COLING 2025industry4 citations

LAW: Legal Agentic Workflows for Custody and Fund Services Contracts

William Watson, Nicole Cho, Nishan Srishankar, Zhen Zeng, Lucas Cecchi, Daniel Scott, Suchetha Siddagangappa, Rachneet Kaur

Abstract

Legal contracts in the custody and fund services domain govern critical aspects such as key provider responsibilities, fee schedules, and indemnification rights. However, it is challenging for an off-the-shelf Large Language Model (LLM) to ingest these contracts due to the lengthy unstructured streams of text, limited LLM context windows, and complex legal jargon. To address these challenges, we introduce LAW (Legal Agentic Workflows for Custody and Fund Services Contracts). LAW features a modular design that responds to user queries by orchestrating a suite of domain-specific tools and text agents. Our experiments demonstrate that LAW, by integrating multiple specialized agents and tools, significantly outperforms the baseline. LAW excels particularly in complex tasks such as calculating a contract’s termination date, surpassing the baseline by 92.9% points. Furthermore, LAW offers a cost-effective alternative to traditional fine-tuned legal LLMs by leveraging reusable, domain-specific tools.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{watson-etal-2025-law,
    title = "{LAW}: Legal Agentic Workflows for Custody and Fund Services Contracts",
    author = "Watson, William  and
      Cho, Nicole  and
      Srishankar, Nishan  and
      Zeng, Zhen  and
      Cecchi, Lucas  and
      Scott, Daniel  and
      Siddagangappa, Suchetha  and
      Kaur, Rachneet  and
      Balch, Tucker  and
      Veloso, Manuela",
    editor = "Rambow, Owen  and
      Wanner, Leo  and
      Apidianaki, Marianna  and
      Al-Khalifa, Hend  and
      Eugenio, Barbara Di  and
      Schockaert, Steven  and
      Darwish, Kareem  and
      Agarwal, Apoorv",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-industry.50/",
    pages = "583--594"
}
LAW: Legal Agentic Workflows for Custody and Fund Services Contracts · COLING 2025