@inproceedings{liao-etal-2026-verdict,
title = "{VERDICT}: Verifiable Evolving Reasoning with Directive-Informed Collegial Teams for Legal Judgment Prediction",
author = "Liao, Hui and
Qin, Chuan and
Ren, Yongwen and
Li, Hao and
Huang, Zhenya and
Zhang, Yanyong and
Wang, Chao",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EMNLP} 2026",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.277/",
pages = "5831--5846",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-462-0",
abstract = "Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) predicts applicable law articles, charges, and penalty terms from case facts. Beyond accuracy, LJP calls for intrinsically interpretable and legally grounded reasoning that can reconcile statutory rules with precedent-informed standards. However, existing methods often behave as static, one-shot predictors, providing limited procedural support for verifiable reasoning and little capability to adapt as jurisprudential practice evolves. We propose VERDICT, a self-refining collaborative multi-agent framework that simulates a \textit{virtual collegial panel}. VERDICT assigns specialized agents to complementary roles (e.g., fact structuring, legal retrieval, opinion drafting, and supervisory verification) and coordinates them in a traceable draft{--}verify{--}revise workflow with explicit Pass/Reject feedback, producing verifiable reasoning traces and revision rationales. To capture evolving case experience, we further introduce a Hybrid Jurisprudential Memory (HJM) grounded in the \textit{Micro-Directive Paradigm}, which stores precedent standards and continually distills validated multi-agent verification trajectories into updated Micro-Directives for continual learning across cases. We evaluate VERDICT on CAIL2018 and a newly constructed CJO2025 dataset with a strict future time-split for temporal generalization. VERDICT achieves state-of-the-art performance on CAIL2018 and demonstrates strong generalization on CJO2025. To facilitate reproducibility and further research, we release our code and the dataset at \url{https://github.com/luckyhui235/VERDICT}."
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<abstract>Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) predicts applicable law articles, charges, and penalty terms from case facts. Beyond accuracy, LJP calls for intrinsically interpretable and legally grounded reasoning that can reconcile statutory rules with precedent-informed standards. However, existing methods often behave as static, one-shot predictors, providing limited procedural support for verifiable reasoning and little capability to adapt as jurisprudential practice evolves. We propose VERDICT, a self-refining collaborative multi-agent framework that simulates a virtual collegial panel. VERDICT assigns specialized agents to complementary roles (e.g., fact structuring, legal retrieval, opinion drafting, and supervisory verification) and coordinates them in a traceable draft–verify–revise workflow with explicit Pass/Reject feedback, producing verifiable reasoning traces and revision rationales. To capture evolving case experience, we further introduce a Hybrid Jurisprudential Memory (HJM) grounded in the Micro-Directive Paradigm, which stores precedent standards and continually distills validated multi-agent verification trajectories into updated Micro-Directives for continual learning across cases. We evaluate VERDICT on CAIL2018 and a newly constructed CJO2025 dataset with a strict future time-split for temporal generalization. VERDICT achieves state-of-the-art performance on CAIL2018 and demonstrates strong generalization on CJO2025. To facilitate reproducibility and further research, we release our code and the dataset at https://github.com/luckyhui235/VERDICT.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T VERDICT: Verifiable Evolving Reasoning with Directive-Informed Collegial Teams for Legal Judgment Prediction
%A Liao, Hui
%A Qin, Chuan
%A Ren, Yongwen
%A Li, Hao
%A Huang, Zhenya
%A Zhang, Yanyong
%A Wang, Chao
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F liao-etal-2026-verdict
%X Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) predicts applicable law articles, charges, and penalty terms from case facts. Beyond accuracy, LJP calls for intrinsically interpretable and legally grounded reasoning that can reconcile statutory rules with precedent-informed standards. However, existing methods often behave as static, one-shot predictors, providing limited procedural support for verifiable reasoning and little capability to adapt as jurisprudential practice evolves. We propose VERDICT, a self-refining collaborative multi-agent framework that simulates a virtual collegial panel. VERDICT assigns specialized agents to complementary roles (e.g., fact structuring, legal retrieval, opinion drafting, and supervisory verification) and coordinates them in a traceable draft–verify–revise workflow with explicit Pass/Reject feedback, producing verifiable reasoning traces and revision rationales. To capture evolving case experience, we further introduce a Hybrid Jurisprudential Memory (HJM) grounded in the Micro-Directive Paradigm, which stores precedent standards and continually distills validated multi-agent verification trajectories into updated Micro-Directives for continual learning across cases. We evaluate VERDICT on CAIL2018 and a newly constructed CJO2025 dataset with a strict future time-split for temporal generalization. VERDICT achieves state-of-the-art performance on CAIL2018 and demonstrates strong generalization on CJO2025. To facilitate reproducibility and further research, we release our code and the dataset at https://github.com/luckyhui235/VERDICT.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.277/
%P 5831-5846
Markdown (Informal)
[VERDICT: Verifiable Evolving Reasoning with Directive-Informed Collegial Teams for Legal Judgment Prediction](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.277/) (Liao et al., Findings 2026)
ACL