AppellateGen: A Benchmark for Appellate Legal Judgment Generation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01331v2
• Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2026 04:49:41 GMT
• Title: AppellateGen: A Benchmark for Appellate Legal Judgment Generation
• Authors: Hongkun Yang, Lionel Z. Wang, Wei Fan, Yiran Hu, Lixu Wang, Chenyu Liu, Shenghong Fu, Haoyang Li, Xin Xu, Jiexin Zheng, Wei Dong,
• Abstract summary: We introduce AppellateGen, a benchmark for second-instance legal judgment generation comprising 7,351 case pairs.<n>The task requires models to draft legally binding judgments by reasoning over the initial verdict and evidentiary updates.<n>We propose a judicial Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)-based Legal Multi-Agent System (SLMAS) to simulate judicial, which decomposes the generation process into discrete stages of issue identification, retrieval, and drafting.
• Score: 30.9030336647868
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Legal judgment generation is a critical task in legal intelligence. However, existing research in legal judgment generation has predominantly focused on first-instance trials, relying on static fact-to-verdict mappings while neglecting the dialectical nature of appellate (second-instance) review. To address this, we introduce AppellateGen, a benchmark for second-instance legal judgment generation comprising 7,351 case pairs. The task requires models to draft legally binding judgments by reasoning over the initial verdict and evidentiary updates, thereby modeling the causal dependency between trial stages. We further propose a judicial Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)-based Legal Multi-Agent System (SLMAS) to simulate judicial workflows, which decomposes the generation process into discrete stages of issue identification, retrieval, and drafting. Experimental results indicate that while SLMAS improves logical consistency, the complexity of appellate reasoning remains a substantial challenge for current LLMs. The dataset and code are publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AppellateGen-5763.

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