PoliLegalLM: A Technical Report on a Large Language Model for Political and Legal Affairs

TL;DR

PoliLegalLM is a domain-specific large language model designed for legal and political tasks, employing a comprehensive training pipeline to improve legal knowledge, reasoning, and task performance.

Contribution

The paper introduces PoliLegalLM, a specialized legal LLM trained with a novel multi-stage approach, achieving superior performance on legal benchmarks and real-world datasets.

Findings

PoliLegalLM outperforms similar-scale models on LawBench and LexEval.

The model achieves state-of-the-art results on PoliLegal, a real-world legal dataset.

The training framework effectively enhances legal knowledge and reasoning capabilities.

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in general-domain tasks, yet their direct application to the legal domain remains challenging due to hallucinated legal citations, incomplete knowledge coverage, and weak structured reasoning. To address these issues, we propose PoliLegalLM, a domain-specific large language model tailored for political and legal applications. Our approach adopts a unified training framework that integrates continued pretraining, progressive supervised fine-tuning, and preference-based reinforcement learning to jointly enhance legal knowledge grounding, task alignment, and reasoning capability. We construct a large-scale, high-quality legal corpus and design a structured post-training pipeline, enabling the model to effectively learn domain-specific knowledge and adapt to diverse legal tasks. We evaluate PoliLegalLM on three representative benchmarks, including LawBench, LexEval, and a real-world dataset, PoliLegal. Experimental results demonstrate that PoliLegalLM achieves strong and consistent performance, outperforming competitive models of similar scale and remaining highly competitive with significantly larger models, while achieving the best results on real-world legal scenarios. These results highlight the effectiveness of our training paradigm and the practical value of domain-specific LLMs for real-world legal applications.