Evaluation of Large Language Models in Legal Applications: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions
This work addresses the need for systematic evaluation of LLMs in legal domains to ensure responsible adoption, but it is incremental as it surveys and categorizes existing approaches without introducing new methods.
This survey tackles the problem of evaluating large language models (LLMs) in legal applications by identifying key challenges such as reasoning reliability and trustworthiness, and it reviews existing methods and benchmarks to outline future directions for more realistic evaluation frameworks.
Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly integrated into legal applications, including judicial decision support, legal practice assistance, and public-facing legal services. While LLMs show strong potential in handling legal knowledge and tasks, their deployment in real-world legal settings raises critical concerns beyond surface-level accuracy, involving the soundness of legal reasoning processes and trustworthy issues such as fairness and reliability. Systematic evaluation of LLM performance in legal tasks has therefore become essential for their responsible adoption. This survey identifies key challenges in evaluating LLMs for legal tasks grounded in real-world legal practice. We analyze the major difficulties involved in assessing LLM performance in the legal domain, including outcome correctness, reasoning reliability, and trustworthiness. Building on these challenges, we review and categorize existing evaluation methods and benchmarks according to their task design, datasets, and evaluation metrics. We further discuss the extent to which current approaches address these challenges, highlight their limitations, and outline future research directions toward more realistic, reliable, and legally grounded evaluation frameworks for LLMs in legal domains.