@inproceedings{cho-etal-2025-modeling,
    title = "Modeling Motivated Reasoning in Law: Evaluating Strategic Role Conditioning in {LLM} Summarization",
    author = {Cho, Eunjung  and
      Hoyle, Alexander Miserlis  and
      Hermstr{\"u}wer, Yoan},
    editor = "Aletras, Nikolaos  and
      Chalkidis, Ilias  and
      Barrett, Leslie  and
      Goanț{\u{a}}, C{\u{a}}t{\u{a}}lina  and
      Preoțiuc-Pietro, Daniel  and
      Spanakis, Gerasimos",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.nllp-1.7/",
    pages = "68--112",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-338-8",
    abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate user-tailored summaries, adapting outputs to specific stakeholders. In legal contexts, this raises important questions about motivated reasoning {---} how models strategically frame information to align with a stakeholder{'}s position within the legal system. Building on theories of legal realism and recent trends in legal practice, we investigate how LLMs respond to prompts conditioned on different legal roles (e.g., judges, prosecutors, attorneys) when summarizing judicial decisions. We introduce an evaluation framework grounded in legal fact and reasoning inclusion, also considering favorability towards stakeholders. Our results show that even when prompts include balancing instructions, models exhibit selective inclusion patterns that reflect role-consistent perspectives. These findings raise broader concerns about how similar alignment may emerge as LLMs begin to infer user roles from prior interactions or context, even without explicit role instructions. Our results underscore the need for role-aware evaluation of LLM summarization behavior in high-stakes legal settings."
}