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AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

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Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech often misses obvious downsides, especially human, in pursuit of unrealistic idealism. A good lawyer is not just knowledgeable of law, but of people. He needs to get 12 people in front of him to agree with him. And he may even be actively misleading them when he's defending a someone whom he knows to be guilty. This comes down to reading people, reading reactions, and understanding what each of those 12 people ne…

> A good lawyer is not just knowledgeable of law, but of people. He needs to get 12 people in front of him to agree with him. While I agree with you that AI powered lawyer can have many downsides and drawbacks here you are building on a falsehood. There is this illusions that computers are "book smart" but not "street smart". It is very deeply ingrained into our culture. Just think about Data from Star Trek. Very ana…

> it would be easier to reliably implement the "reading reactions, and understanding what each of those 12 people needs to hear to have them act like he wants" part

Come to think about it. This part can be valuable, even as a startup. You get mock juries, you act out legal cases in front of them. You collect every single thing the actor lawyers say, and how they say it, and you also collect full transcript of their deliberations.

You model the data, and then you sell the services to lawyers. They can practice in front of your model jury initialised with what can be known about the real jurors and can see traces of their deliberations. Not just one run of the model, but many runs if they want to.

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could also make things much worse, due to Jevon's paradox. The way rich societies throw away tons of food because it isn't scarce, or how modern software is slower than ever because hardware is too cheap. If half-baked AI's lower *some* of the costs of law practice, we might end up wasting more resources than ever before fighting against the proliferating volume of it. See, the sword cuts both ways. Prosecutors' o…

I'm imagining a dystopian future where everyone wears a legal advice headset that is constantly whispering to them about things they are doing, or need to change to avoid a lawsuit. Kind of like a continual game of twister where if you misstep, all the watching legal AIs jump on you, immediately serving you electronically, with court dates pre-scheduled and all the evidence they need to win the case already submitted…

Sounds like something out of Accelerando.

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#143
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s more likely that the AI would free up public defendants from things like having to answer their clients’ questions, as they could just ask the AI, allowing them to be more effective Public defenders would be more effective if they didn't have to talk to their clients?

I read it more as, clients have a mix of questions. Clients don’t go through the system everyday and likely have some general worries and procedural questions as a result. Clients also have a case and need to coordinate with their lawyer. AI could enable more of the latter to happen within the limited time the lawyer has for each client.

Seems like that problem could be fixed by giving clients a brochure and a video to watch that explains everything.

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why do we need lawyer of any type to handle something as banal as speeding tickets? You don't. Just show up in court and talk to the judge. That's how it's currently handled. Lawyers aren't involved in the traffic courts I've seen.

I always hire a lawyer for traffic court. Show up with a lawyer and wear a suit. Don't want them to think I'm one of the poors to stomp down. If you go to low-level court in middle America you'll understand what I mean -- 99% of the people there are drugged out and wearing rags generally look like their shit is not together at all and these are the people the lazy/burnt-out prosecutor is geared towards crushing effor…

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Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always hire a lawyer for traffic court. Show up with a lawyer and wear a suit. Don't want them to think I'm one of the poors to stomp down. If you go to low-level court in middle America you'll understand what I mean -- 99% of the people there are drugged out and wearing rags generally look like their shit is not together at all and these are the people the lazy/burnt-out prosecutor is geared towards crushing effor…

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Weird that people assume someone who was never convicted must be a guilty "monster." I believe in innocent until proven guilty.

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the core issue I have with comments like this: they refuse to try solving social issues with business. Every time a solution involving business pops up, there's immediately people dismissing it with a comment saying you can't solve societal issues with business, with no proposed alternative solutions either. Ok, you don't want to solve it with business, how then? A an aside business has been shown to be the b…

lol. I agree with you, but I also can understand why people may think that profiting from solving a social problem could create a slew of other issues, such as incentivizing the proliferation of that same social problem so that solving it can turn a profit. It's just business! On the other hand I don't understand this hatred towards tech, aside from "it's new, and I don't understand it, therefore it's bad".

>>such as incentivizing the proliferation of that same social problem so that solving it can turn a profit. It's just business!

The ironic thing is we see this more with government than business. Social programs almost always NEVER solve the social problem they just manage it.

This is to ensure a voting base is dependent on the government and gives the political class levers to pull to ensure their control and domination.

Government does not want to fix problems, they want to manage them

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#147
post #6

>The ultimate goal, according to Browder, is to democratize legal representation by making it free for those who can't afford it, in some cases eliminating the need for pricey attorneys. this is the core issue I have with companies and tech like this: they try to solve social issues with technology and business. the issue of accessible defense is an issue of institutional failure that rests on the shoulders of the st…

Nitpick: From a glimpse at the article, I think the defendant will represent himself , the "AI lawyer" running on the defendants smartphone will just give him hints. Not sure how it can be acceptable to have a third party listen into court proceedings in real time through a smartphone, but ok.

>>Not sure how it can be acceptable to have a third party listen into court proceedings in real time through a smartphone, but ok.

Why would it not be? Court Rooms are public, open to the public with many high profile case being broadcast in real time

Personally I think ever courtroom should have everything broadcast in real time to anyone that wants to view it

Government Secrecy is how abuse occurs

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#148
post #31
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. If its one thing we've seen ChatGPT and the like struggling with, it's internal consistency and keeping the whole text coherent and tied to some fundamental overarching thread or strategy. To play devil's advocate though, would a layman without AI help be any better at navigating this?

Answer - probably not. But courts are very likely (in my view) to take a very very dim view of the introduction of some kind of barrack-room "AI lawyer". It will slow things down by introducing potentially spurious arguments which wouldn't have been made by either a represented party, or unrepresented party. Given the courts are a public service, this isn't necessarily zero sum - unrepresented parties do take longer…

This is not an AI problem, I have seen more than a few time Lawyers contradict in different parts of a case. One example off the top of my head is when Lawyers attempt aurge that social media platforms are both publishers and platforms so they can not be held liable at all under any circumstance

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#149

Attorney here, I think it’s too early stages to run with this tech. It’s not just the confidentially incorrectness people have mentioned. If you ask it for legal citations for an argument, it makes them up because it has no concept of truth to filter on. Make all the jokes you want about lawyers stretching the truth, but citing State v. Johnson, (Minn. 2007) when that doesn’t exist is going to be bad for the individu…

> imagine an indefatigable, perpetually nice adversary out to screw you over.

That's already the case on a lot of calls. In particular, the systems that are configured to not hand you over to a human no matter what unless the system itself detects there is an error in its handling of the situation. I've just defaulted for some time now to saying the word "gibberish" when prompted, and usually that gets you connected directly to a human after no more than 3 times saying it because the system believes that it can't understand you. You can not ask the system to please do that for you no matter how you phrase the question because it was designed specifically to stop you from reaching a human.

Re: AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

#150
Since legal firms are in no hurry to lower billable hours by replacing all of their paralegal researchers with models that can guide towards relevant case law, public defenders are the perfect market for these tools.

If I were the CEO of this company making an AI-powered lawyer product, I would also try and market this to the lawyers that are already representing this underserved class but generally stretched too thin.

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