Can ChatGPT Perform Reasoning Using the IRAC Method in Analyzing Legal Scenarios Like a Lawyer?

TL;DR

This paper evaluates ChatGPT's ability to perform legal reasoning using the IRAC method on Malaysian and Australian legal scenarios, comparing its analysis to that of legal professionals.

Contribution

It introduces a novel legal corpus and provides the first empirical assessment of ChatGPT's IRAC analysis alignment with legal experts.

Findings

ChatGPT can perform IRAC analysis with moderate accuracy.

Alignment between ChatGPT and legal professionals varies across scenarios.

Results suggest potential for improving LLMs in legal reasoning tasks.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have drawn a lot of attentions recently in the legal domain due to its emergent ability to tackle a variety of legal tasks. However, it is still unknown if LLMs are able to analyze a legal case and perform reasoning in the same manner as lawyers. Therefore, we constructed a novel corpus consisting of scenarios pertain to Contract Acts Malaysia and Australian Social Act for Dependent Child. ChatGPT is applied to perform analysis on the corpus using the IRAC method, which is a framework widely used by legal professionals for organizing legal analysis. Each scenario in the corpus is annotated with a complete IRAC analysis in a semi-structured format so that both machines and legal professionals are able to interpret and understand the annotations. In addition, we conducted the first empirical assessment of ChatGPT for IRAC analysis in order to understand how well it aligns with the analysis of legal professionals. Our experimental results shed lights on possible future research directions to improve alignments between LLMs and legal experts in terms of legal reasoning.