LiTiL Clause Classifier

What this model does

LiTiL Clause Classifier assigns one category from a contract taxonomy to a contract provision and returns a score for every available category. It gives contract systems a consistent label for clauses whose wording may vary widely across agreements.

Place it after contract parsing and clause segmentation. The selected label can be written to a clause index, used as a search filter, shown in a review interface, or mapped to a category-specific playbook. The score distribution also lets an application send close or low-scoring classifications to a reviewer instead of forcing every clause through the same path.

• Useful for: organizing agreements, making clauses easier to search, and routing provisions for review
• Give it: one contract clause
• It returns: the selected label and a score for every category

Input and output contract

Input JSON accepts a required text string and optional text_pair string. The classifier applies softmax across 100 mutually exclusive labels and selects argmax; there is no multilabel threshold.

{
  "text": "The receiving party shall keep all confidential information secret.",
  "text_pair": null
}

The full ordered label map ships as labels.json and must remain aligned with the classification head. Output scores are useful for ranking alternatives, but they have not been calibrated as probabilities.

Practical use

1. Segment a contract into individual provisions.
2. Classify each provision independently with the 512-token policy above.
3. Retain the top label and score, and optionally the next few labels for review.
4. Route the provision using the exact LEDGAR label map.

Multi-topic provisions still receive one label. For full-contract processing, segment first and preserve the source location of every provision.

Training data and method

ModernBERT-large was fine-tuned on 60,000 public LEDGAR contract provisions from the LexGLUE dataset. The bound dataset revision is c23fdff1a6bf74e0e1a71cb86f1e781d37da888c; its published license is CC BY 4.0. No private client or user data was used in the reviewed post-training set.

Evaluation

The retained test receipt reports this 100-label aggregate for the selected checkpoint.

A separate CPU interface check on September 10, 2026 produced the expected category on four synthetic provisions: confidentiality, governing law, severability and counterparts.

Runtime and version

The repository contains a complete model; no base-model download or PEFT merge is required. The selected model.safetensors is 1,583,753,448 bytes with SHA-256 0c33bae20ce7edf1e0a2d5a71c5bb93aa30e5dd729564c12b585ddfde18293e3.

• Selected checkpoint commit: 136c5138e3b40b43b192b965fdee48fb9591784f
• Tested base snapshot: 45bb4654a4d5aaff24dd11d4781fa46d39bf8c13
• Dataset revision: c23fdff1a6bf74e0e1a71cb86f1e781d37da888c
• Card version: September 11, 2026
• Organization: LiTiL Labs

Use the model

python -m pip install "torch==2.12.0" "transformers==5.9.0"

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForSequenceClassification, AutoTokenizer

MODEL_ID = "litillabs/litil-clause-classifier"
text = (
    "This agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with "
    "the laws of the State of Oregon, without regard to conflict of laws rules."
)

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(MODEL_ID)
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(MODEL_ID).eval()
inputs = tokenizer(text, truncation=True, max_length=512, return_tensors="pt")

with torch.inference_mode():
    probabilities = model(**inputs).logits[0].float().softmax(-1)

class_id = int(probabilities.argmax())
print({"label": model.config.id2label[class_id], "score": float(probabilities[class_id])})

Expected result for the example:

{"label": "Governing Laws", "score": 0.963958}

The prepared offline package also includes an explicit label map and runner:

python classify_offline.py --model ./model --validate-only
python classify_offline.py --model ./model --input example_input.json

Citation

When using this checkpoint, cite the release repository, LEDGAR/LexGLUE and ModernBERT.