Exploring the Nexus of Large Language Models and Legal Systems: A Short Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews how Large Language Models are transforming legal tasks, discussing applications, challenges like bias and interpretability, and recent advancements in fine-tuned legal LLMs across different legal systems and languages.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current applications, challenges, datasets, and future directions for LLMs in the legal domain, highlighting recent progress and research gaps.

Findings

LLMs are increasingly used for legal text comprehension and case retrieval

Challenges include bias, interpretability, and ethical issues in legal LLMs

Recent advancements involve fine-tuned legal LLMs for various legal systems

Abstract

With the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a profound transformation occurring in the realm of natural language processing tasks within the legal domain. The capabilities of LLMs are increasingly demonstrating unique roles in the legal sector, bringing both distinctive benefits and various challenges. This survey delves into the synergy between LLMs and the legal system, such as their applications in tasks like legal text comprehension, case retrieval, and analysis. Furthermore, this survey highlights key challenges faced by LLMs in the legal domain, including bias, interpretability, and ethical considerations, as well as how researchers are addressing these issues. The survey showcases the latest advancements in fine-tuned legal LLMs tailored for various legal systems, along with legal datasets available for fine-tuning LLMs in various languages. Additionally, it proposes directions for future research and development.