Papers › LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English

LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English

3 Oct 2021ACL 2022 5arXiv:2110.00976archive 2025-07-28

Ilias Chalkidis, Abhik Jana, Dirk Hartung, Michael Bommarito, Ion Androutsopoulos, Daniel Martin Katz, Nikolaos Aletras

Laws and their interpretations, legal arguments and agreements\ are typically expressed in writing, leading to the production of vast corpora of legal text. Their analysis, which is at the center of legal practice, becomes increasingly elaborate as these collections grow in size. Natural language understanding (NLU) technologies can be a valuable tool to support legal practitioners in these endeavors. Their usefulness, however, largely depends on whether current state-of-the-art models can generalize across various tasks in the legal domain. To answer this currently open question, we introduce the Legal General Language Understanding Evaluation (LexGLUE) benchmark, a collection of datasets for evaluating model performance across a diverse set of legal NLU tasks in a standardized way. We also provide an evaluation and analysis of several generic and legal-oriented models demonstrating that the latter consistently offer performance improvements across multiple tasks.

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Tasks

Multi-Label ClassificationMulti-class ClassificationMultiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA)Natural Language UnderstandingOpen-Ended Question Answering

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

LexGLUE

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BERT CaseHOLD 70.7 #1 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BERT ECtHR Task A 71.4 / 64.0 #1 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BERT ECtHR Task B 87.6 / 77.8 #1 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BERT EUR-LEX 71.6 / 55.6 #1 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BERT LEDGAR 87.7 / 82.2 #1 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BERT SCOTUS 70.5 / 60.9 #1 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BERT UNFAIR-ToS 87.5 / 81.0 #1 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Legal-BERT CaseHOLD 75.1 #2 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Legal-BERT ECtHR Task A 71.2 / 64.6 #2 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Legal-BERT ECtHR Task B 88.0 / 77.2 #2 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Legal-BERT EUR-LEX 72.2 / 56.2 #2 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Legal-BERT LEDGAR 88.1 / 82.7 #2 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Legal-BERT SCOTUS 76.2 / 65.8 #2 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Legal-BERT UNFAIR-ToS 88.6 / 82.3 #2 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE CaseLaw-BERT CaseHOLD 75.6 #3 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE CaseLaw-BERT ECtHR Task A 71.2 / 64.2 #3 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE CaseLaw-BERT ECtHR Task B 88.0 / 77.5 #3 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE CaseLaw-BERT EUR-LEX 71.0 / 55.9 #3 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE CaseLaw-BERT LEDGAR 88.0 / 82.3 #3 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE CaseLaw-BERT SCOTUS 76.4 / 66.2 #3 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE CaseLaw-BERT UNFAIR-ToS 88.3 / 81.0 #3 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BigBird CaseHOLD 70.4 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BigBird ECtHR Task A 70.5 / 63.8 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BigBird ECtHR Task B 88.1 / 76.6 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BigBird EUR-LEX 71.8 / 56.6 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BigBird LEDGAR 87.7 / 82.1 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BigBird SCOTUS 71.7 / 61.4 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE BigBird UNFAIR-ToS 87.7 / 80.2 #4 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Longformer CaseHOLD 72.0 #5 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Longformer ECtHR Task A 69.6 / 62.4 #5 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Longformer ECtHR Task B 88.0 / 77.8 #5 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Longformer EUR-LEX 71.9 / 56.7 #5 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Longformer LEDGAR 87.7 / 82.3 #5 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Longformer SCOTUS 72.2 / 62.5 #5 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE Longformer UNFAIR-ToS 87.7 / 80.1 #5 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE RoBERTa CaseHOLD 71.7 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE RoBERTa ECtHR Task A 69.5 / 60.7 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE RoBERTa ECtHR Task B 87.2 / 77.3 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE RoBERTa EUR-LEX 71.8 / 57.5 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE RoBERTa LEDGAR 87.9 / 82.1 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE RoBERTa SCOTUS 70.8 / 61.2 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE RoBERTa UNFAIR-ToS 87.7 / 81.5 #6 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE DeBERTa CaseHOLD 72.1 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE DeBERTa ECtHR Task A 69.1 / 61.2 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE DeBERTa ECtHR Task B 87.4 / 77.3 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE DeBERTa EUR-LEX 72.3 / 57.2 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE DeBERTa LEDGAR 87.9 / 82.0 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE DeBERTa SCOTUS 70.0 / 60.0 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Understanding LexGLUE DeBERTa UNFAIR-ToS 87.2 / 78.8 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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