LEXam: Benchmarking Legal Reasoning on 340 Law Exams

Long-form legal reasoning remains a key challenge for large language models (LLMs) in spite of recent advances in test-time scaling. We introduce LEXam, a novel benchmark derived from 340 law exams spanning 116 law school courses across a range of subjects and degree levels. The dataset comprises 4,886 law exam questions in English and German, including 2,841 long-form, open-ended questions and 2,045 multiple-choice questions. Besides reference answers, the open questions are also accompanied by explicit guidance outlining the expected legal reasoning approach such as issue spotting, rule recall, or rule application. Our evaluation on both open-ended and multiple-choice questions present significant challenges for current LLMs; in particular, they notably struggle with open questions that require structured, multi-step legal reasoning. Moreover, our results underscore the effectiveness of the dataset in differentiating between models with varying capabilities. Adopting an LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm with rigorous human expert validation, we demonstrate how model-generated reasoning steps can be evaluated consistently and accurately. Our evaluation setup provides a scalable method to assess legal reasoning quality beyond simple accuracy metrics. Project page:this https URL

@article{fan2025_2505.12864,
  title={ LEXam: Benchmarking Legal Reasoning on 340 Law Exams },
  author={ Yu Fan and Jingwei Ni and Jakob Merane and Etienne Salimbeni and Yang Tian and Yoan Hermstrüwer and Yinya Huang and Mubashara Akhtar and Florian Geering and Oliver Dreyer and Daniel Brunner and Markus Leippold and Mrinmaya Sachan and Alexander Stremitzer and Christoph Engel and Elliott Ash and Joel Niklaus },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.12864},
  year={ 2025 }
}