Precedent-Aware Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Case Law Analysis


Authors : Shatrunjay Kumar Singh

Volume/Issue : Volume 10 - 2025, Issue 12 - December


Google Scholar : https://tinyurl.com/m6trdj3w

Scribd : https://tinyurl.com/y8b4cnz6

DOI : https://doi.org/10.38124/ijisrt/25dec1556

Note : A published paper may take 4-5 working days from the publication date to appear in PlumX Metrics, Semantic Scholar, and ResearchGate.


Abstract : Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems promise practical legal assistance by grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) in external authority. However, standard RAG optimizes semantic similarity and often fails to respect common-law constraints such as jurisdictional bindingness, court hierarchy, temporal validity, and negative treatment. We propose Precedent- Aware Multi-Agent RAG (PA-MA-RAG), an agentic architecture that decomposes legal research and writing into specialized agents for issue framing, authority planning, retrieval, precedent ranking, conflict resolution, drafting, and citation verification. Our method introduces an authority- constrained re-ranking objective that prioritizes controlling precedents while penalizing overruled or otherwise negatively treated cases. The verifier agent enforces evidence-grounded generation by requiring each legal proposition to be supported by retrieved holdings and quotations. We describe an evaluation protocol for both precedent retrieval and citation-grounded legal analysis generation, including authority correctness, supported-claim rate, and robustness to conflicting precedent.

Keywords : Precedent-Aware RAG, Multi-Agent Systems, Legal Information Retrieval, Stare Decisis, Authority Ranking, Citation Networks, CLERC, COLIEE.

References :

  1. Hou, A. B., Weller, O., Qin, G., Yang, E., Lawrie, D., Holzenberger, N., Blair-Stanek, A., & Van Durme, B. (2024). CLERC: A Dataset for Legal Case Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Analysis Generation. arXiv:2406.17186.
  2. Lewis, P., Perez, E., Piktus, A., Petroni, F., Karpukhin, V., Goyal, N., Küttler, H., Lewis, M., Yih, W.-t., Rocktäschel, T., Riedel, S., & Kiela, D. (2020). Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks. NeurIPS 2020.
  3. Nguyen, T., Chin, P., & Tai, Y.-W. (2025). MA-RAG: Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Collaborative Chain-of-Thought Reasoning. arXiv:2505.20096.
  4. Rabelo, J., Goebel, R., Kim, M.-Y., Kano, Y., Yoshioka, M., & Satoh, K. (2024). Overview and Discussion of the Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE) 2023. Review of Socionetwork Strategies, 18(1), 27-47.
  5. Zheng, L., Guha, N., Anderson, B. R., Henderson, P., & Ho, D. E. (2021). When Does Pretraining Help? Assessing Self-Supervised Learning for Law and the CaseHOLD Dataset. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL).

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems promise practical legal assistance by grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) in external authority. However, standard RAG optimizes semantic similarity and often fails to respect common-law constraints such as jurisdictional bindingness, court hierarchy, temporal validity, and negative treatment. We propose Precedent- Aware Multi-Agent RAG (PA-MA-RAG), an agentic architecture that decomposes legal research and writing into specialized agents for issue framing, authority planning, retrieval, precedent ranking, conflict resolution, drafting, and citation verification. Our method introduces an authority- constrained re-ranking objective that prioritizes controlling precedents while penalizing overruled or otherwise negatively treated cases. The verifier agent enforces evidence-grounded generation by requiring each legal proposition to be supported by retrieved holdings and quotations. We describe an evaluation protocol for both precedent retrieval and citation-grounded legal analysis generation, including authority correctness, supported-claim rate, and robustness to conflicting precedent.

Keywords : Precedent-Aware RAG, Multi-Agent Systems, Legal Information Retrieval, Stare Decisis, Authority Ranking, Citation Networks, CLERC, COLIEE.

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Paper Submission Last Date
31 - January - 2026

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