taxonomy that integrates legal reasoning frameworks and professional ontologies to systematically unify historical research and contemporary breakthroughs. Transformer-based LLMs, which exhibit emergent capabilities such as contextual reasoning and generative argumentation, surmount traditional limitations by dynamically capturing legal semantics and unifying evidence reasoning. Significant progress is documented in task generalization, reasoning formalization, workflow integration, and addressing core challenges in text processing, knowledge integration, and evaluation rigor via technical innovations like sparse attention mechanisms and mixture-of-experts architectures. However, widespread adoption of LLM introduces critical challenges: hallucination, explainability deficits, jurisdictional adaptation difficulties, and ethical asymmetry. This review proposes a novel taxonomy that maps legal roles to NLP subtasks and computationally implements the Toulmin argumentation framework, thus systematizing advances in reasoning, retrieval, prediction, and dispute resolution. It identifies key frontiers including low-resource systems, multimodal evidence integration, and dynamic rebuttal handling. Ultimately, this work provides both a technical roadmap for researchers and a conceptual framework for practitioners navigating the algorithmic future, laying a robust foundation for the next era of legal artificial intelligence. We have created a GitHub repository to index the relevant papers: https://github.com/Kilimajaro/LLMs_Meet_Law.