@inproceedings{sadikot-jain-2025-legal,
    title = "Legal Document Summarization: A Zero-shot Modular Agentic Workflow Approach",
    author = "Sadikot, Taha  and
      Jain, Sarika",
    editor = "Modi, Ashutosh  and
      Ghosh, Saptarshi  and
      Ekbal, Asif  and
      Goyal, Pawan  and
      Jain, Sarika  and
      Joshi, Abhinav  and
      Mishra, Shivani  and
      Datta, Debtanu  and
      Paul, Shounak  and
      Singh, Kshetrimayum Boynao  and
      Kumar, Sandeep",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Empowering Justice (JUST-NLP 2025)",
    month = dec,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Mumbai, India",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.justnlp-main.5/",
    pages = "29--40",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-312-8",
    abstract = "The increasing volume and complexity of Indian High Court judgments require high-quality automated summarization systems. Our agentic workflow framework for the summarization of Indian High Court judgments achieves competitive results without model fine-tuning. Experiments on CivilSum and IN-Abs test sets report ROUGE-1 F1 up to 0.547 and BERTScore F1 up to 0.866, comparable to state-of-the-art supervised models, with advantages in transparency and efficiency. We introduce two zero-shot modular agentic workflows: Lexical Modular Summarizer (LexA), a three-stage modular architecture optimized for lexical overlap (ROUGE), and Semantic Agentic Summarizer (SemA), a five-stage integrated architecture optimized for semantic similarity (BERTScore). Both workflows operate without supervised model fine-tuning, instead relying on strategic data processing, modular agent orchestration, and carefully engineered prompts. Our framework achieves ROUGE-1 F1 of 0.6326 and BERTScore F1 of 0.8902 on CivilSum test set, and ROUGE-1 F1 of 0.1951 and BERTScore F1 of 0.8299 on IN-Abs test set, substantially outperforming zero-shot baselines, rivaling leading fine-tuned transformer models while requiring no supervised training. This work demonstrates that modular, zero-shot agentic approaches can deliver production-grade results for legal summarization, offering a new direction for resource-limited judicial settings."
}