Z.ai introduces GLM-Legal, a model for legal work built on GLM-5.3-Flash

Z.ai pitches GLM-Legal, which is in beta, at everyday legal work such as reviewing contracts, analysing evidence and compliance. It says the model matches frontier closed-source models on LegalBench and on PLawBench, a test of Chinese legal practice, while being much smaller.

Vals, which tested GLM-Legal independently, ranks it seventh of 79 models on Harvey’s benchmark and 14th of 150 on LegalBench.

Z.ai built the model with extra training on legal material, followed by reinforcement learning, in which the model is rewarded for good results, across tens of thousands of lifelike legal tasks. It says GLM-Legal is coming to AutoClaw, its desktop agent platform, without giving a date. Its examples include a contract review delivered as tracked changes and comments in Word, an analysis of 40 documents from a software project dispute, and a privacy compliance plan for a website launching in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Correction, 13 Oct: an earlier version of the benchmark chart’s description said GLM-Legal was close to GPT-6 Astra on PLawBench; it is ahead, at 77.3 against 69.1.