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arXiv · 2508.07849

Evaluating Customized vs. Generalist Transformer-based Models for Legal Contract Classification

Amrita Singh·H. Suhan Karaca·Aditya Joshi·Hye-young Paik·Jiaojiao Jiang
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Abstract

Despite advances in legal NLP, no comprehensive evaluation of Transformer-based models customized for legal tasks (referred to as `legal-specific' models in this paper) exists for contract classification tasks. To address this gap, we present an evaluation of 13 legal-specific transformer-based models on 3 English-language contract classification tasks and compare them with 9 generalist models. The results show that legal-specific models consistently outperform generalist models, especially on tasks requiring nuanced legal understanding. They also help reduce misclassification of rare classes in imbalanced datasets. Legal-BERT and Contracts-BERT establish new SOTAs on two of the three tasks, despite having 69% fewer parameters than the best-performing generalist models. We also identify CaseLaw-BERT and LexLM as strong additional baselines for contract classification. Our results highlight the shortcomings of generalist models, emphasizing the need for domain-specific customization, particularly in the context of legal applications.

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Amrita Singh, H. Suhan Karaca, Aditya Joshi, Hye-young Paik, Jiaojiao Jiang. 2025-08-11. Evaluating Customized vs. Generalist Transformer-based Models for Legal Contract Classification. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07849

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