Benchmark profile
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 23, 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 23, 2026
BenchLM mirrors the published legal research bench score view for Legal Research Bench. Claude Opus 5 leads the public snapshot at 55.29% , followed by Claude Fable 5 (49.52%) and GPT-5.6 Sol (48.08%). BenchLM does not use these results to rank models overall.
Claude Opus 5
Anthropic
anthropic/claude-opus-5
Claude Fable 5
Anthropic
anthropic/claude-fable-5
GPT-5.6 Sol
OpenAI
openai/gpt-5.6-sol
Legal Research Bench score table (27 models)
ScoreThe published Legal Research Bench snapshot places Claude Opus 5 first at 55.29%. The third row is 7.21 points behind. The broader top-10 range is 17.31 points, so the table still separates the published systems.
27 models have been evaluated on Legal Research Bench. The benchmark falls in the External benchmark mirrors category. We keep external benchmark mirrors separate from the weighted global scoring system, so these results remain source-specific evidence. 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.
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?
Claude Opus 5 currently leads the published Legal Research Bench snapshot with 55.29% 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?
27 AI models are included in BenchLM's mirrored Legal Research Bench snapshot, based on the public leaderboard captured on July 23, 2026.
Know when it’s worth switching models
The model to choose, the cheaper alternative, and the release we would wait on.
Read a sample issueJoin 2,000+ readers.
One email each week. Unsubscribe anytime.