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An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

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Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#261

Post by ethanbond »

lolinder wrote: post #246

This company is either run by someone who doesn't understand the tech or is willfully fraudulent. ChatGPT and company are far from good enough to be entrusted with law. Having interacted extensively with modern LLMs, I absolutely know something like this would happen: > Defendant (as dictated by AI): The Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. Smith in 1978... > Judge: There was no case Johnson v. Smith in 1978. LLMs hallu…

DoNotPay seems to know very well what they’re doing.

It really doesn’t strike me as true that law requires absolute precision. There are many adjacent (both near and far) arguments that can work in law for any given case, since the interpreter is a human. You just need no silly mistakes that shatter credibility, but that’s very different from “get one thing wrong and the system doesn’t work at all or works in wildly unexpected ways.”

Low end law will be one of the first areas to go due to this tech. DoNotPay actually has already been doing this stuff successfully for a while (not in court proceedings themselves though).

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#262

Post by dahart »

deltarholamda wrote: post #236
tablespoon wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One could also argue the real problem is the tech industry constantly ignoring regulations that were put in place for good reasons This is it. The tech company wants the ability to sell a shoddy product to its customers, and the legal system said no. And frankly, I don't know how anyone could honestly claim (without being ignorant or deluded) that feeding legal arguments into court, output from modern-day voice rec…

>The legal system is no joke, and if there weren't regulations about who can practice law, you'd have all kinds of fly-by-night people getting paid to do it while getting their clients thrown in jail That sort of highlights the problem. The legal system is supposed to be about ensuring fair and impartial justice. What the legal system is actually about is providing jobs for people in the legal system. Lawyers make la…

> I've often said that if you really want to make a lawyer squirm, suggest that we have socialized law care. Most modern countries have some version of socialized or single payer health care, so why not make it the same for legal services?

We do have socialized law in the US, in the form of public defenders.

> Why should rich people get access to better legal service than regular people?

Oh, is “better” what you’re talking about, not just access? This is different than what the first half of your paragraph implied. The answer, of course, is money. And rich people in all the “modern countries” you’re referring to always have access to “better” than what’s provided by all social services. Always. Unfortunate, but true, that money makes life unequal.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#263

Post by idkyall »

asvitkine wrote: post #223
parsimo2010 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US does not have them, and they are not legal. I agree that they could be useful. But in the US you have strictly two options- represent yourself to a court, or let a bar-certified lawyer represent you. Nobody else gets to help in court. Outside of court, legal assistants help lawyers with administrative stuff- doing legal research, organizing paperwork, etc. But the lawyer holds the sole responsibility to the co…

Seems like the company could perhaps switch its focus to markets where these are allowed?

It's sort of a catch-22, Law in the US is only a lucrative market to disrupt because the regulation and gatekeeping has made labor expensive. If lawyers didn't bill 300+/hr in the US, then an AI powered startup to replace them wouldn't be cost effective. There's a joke I saw recently about a guy hiring a lawyer for a $800 traffic violation and getting a bill for $1200.

I can't speak to the price of a lawyer abroad, but a quick google seems to indicate US lawyer salaries on avg are up to ~2x as much as in some parts of Europe[1][2].

[1]https://www.legalcheek.com/2020/12/revealed-the-eu-countries...

[2]https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/lawyer/salary

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#264

Post by pibechorro »

dools wrote: post #123

This is so fucking dumb. As if you need a lawyer to contest a parking ticket in the first place. The last time I got a parking ticket I had photos and documentary evidence that I should not have been liable. After I lodged my intent to contest the fine, the council sent me a letter saying how they win 97% of cases and I should just pay up now to avoid the risk. I called bullshit and turned up on my court date. There…

I was snatched up in an entrapment scheme by the Bronx police a decade or so ago. They waited for a bad rainy day, knowing the subway flooded badly, then put police tape around the turnstyles and opened the emergency gates wide open. As the hundreds of people followed each other down the tunnel the insticnt of everyone was to follow everyone else walking past, assuming the flooding broke the turnstyles. Fast forward 10min when the train shows up. The cops stopped the train, closed the exits and rounded up everyone issuing them 100$ tickets.

