# Legal Retrieval Benchmark: three search APIs on 581 official-document requests

Three search APIs on 581 legal research requests, scored against the official document. The Government & Legal Index leads on gold@1 and gold@10.

- Published: November 4, 2026

The **Legal Retrieval Benchmark** measures whether a search API returns the official document behind a legal research request, and whether it puts that document first. The public release runs the Firecrawl Government & Legal Index, Exa and Parallel on 581 requests, with Claude Code as a reference, built from what customers ask the index, with one frozen official answer each and no model judging the scores. The loop behind it has turned eight times inside Firecrawl; this is the first version published.

![Legal Retrieval Benchmark](/images/changelog/legal-retrieval-benchmark.webp)

### What you can do

* **Read the scores.** gold\@1, gold\@10 and bad\@10 for every engine, with 95% intervals, on the benchmark page.
* **See the price of the official page.** Index searches use no credits; the page charts each engine's score against its cost per request (list price for the engines, the agent's spend for the two Claude Code references) and against its median latency.
* **Follow the loop.** Every week, customer requests find the gaps in the index, the search team fixes them, and the next version measures the result.
* **Try the index without an API key.** `POST /v2/search/gov`, the `firecrawl_gov_search` tool in the Firecrawl MCP server, or `firecrawl gov` in the CLI.
* **Rerun it.** The 290 public requests, their answer key and the scoring code are on GitHub at [firecrawl/benchmark-legal-retrieval](https://github.com/firecrawl/benchmark-legal-retrieval).

[Read the benchmark](/benchmarks/legal-retrieval) · [Read the post](/blog/legal-retrieval-benchmark.md) · [Docs](https://docs.firecrawl.dev/features/gov)

_Canonical HTML: https://www.firecrawl.dev/changelog/legal-retrieval-benchmark_

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