Abstract
We introduce InvestigationWorlds, an agentic environment for legal investigation. We build on an underused artifact of U.S. civil litigation: the summary judgment motion. This motion relies upon a record composed of real evidence exhibits, and results in a court-adopted hypothesis that is treated as ground truth for the purposes of deciding the motion. Each environment is built from a real U.S. Federal Court case retrieved from Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) and augmented by an attorney-validated generation pipeline that synthesizes role-tagged documents around the original record. The resulting corpus admits multiple coherent factual readings, only one of which matches the court-adopted hypothesis. Evaluating on 100 cases, we find agents often commit to incorrect hypotheses despite retrieving relevant evidence, struggling to distinguish the court-adopted hypothesis from alternative hypotheses.
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Cite this article
APA 7
Sun, A. Y., Benard, A., Hamilton, S., Marcelo, A. T. A., Kim, Y. J., Henneking, C. L., Hu, R., Wang, Y., Mimno, D., Yang, B., & Labutov, I. (2026). InvestigationWorlds: An Agentic Environment for Legal Investigation. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/investigationworlds-an-agentic-environment-for-legal-investigation
MLA 9
Sun, Albert Yu, et al. "InvestigationWorlds: An Agentic Environment for Legal Investigation." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/investigationworlds-an-agentic-environment-for-legal-investigation.
Chicago (author–date)
Sun, Albert Yu, Andrew Benard, Sil Hamilton, Anna Teresita A. Marcelo, Yong Jae Kim, Carl-Leander Henneking, Rundong Hu, Yuhong Wang, David Mimno, Bishan Yang, and Igor Labutov. 2026. "InvestigationWorlds: An Agentic Environment for Legal Investigation." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/investigationworlds-an-agentic-environment-for-legal-investigation.
Harvard
Sun, A. Y., Benard, A., Hamilton, S., Marcelo, A. T. A., Kim, Y. J., Henneking, C. L., Hu, R., Wang, Y., Mimno, D., Yang, B. and Labutov, I. (2026) 'InvestigationWorlds: An Agentic Environment for Legal Investigation', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/investigationworlds-an-agentic-environment-for-legal-investigation.
Vancouver
Sun AY, Benard A, Hamilton S, Marcelo ATA, Kim YJ, Henneking CL, et al. InvestigationWorlds: An Agentic Environment for Legal Investigation. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/investigationworlds-an-agentic-environment-for-legal-investigation
IEEE
A. Y. Sun, A. Benard, S. Hamilton, A. T. A. Marcelo, Y. J. Kim, C. L. Henneking, R. Hu, Y. Wang, D. Mimno, B. Yang, and I. Labutov, "InvestigationWorlds: An Agentic Environment for Legal Investigation," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/investigationworlds-an-agentic-environment-for-legal-investigation.