PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to legal domain-specific tasks, evaluating their ability to perform legal work in realworld settings has become essential. However, existing legal benchmarks rely on simplified and highly standardized tasks, failing to capture the ambiguity, complexity, and reasoning demands of real legal practice. Moreover, prior evaluations often adopt coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. To address these limitations, we introduce PL AW B ENCH, a Practical Law Benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs in realistic legal practice scenarios. Grounded in real-world legal workflows, PL AW B ENCH models the core processes of legal practitioners through three task categories: public legal consultation, practical case analysis, and legal document generation. These tasks assess a model’s ability to identify legal issues and key facts, perform structured legal reasoning, and generate legally coherent documents. PL AW B ENCH comprises 850 questions across 13 practical legal scenarios, with each question accompanied by expert-designed evaluation rubrics, resulting in approximately 12,500 rubric items for fine-grained assessment. Using an LLM-based evaluator aligned with human expert judgments, we evaluate 27 state-of-the-art LLMs. Experimental results show that none achieves strong performance on PL AW B ENCH, revealing substantial limitations in the fine-grained legal reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and highlighting important directions for future evaluation and development of legal LLMs.