DLawBench: Evaluating LLMs Through Multi-Turn Legal Consultation
DLawBench is a new diagnostic benchmark for evaluating LLMs in multi-turn legal consultation. It includes 461 cases from Chinese and U.S. law, categorizing interactions into Cooperative, Dependent, Withdrawn, and Adversarial types. Experiments show the best model, GPT-5.5, achieves only 0.562 on consultation-grounded legal reasoning, exposing sycophancy and a paradox where models perform worse when clients need guidance most.
[2606.13931] DLawBench: Evaluating LLMs Through Multi-Turn Legal Consultation
[Submitted on 11 Jun 2026]
Title:DLawBench: Evaluating LLMs Through Multi-Turn Legal Consultation
View a PDF of the paper titled DLawBench: Evaluating LLMs Through Multi-Turn Legal Consultation, by Li Zhang and 17 other authors
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Abstract:Lawyer-client consultation is a critical starting point for legal services. Effective legal assistance hinges on eliciting sufficient and truthful information from clients in order to devise strategies that best protect their interests. This task requires Large Language Models (LLMs) not only to perform robust legal reasoning, but also to strategically elicit material facts through multi-turn interactions and effectively guide clients with diverse personalities. Yet existing legal benchmarks overlook this interactive capability. To fill this gap, we introduce DLawBench, a diagnostic benchmark for real-world legal consultation. Drawing on realistic client behavior, we characterize lawyer-client interactions into four types: Cooperative, Dependent, Withdrawn, and Adversarial. Using dialogues grounded in real cases, DLawBench evaluates whether LLMs can effectively conduct legal consultation under realistic conditions. DLawBench comprises 461 cases from Chinese and U.S. law, 5,532 paired fact entries, 3,411 inquiry rubrics, and 3,348 issue-resolution rubrics, and evaluates 26 representative LLMs. Systematic experiments show substantial headroom: the best-performing model, GPT-5.5, achieves only 0.562 on consultation-grounded legal reasoning. More importantly, DLawBench exposes both sycophancy in legal consultation and a paradox: models perform worse when clients need guidance most.
Comments: 37 pages, 8 figures, 26 tables. Code and data: this https URL
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
MSC classes: 68T50
ACM classes: I.2.7; I.2.4
Cite as: arXiv:2606.13931 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2606.13931v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.13931
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Li Zhang [view email] [v1] Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:50:44 UTC (2,842 KB)
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