Scaling Legal AI: Benchmarking Mamba and Transformers for Statutory Classification and Case Law Retrieval

Abstract

Statutory corpora and judicial decisions are growing faster than legal professionals can read them, while individual judgments often exceed the context limits of standard encoder models. Transformer architectures dominate legal NLP benchmarks, but their quadratic attention complexity can require truncating or fragmenting documents that demand whole-document reasoning. Selective state-space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, offer linear-time sequence modeling and are a promising alternative for long legal documents, yet their performance on legal classification and retrieval remains underexplored. We present a preliminary benchmark comparing Mamba and SSD-Mamba with BERT, DeBERTa, and Longformer across four legal classification tasks (ECtHR, EUR-Lex, SCOTUS, and ILDC/ILC) and two case-retrieval tasks (ECtHR and ILDC), using a shared windowing and aggregation pipeline. The strongest SSM performs within approximately 1.3 percentage points of the strongest transformer across tasks and metrics. SSD-Mamba achieves the best results on most metrics for ECtHR classification, ILDC classification, and ECtHR retrieval, while processing approximately 3 times more tokens per second than DeBERTa and 4 times more than Longformer. DeBERTa remains strongest on SCOTUS and EUR-Lex F1. These results are preliminary because they do not include variance estimates across random seeds or statistical significance testing. Rather than presenting a definitive ranking, we use these findings to motivate further evaluation with repeated-seed experiments, statistical testing, and controls for model capacity and computational efficiency.