LAW: Legal Agentic Workflows for Custody and Fund Services Contracts

William Watson, Nicole Cho, Nishan Srishankar, Zhen Zeng, Lucas Cecchi, Daniel Scott, Suchetha Siddagangappa, Rachneet Kaur, Tucker Balch, Manuela Veloso


Abstract
Legal contracts in the custody and fund services domain govern critical aspects such as key provider responsibilities, fee schedules, and indemnification rights. However, it is challenging for an off-the-shelf Large Language Model (LLM) to ingest these contracts due to the lengthy unstructured streams of text, limited LLM context windows, and complex legal jargon. To address these challenges, we introduce LAW (Legal Agentic Workflows for Custody and Fund Services Contracts). LAW features a modular design that responds to user queries by orchestrating a suite of domain-specific tools and text agents. Our experiments demonstrate that LAW, by integrating multiple specialized agents and tools, significantly outperforms the baseline. LAW excels particularly in complex tasks such as calculating a contract’s termination date, surpassing the baseline by 92.9% points. Furthermore, LAW offers a cost-effective alternative to traditional fine-tuned legal LLMs by leveraging reusable, domain-specific tools.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-industry.50
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert, Kareem Darwish, Apoorv Agarwal
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
583–594
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-industry.50/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
William Watson, Nicole Cho, Nishan Srishankar, Zhen Zeng, Lucas Cecchi, Daniel Scott, Suchetha Siddagangappa, Rachneet Kaur, Tucker Balch, and Manuela Veloso. 2025. LAW: Legal Agentic Workflows for Custody and Fund Services Contracts. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track, pages 583–594, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LAW: Legal Agentic Workflows for Custody and Fund Services Contracts (Watson et al., COLING 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-industry.50.pdf