What it measures

Evaluates legal agents on multi-jurisdictional US case-law and statutory research (hardest component of Vals Legal Index).

Reading the measurement

Check the source documents, dates, accounting conventions and calculation chain. A financial answer needs evidence and consistent units. Benchmark success does not establish live investment performance or suitability for an individual decision.

Published evaluation

The linked publication documents the task and scoring procedure. Model results retain the source’s evaluation setting, native score units and available uncertainty.

Where this fits in an evaluation suite

Synthetic research rewards do not establish live investment performance. Preserve transaction costs, held-out regimes, constraints, and the exact policy behind a reported result.

Start with a capability hypothesis, then choose a second test with a different failure mode. Keep the checkpoint, reasoning effort, agent tools, sampling policy, and scoring procedure fixed when measuring a training intervention. Record failures and missing outputs in the denominator.

A reproducible comparison

Record the source publication, benchmark version, scoring units, denominator, tool access and attempt budget. Preserve uncertainty and distinguish developer-reported results from independent evaluations.

Publish the exact run configuration, item coverage, score units, and available uncertainty. If a source supplies only an aggregate or a single run, preserve that limit. A new model name or a rounded score alone does not establish a capability improvement.

PRIMARY EVIDENCE & FURTHER READING

  1. Legal Research Bench — evaluation methodology and results ↗

    Vals AI · 2026

Reviewed 2026-10-26. Explanation and interpretation by RLTasks. Benchmark ownership remains with its original authors.