When Reasoning Hurts Legal Drafting: The Verbalization Bottleneck in Patent Claim Generation

Jul 14, 2026

A new preprint investigates the impact of explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning on patent claim generation using large language models. The study finds that implicit CoT, where reasoning is kept internal, consistently outperforms explicit CoT, which can introduce a verbalization bottleneck. The authors identify three mechanisms by which explicit verbalized reasoning degrades output quality: abstraction of critical details, disruption of internalized generation patterns, and cascading error propagation. These results are supported by both automatic metrics and human expert assessment.

Why it matters: This challenges the common assumption that explicit reasoning always benefits LLM outputs, especially for structured legal drafting tasks like patent claims.

Full story at: arXiv Computation and Language ↗