Speaker Series of the Minerva Fast Track Research Group "Artificial Justice" - Virtual Lecture with Matthias Grabmair

"Large Language Models for Legal Reasoning and Legislation Support"

 Wednesday, 4 February 2026, 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. (CET)

About the Speakers:

Matthias Grabmair is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Legal Tech in the Department of Informatics at the Technical University of Munich. After a German state exam in law and an American LL.M., he researched and taught at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute until 2019. He then spent a year as a Legal Data Scientist at SINC before joining the CIT School at TUM in 2021. He is also an academic co-director of the Legal Tech Colab. His research focuses on how natural language processing on legal text, knowledge representation, and computational models of argumentation can be leveraged to support and transform legal practice, in particular the judicial and legislative branches of government.

About the Topic:

The first part of the presentation presents the state of knowledge of what we know about the ability of large language models to engage in “authentic” legal reasoning. The narrative will cover relevant technical basics, benchmarks, and the role of so-called “thinking models”, leading up to experimental results on a synthetic case-based reasoning task and dataset, where even thinking models produce mixed results. The second part of the talk reports on the state of the art and proof-of-concept implementations using LLMs for legislation support, specifically the drafting of legislative amendments from natural language policy objectives in tax law and the automatic consolidation of statute versions. The concluding discussion will feature lessons learned about the challenges faced with working with publicly available data cutting across different source types towards effectively supporting government roles with AI technology.

About the Speaker Series:

The Speaker Series of the Minerva Fast Track Research Group "Artificial Justice" is organized by Katharina Isabel Schmidt. The Series invites guest speakers who work at the intersection between law, computer science, and the humanities. Neither technical nor juristic knowledge is a prerequisite for participation—the Series is aimed at anyone with an interest in critical and interdisciplinary perspectives on “Law and AI”. The event takes place on Zoom and is scheduled to last one hour.