Vals Legal Research Bench (Legal Research Bench)
Evaluating agents on legal research tasks across diverse areas of US law
Data verifiedHow BenchLM shows Legal Research Bench
BenchLM mirrors the public Vals AI Legal Research Bench leaderboard captured from https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/legal_research and updated by Vals on July 9, 2026. The snapshot preserves overall scores, uncertainty, latency, cost-per-test metadata, and task-level scores where Vals publishes them.
Legal Research Bench is display only on BenchLM. Vals proprietary or Vals-hosted aggregate views are useful context, but BenchLM does not use them as weighted ranking inputs or as a replacement for benchmark-native source records.
Legal Research Bench score on Legal Research Bench — July 9, 2026
BenchLM mirrors the published legal research bench score view for Legal Research Bench. GPT-5.6 Sol leads the public snapshot at 48.08% , followed by Claude Opus 4.8 (43.75%) and Claude Sonnet 5 (41.83%). BenchLM does not use these results to rank models overall.
GPT-5.6 Sol
OpenAI
openai/gpt-5.6-sol
Claude Opus 4.8
Anthropic
anthropic/claude-opus-4-8
Claude Sonnet 5
Anthropic
anthropic/claude-sonnet-5
The published Legal Research Bench snapshot is tightly clustered at the top: GPT-5.6 Sol sits at 48.08%, while the third row is only 6.25 points behind. The broader top-10 spread is 17.31 points, so the benchmark still separates strong models even when the leaders cluster.
18 models have been evaluated on Legal Research Bench. The benchmark falls in the External benchmark mirrors category. BenchLM tracks this category separately from its weighted global scoring system, so these results are best compared on the dedicated Korean benchmark views. Legal Research Bench is currently displayed for reference but excluded from the scoring formula, so it does not directly affect overall rankings.
About Legal Research Bench
Year
2026
Tasks
US-law legal research tasks
Format
Accuracy score
Difficulty
Professional legal research
BenchLM mirrors the public Vals AI Legal Research Bench leaderboard as display-only external evidence. The captured snapshot preserves overall scores, task-level scores where Vals publishes them, uncertainty, latency, and cost-per-test metadata. It is excluded from BenchLM weighted rankings.
BenchLM freshness & provenance
Version
Legal Research Bench 2026
Refresh cadence
Quarterly
Staleness state
Current
Question availability
Public benchmark set
BenchLM uses freshness metadata to decide whether a benchmark should still be treated as a strong differentiator, a benchmark to watch, or a display-only reference. For the full scoring policy, see the BenchLM methodology page.
Legal Research Bench score table (18 models)
FAQ
What does Legal Research Bench measure?
Evaluating agents on legal research tasks across diverse areas of US law
Which model leads the published Legal Research Bench snapshot?
GPT-5.6 Sol currently leads the published Legal Research Bench snapshot with 48.08% legal research bench score. BenchLM shows this benchmark for display only and does not use it in overall rankings.
How many models are evaluated on Legal Research Bench?
18 AI models are included in BenchLM's mirrored Legal Research Bench snapshot, based on the public leaderboard captured on July 9, 2026.
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