# UK-PRBENCH: A Paragraph-Level Precedent Retrieval Benchmark for United Kingdom Case Law

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24613 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24613/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00976/) (2021)
- [Nomic Embed: Training a Reproducible Long Context Text Embedder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01613/) (2024)
- [SAILER: Structure-aware Pre-trained Language Model for Legal Case Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11370/) (2023)
- [Arctic-Embed 2.0: Multilingual Retrieval Without Compromise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04506/) (2024)
- [Improved Multi-label Classification under Temporal Concept Drift: Rethinking Group-Robust Algorithms in a Label-Wise Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07856/) (2022)
- [U-CREAT: Unsupervised Case Retrieval using Events extrAcTion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05260/) (2023)
- [Learning Interpretable Legal Case Retrieval via Knowledge-Guided Case Reformulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19760/) (2024)
- [nigam@COLIEE-22: Legal Case Retrieval and Entailment using Cascading of Lexical and Semantic-based models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07853/) (2022)
- [MUSER: A Multi-View Similar Case Retrieval Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15602/) (2023)
- [Jasper-Token-Compression-600M Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14405/) (2025)
- [GuRE:Generative Query REwriter for Legal Passage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12950/) (2025)
- [The Massive Legal Embedding Benchmark (MLEB)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19365/) (2025)
- [PARM: A Paragraph Aggregation Retrieval Model for Dense Document-to-Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01614/) (2022)
- [LegalSearchLM: Rethinking Legal Case Retrieval as Legal Elements Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23832/) (2025)
- [IL-PCSR: Legal Corpus for Prior Case and Statute Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00268/) (2025)
- [Query-driven Relevant Paragraph Extraction from Legal Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00595/) (2024)
- [Can Model Fusing Help Transformers in Long Document Classification? An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09532/) (2023)
- [LLM-based Embedders for Prior Case Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18455/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prior case retrieval (PCR) aims to identify precedent cases relevant to a given query case. Existing PCR benchmarks and methods predominantly operate at the document level, treating entire judgments as the unit of relevance. This formulation is suboptimal for legal practitioners, as judgments address multiple legal issues and only a small subset of paragraphs is relevant to a particular query. Addressing this gap, we introduce UK-PRBench, a benchmark for paragraph-level precedent retrieval in UK case law, constructed from judgments obtained from the UK National Archives and covering a broad range of UK courts and tribunals. Furthermore, we evaluate state-of-the-art retrieval models and establish baseline results. Our experiments show that paragraph-level precedent retrieval remains challenging for current retrieval approaches, highlighting substantial room for improvement. UK-PRBench provides a standardised benchmark for evaluating fine-grained precedent retrieval and advancing retrieval systems for the UK legal domain.