Can ChatGPT Perform Reasoning Using the IRAC Method in Analyzing Legal Scenarios Like a Lawyer?

Xiaoxi Kang, Lizhen Qu, Lay-Ki Soon, Adnan Trakic, Terry Zhuo, Patrick Emerton, Genevieve Grant


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have drawn a lot of attentions recently in the legal domain due to its emergent ability to tackle a variety of legal tasks. However, it is still unknown if LLMs are able to analyze a legal case and perform reasoning in the same manner as lawyers. Therefore, we constructed a novel corpus consisting of scenarios pertain to Contract Acts Malaysia and Australian Social Act for Dependent Child. ChatGPT is applied to perform analysis on the corpus using the IRAC method, which is a framework widely used by legal professionals for organizing legal analysis. Each scenario in the corpus is annotated with a complete IRAC analysis in a semi-structured format so that both machines and legal professionals are able to interpret and understand the annotations. In addition, we conducted the first empirical assessment of ChatGPT for IRAC analysis in order to understand how well it aligns with the analysis of legal professionals. Our experimental results shed lights on possible future research directions to improve alignments between LLMs and legal experts in terms of legal reasoning.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.929
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13900–13923
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.929
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.929
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoxi Kang, Lizhen Qu, Lay-Ki Soon, Adnan Trakic, Terry Zhuo, Patrick Emerton, and Genevieve Grant. 2023. Can ChatGPT Perform Reasoning Using the IRAC Method in Analyzing Legal Scenarios Like a Lawyer?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 13900–13923, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can ChatGPT Perform Reasoning Using the IRAC Method in Analyzing Legal Scenarios Like a Lawyer? (Kang et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.929.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.929.mp4