CitaLaw: Enhancing LLM with Citations in Legal Domain

Kepu Zhang, Weijie Yu, Sunhao Dai, Jun Xu


Abstract
In this paper, we propose CitaLaw, the first benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ ability to produce legally sound responses with appropriate citations. CitaLaw features a diverse set of legal questions for both laypersons and practitioners, paired with a comprehensive corpus of law articles and precedent cases as a reference pool. This framework enables LLM-based systems to retrieve supporting citations from the reference corpus and align these citations with the corresponding sentences in their responses. Moreover, we introduce syllogism-inspired evaluation methods to assess the legal alignment between retrieved references and LLM-generated responses, as well as their consistency with user questions. Extensive experiments on 2 open-domain and 7 legal-specific LLMs demonstrate that integrating legal references substantially enhances response quality. Furthermore, our proposed syllogism-based evaluation method exhibits strong agreement with human judgments.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.583
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11183–11196
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.583/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kepu Zhang, Weijie Yu, Sunhao Dai, and Jun Xu. 2025. CitaLaw: Enhancing LLM with Citations in Legal Domain. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 11183–11196, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CitaLaw: Enhancing LLM with Citations in Legal Domain (Zhang et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.583.pdf