Gavel: Agent Meets Checklist for Evaluating LLMs on Long-Context Legal Summarization

arXiv:2601.04424 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-01-07 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-01-07

Updated: 2026-08-26

Comments: Accepted at EMNLP 2026 Main; webpage at https://yao-dou.github.io/gavel/

Project page: https://yao-dou.github.io/gavel

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Large language models (LLMs) now support contexts of up to 1M tokens, but their strengths and weaknesses on complex long-context tasks remain unclear.

Terminology

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) now support contexts of up to 1M tokens, but their strengths and weaknesses on complex long-context tasks remain unclear. To study this, we focus on multi-document legal case summarization, where a single case often spans many documents exceeding 100K tokens. We systematically evaluate 12 frontier LLMs with Gavel, which consists of Gavel-Ref, a reference-based evaluation framework with checklist, residual-fact, and writing-style evaluations, and Gavel-Agent, a reference-free agent for evaluating factual coverage directly from source documents. Our results show that current models are more prone to omitting key information than hallucinating. They all perform well on simple checklist items, such as filing date, but struggle with rare and complex items, such as settlements. Performance also declines as case length increases. To meta-evaluate Gavel, we collect 160 hours of human annotations. Gavel-Agent reduces token usage by at least 36% compared to end-to-end and chunk-by-chunk methods while achieving competitive performance. Gavel-Agent also generalizes to the medical domain, performing the best with at least 77% fewer tokens.

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