On Wednesdays, We Ask Questions: Optimizing "Active Listening" in Automated Legal Triage and Referral

In three linesFETCH, an automated legal triage classifier, generates follow-up questions using a low-cost LLM ensemble. The study shows cheap models perform well at classification, but high-quality plain-language question generation requires GPT-4 or higher. Prompt engineering alone is insufficient; LLM-as-judge ratings diverge from human evaluations.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified