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XLaw-JP-27B passed Japan's bar exam in all three years tested, and ships under Apache 2.0 on a single 48 GB GPU

AspireAI community · arXiv (Andrew Shin)
XLaw-JP-27B is an open-weight model specialised for Japanese law that adapts Qwen3.8-27B with hybrid retrieval over current statutes and 31k case summaries, a light QLoRA self-distillation pass on its own verified bar-exam answers, a contract-specific LoRA adapter and four-sample voting. It ranks first on six of eight Japanese legal tasks (mean rank 1.3 against 2.8-3.1 for 12-33B baselines) and is the only system to pass the bar exam in all three years tested, scoring 129, 120 and 130 out of 175 with no test-year material in training, while Japanese 32-33B open models fail at least one year. The weights are on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0 and the model is built to run on a single 48 GB GPU, so a legal team can self-host it rather than sending case material to an API. The paper's own caveat is that the remaining gap to frontier models sits in contract review and patent law, and the bar-exam result is the authors' evaluation, not an independent audit.
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