Do Large Language Models Know Colombian Law? A Reliability Benchmark for the Colombian Legal System

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support legal practice, education, and research, yet their reliability in national legal systems outside the United States remains largely undocumented. We introduce an expert-validated benchmark for evaluating LLM reliability on the Colombian legal system. The benchmark comprises 1,042 items spanning ten areas of law and three question formats (closed multiple-choice, semi-open, and open-ended IRAC), built through a human-in-the-loop pipeline with multi-stage expert review. We evaluate 15 contemporary proprietary and open-weight models with format-appropriate metrics. Accuracy on closed questions ranges widely, from 0.905 (Gemini 3.1 Pro) to 0.577, but on free-text legal answers factual correctness never exceeds 0.45 (on a 0-1 scale) for any model. We find a dissociation between answer relevancy and correctness (Spearman rho = -0.46): models reliably sound responsive while frequently being wrong, a pattern of particular concern for non-expert users. Closed-question accuracy and free-text correctness are strongly rank-correlated (rho = 0.94), so cheap multiple-choice screening predicts model ranking but overstates absolute reliability. An independent rubric-based LLM judge and blind human expert scoring both reproduce the free-text ranking (rho >= 0.88). The judge further reveals that only about half of the norms models cite are correct; the rest are wrong or non-existent. Reliability varies systematically by legal area and follows an inverted-U across question complexity. Our results indicate that current LLMs require expert supervision for Colombian legal tasks, and that grounding answers in authoritative sources is a promising path to higher reliability. We release the benchmark construction pipeline to support reproducible evaluation.