# Large Language Models Meet Legal Artificial Intelligence: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09969 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09969/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 114 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14196/) (2024)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07567/) (2021)
- [LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00976/) (2021)
- [Efficient and Effective Text Encoding for Chinese LLaMA and Alpaca](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08177/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Large Language Models for Data Annotation and Synthesis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13446/) (2024)
- [When Does Pretraining Help? Assessing Self-Supervised Learning for Law and the CaseHOLD Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08671/) (2021)
- [CAIL2018: A Large-Scale Legal Dataset for Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02478/) (2018)
- [SantaCoder: don't reach for the stars!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03988/) (2023)
- [SaulLM-7B: A pioneering Large Language Model for Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03883/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Meet NL2Code: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09420/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Chatlaw: A Multi-Agent Legal Assistant based on a Role-Aligned Mixture-of-Experts Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16092/) (2023)
- [JEC-QA: A Legal-Domain Question Answering Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12011/) (2019)
- [Pile of Law: Learning Responsible Data Filtering from the Law and a 256GB Open-Source Legal Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00220/) (2022)
- [Re-TACRED: Addressing Shortcomings of the TACRED Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08398/) (2021)
- [Can GPT-3 Perform Statutory Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06100/) (2023)
- [CBR-RAG: Case-Based Reasoning for Retrieval Augmented Generation in LLMs for Legal Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04302/) (2024)
- [Fengshenbang 1.0: Being the Foundation of Chinese Cognitive Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02970/) (2022)
- [SAILER: Structure-aware Pre-trained Language Model for Legal Case Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11370/) (2023)
- [Swiss-Judgment-Prediction: A Multilingual Legal Judgment Prediction Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00806/) (2021)
- [Legal Prompting: Teaching a Language Model to Think Like a Lawyer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01326/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [LRAS: Advanced Legal Reasoning with Agentic Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07296/) (2026)
- [LLM Agents in Law: Taxonomy, Applications, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06216/) (2026)
- [LegalGraphRAG: Multi-Agent Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reliable Legal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28120/) (2026)
- [LegalCiteBench: Evaluating Citation Reliability in Legal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10186/) (2026)
- [ShiZhi: A Chinese Lightweight Large Language Model for Court View Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09297/) (2025)
- [Evaluation of Large Language Models in Legal Applications: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15267/) (2026)
- [Towards Intelligent Legal Document Analysis: CNN-Driven Classification of Case Law Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17674/) (2026)
- [Exploring Lightweight Large Language Models for Court View Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16770/) (2026)
- [JusticeAxis: Benchmarking Legal Judgment between Rigid Rule Application and Ungrounded Discretion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00353/) (2026)
- [AgentTune: A Unified Training Lifecycle for Tool-Using LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13335/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the development of Legal Artificial Intelligence (Legal AI) in recent years, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of legal tasks. To advance research and applications of LLM-based approaches in legal domain, this paper provides a comprehensive review of 16 legal LLMs series and 47 LLM-based frameworks for legal tasks, and also gather 15 benchmarks and 29 datasets to evaluate different legal capabilities. Additionally, we analyse the challenges and discuss future directions for LLM-based approaches in the legal domain. We hope this paper provides a systematic introduction for beginners and encourages future research in this field. Resources are available at https://github.com/ZhitianHou/LLMs4LegalAI.