Are LLMs Court-Ready? Evaluating Frontier Models on Indian Legal Reasoning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17900v1
• Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2025 10:04:29 GMT
• Title: Are LLMs Court-Ready? Evaluating Frontier Models on Indian Legal Reasoning
• Authors: Kush Juvekar, Arghya Bhattacharya, Sai Khadloya, Utkarsh Saxena,
• Abstract summary: We use India's public legal examinations as a transparent proxy.<n>Our benchmark assembles objective screens from top national and state exams.<n>We also include a lawyer-graded, paired-blinded study of long-form answers from the Supreme Court's Advocate-on-Record exam.
• Score: 0.5308136763388956
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are entering legal workflows, yet we lack a jurisdiction-specific framework to assess their baseline competence therein. We use India's public legal examinations as a transparent proxy. Our multi-year benchmark assembles objective screens from top national and state exams and evaluates open and frontier LLMs under real-world exam conditions. To probe beyond multiple-choice questions, we also include a lawyer-graded, paired-blinded study of long-form answers from the Supreme Court's Advocate-on-Record exam. This is, to our knowledge, the first exam-grounded, India-specific yardstick for LLM court-readiness released with datasets and protocols. Our work shows that while frontier systems consistently clear historical cutoffs and often match or exceed recent top-scorer bands on objective exams, none surpasses the human topper on long-form reasoning. Grader notes converge on three reliability failure modes: procedural or format compliance, authority or citation discipline, and forum-appropriate voice and structure. These findings delineate where LLMs can assist (checks, cross-statute consistency, statute and precedent lookups) and where human leadership remains essential: forum-specific drafting and filing, procedural and relief strategy, reconciling authorities and exceptions, and ethical, accountable judgment.

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