Witold Kowalczyk
2026
Accurate Legal Reasoning at Scale: Neuro-Symbolic Offloading and Structural Auditability for Robust Legal Adjudication
Stanisław Sójka | Witold Kowalczyk
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Stanisław Sójka | Witold Kowalczyk
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Legal texts often contain computational legal clauses—provisions whose understanding requires complex logic. While frontier Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can describe such clauses, building production-ready systems is limited by reasoning errors and the high cost of inference. We propose Amortized Intelligence, a neuro-symbolic approach where we use an LLM once to translate a legal text into Deterministic Autonomous Contract Language (DACL): a typed graph intermediate representation. Adjudication then relies on deterministic graph executions with a visually auditable trace. In comparison against runtime LRM baselines (including GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro), our DACL-based Agent achieves near-perfect consistency and mitigates the "reasoning cliff" observed in probabilistic models. The system reduces compute costs by over 90% in high-volume workflows while satisfying the strict auditability requirements of legal adjudication.