To Judge or Not to Judge: Can Large Language Models Leverage the Dispute Focus in Legal Judgment?

Civil judicial cases are highly complicated, posing significant challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP). While judges manage this complexity through the dispute focus-a mechanism distilling cases into core issues-existing research largely overlooks this tool in favor of generic reasoning frameworks that lack authentic judicial logic. To bridge this gap, we first introduce FocalLaw, the first dataset aligning fullprocess Chinese civil judicial data through the dispute focus, comprising 1,000 high-quality cases across six causes of action. Building on this dataset, we examine LLMs' capability to utilize the dispute focus and uncover a counter-intuitive phenomenon: LLMs fail to leverage the dispute focus even with CoT and SFT, which we identify as the "Clerk Trap". To solve the problem, we propose FocalJudge, a novel framework that leverages the dispute focus to guide LLMs through a structured, judgelike cognitive workflow. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of FocalJudge and offer valuable insights into the interpretability and reliability of LLMs in the legal domain. * https://wenshu.court.gov.cn/ † https://tingshen.court.gov.cn/