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Published as a conference paper at NeurIPS 2026

InvestigationWorlds: An Agentic Environment for Legal Investigation

Albert Sun, Andrew J Benard, Sil Hamilton, Anna Teresita Marcelo, Yong J Kim, Carl-Leander Henneking, Rundong Hu, Yuhong Wang, David Mimno, Bishan Yang, Igor Labutov

Abstract

We introduce **InvestigationWorlds**, an agentic environment for legal investigation. We build on an underused artifact of U.S. civil litigation: the summary judgment motion. This motion relies upon a record composed of real evidence exhibits, and results in a court-adopted hypothesis that is treated as ground truth for the purposes of deciding the motion. Each environment is built from a real U.S. Federal Court case retrieved from Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) and augmented by an attorney-validated generation pipeline that synthesizes role-tagged documents around the original record. The resulting corpus admits multiple coherent factual readings, only one of which matches the court-adopted hypothesis. Evaluating on 100 cases, we find agents often commit to incorrect hypotheses despite retrieving relevant evidence, struggling to distinguish the court-adopted hypothesis from alternative hypotheses.

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