by Bianca Steffes and Nils Torben Wiedemann
Abstract:
Using the task of generating guiding principles for judgments of the German Federal Court of Justice we investigate whether current state of the art large language models can solve a complex legal summarisation task. Our results indicate that prompt engineering is not yet sufficient to solve the task, but fine-tuning already shows promising results. In addition, our results show that models with an increased context window size do not necessarily take the entire input into account equally.
Reference:
Bianca Steffes and Nils Torben Wiedemann: Generating Guiding Principles: Evaluating Large Language Models for Complex German Legal Summaries, In New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (Yukiko Nakano, Toyotaro Suzumura, eds.), Springer Nature Singapore, pp. 49–65, 2025.
Bibtex Entry:
@InProceedings{ steffeswiedemannjurisin25,
author = "Steffes, Bianca and Wiedemann, Nils Torben",
editor = "Nakano, Yukiko and Suzumura, Toyotaro",
title = "Generating Guiding Principles: Evaluating Large Language
Models for Complex German Legal Summaries",
booktitle = "New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence",
year = "2025",
publisher = "Springer Nature Singapore",
address = "Singapore",
pages = "49--65",
abstract = "Using the task of generating guiding principles for
judgments of the German Federal Court of Justice we
investigate whether current state of the art large language
models can solve a complex legal summarisation task. Our
results indicate that prompt engineering is not yet
sufficient to solve the task, but fine-tuning already shows
promising results. In addition, our results show that
models with an increased context window size do not
necessarily take the entire input into account equally.",
isbn = "978-981-96-7071-0"
}