Towards Robust Legal Reasoning: Harnessing Logical LLMs in Law

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission6805 Authors

Abstract:

Legal services rely heavily on text processing. While large language models (LLMs) show promise, their application in legal contexts demands higher accuracy, repeatability, and transparency. Logic programs, by encoding legal concepts as structured rules and facts, offer reliable automation but require sophisticated text extraction. We propose a neuro-symbolic approach that integrates LLMs’ natural language understanding with logic-based reasoning to address these limitations.

As a legal document case study, we applied neuro-symbolic AI to coverage-related queries in insurance contracts using both closed and open-source LLMs. While LLMs have improved in legal reasoning, they still lack the accuracy and consistency required for complex contract analysis. In our analysis, we tested three methodologies to evaluate whether a specific claim is covered under a contract: a vanilla LLM, an unguided approach that leverages LLMs to encode both the contract and the claim, and a guided approach that uses a framework for the LLM to encode the contract. We demonstrated the promising capabilities of LLM + Logic in the guided approach.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: NLP Applications

Research Area Keywords: NLP Applications, Language Modeling

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 6805