I fought it. The courtroom had people, mainly minorities, in a line all around the block in winter time. It was a money generating racket, preying on the poorest citizens who could not afford a $100 ticket, to loose a day of work,let alone a lawyer.

I was the only one there with a letter written by my lawyer. When it was my turn and they saw I had a lawyer ready to fight they dismissed my case with no explanation. Shameless.

Everyone takes a plea deal and they just extract millions from us. The courts, lawyers, the police.

Do not take plea deals! Fight them. Grind the courts, force them to work for it. Hold them accountable. I cant WAIT for ai to make them obsolete.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#265

Post by gfodor »

jtode wrote: post #249

This is gonna be the funniest battle ever. AI is not gonna go away and it will be better at law than humans. I'll take any odds.

Same. Lawyers are screwed - they have been an insanely overpaid profession forever, this is going to be absolutely devastating for them. Also, there isn’t a whole lot of leverage in lawyering compared to the other professions that AI is poised to dominate, so it feels like lawyers in particular are going to have a hard time transforming themselves into a new profession that is symbiotic with AI systems. This is a case where the human part may entirely go away for large swathes of cases.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#266

Post by GuB-42 »

pierrebai wrote: post #248

Another instance of the irreconcilable dichotomy of: "no one shall ignore the law" and "only lawyers can understand the law".

Only lawyers can give legal advice, big difference.

You can represent yourself in court if you want to (generally, you don't) but if you want to offer that service to others, you need to be a licensed lawyer. It is the same for many professions.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#267

Post by criddell »

lolinder wrote: post #246

This company is either run by someone who doesn't understand the tech or is willfully fraudulent. ChatGPT and company are far from good enough to be entrusted with law. Having interacted extensively with modern LLMs, I absolutely know something like this would happen: > Defendant (as dictated by AI): The Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. Smith in 1978... > Judge: There was no case Johnson v. Smith in 1978. LLMs hallu…

It would be kind of funny to hear an argument made by an LLM that has digested all the sovereign citizen bs.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#268

Post by pintxo »

Absolute precision? Have you read any law lately? Legal texts are (to me) surprisingly imprecise.

One wonders why we have not developed something explicit like mathematical notations for legal stuff.

I mean, comma/and/or separated lists in full text? Not even parenthesis? That’s not precision.

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#269

Post by DangitBobby »

LegitShady wrote: post #187
IanCal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see the problem as long as the actual lawyer can intervene when necessary. I don't believe there was an actual lawyer here: > The person challenging a speeding ticket would wear smart glasses that both record court proceedings and dictate responses into the defendant's ear from a small speaker.

Most judges won't allow you to record video in their court room anyways.

I wonder why we allow them to prevent that?

Re: An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

#270

Post by lolinder »

gfodor wrote: post #259
lolinder wrote: post #246

This company is either run by someone who doesn't understand the tech or is willfully fraudulent. ChatGPT and company are far from good enough to be entrusted with law. Having interacted extensively with modern LLMs, I absolutely know something like this would happen: > Defendant (as dictated by AI): The Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. Smith in 1978... > Judge: There was no case Johnson v. Smith in 1978. LLMs hallu…

If this is the case, the lawyers should have nothing to fear, and the plaintiff nothing to lose but a parking ticket. I say we stop arguing and run the experiment.

Non-lawyers aren't banned from giving legal advice because lawyers are trying to protect their jobs, they're banned from giving legal advice because they're likely to be bad at it, and the people who take their advice are likely to be hurt.

Yes, in this case, it would just be a parking ticket, but the legal system runs on precedent and it's safer to hold a strict line than to create a fuzzy "well, it depends on how much is at stake" line. If we know that ChatGPT is not equipped to give legal advice in the general case, there's no reason to allow a company to sell it as a stand-in for a lawyer.

(I would feel differently about a defendant deciding to use the free ChatGPT in this way, because they would be deliberately ignoring the warnings ChatGPT gives. It's the fact that someone decided to make selling AI legal advice into a business model that makes it troubling.)

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