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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

#301

Post by sbaiddn »

dubcanada wrote: post #44

I always found lawyers to be interesting… they are not responsible for you. They help guide you and argue for your case. But if they mess up, that doesn’t send them to jail. You can fire them or report them. But that’s it. You’re still screwed. Really the only one in the court working for you, is yourself. So ideally we’d make it easier to represent yourself. As long as your capable of doing such. I quite like this i…

Following your line of thought, I would love it if software engineers lost all their personal privacy every time their product got hacked or was built to spy on others.

What can I say? I'm a dreamer.

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

#302

Post by freejazz »

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.

Why is there this narrative that it's a response being done out of fear? That seems to be a huge misunderstanding on your part.

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

#303

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ethanbond wrote: post #294
lolinder wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also many adjacent algorithms that could solve the same problem, but you still need to execute the algorithm correctly. LLMs are not ready for unsupervised use in any domain outside of curiosity, and what DoNotPay is proposing would be to let one roam free in a courtroom. I'm not at all opposed to using LLMs in the research and discovery phase. But having a naive defendant with no legal experience parroting…

That’s nowhere near analogous because between every working algorithm are massive gulfs of syntactic and semantic failure zones. This is not the case with human language, which is the whole power of both language production and language interpretation. Is it more problematic than this person 1) not being represented, 2) having to pay exorbitant fees to be represented, or 3) having an extremely overworked and disinter…

> 1) not being represented, 2) having to pay exorbitant fees to be represented, or 3) having an extremely overworked and disinterested public defender?

You’re leaving off being put in jail for contempt of court, perjuring oneself, making procedural errors that result in an adverse default ruling, racking up fines, et cetera. Bad legal representation is ruinous.

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

#304

Post by freejazz »

enraged_camel wrote: post #275
lolinder wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

>> 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. But why would the opposing side's lawyers care about this? They presumably want their client to win the lawsuit.

When did the opposing side's lawyers say anything about this? Are you confused? Law is a regulated profession. The lawyers pointing out that this is illegal aren't on the other side of the case...

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

#305

Post by rbanffy »

elicksaur wrote: post #284

Good. Totally fine with trying to use AI to give legal advice, but it should be done with a lawyer’s license on the line. A company that explicitly disclaims being a law firm and states is not giving legal advice should also not get to tweet that they are “representing” someone in court. A good bar (pun intended) for the quality of the tech is if it is good enough that a licensed attorney trusts it to give legal advi…

> but it should be done with a lawyer’s license on the line.

Either that, or the client is fully aware they are defending themselves with the help of an AI that's not, and cannot at the moment be, a lawyer. As much as I want to believe AGI is just around the corner, LLMs are not individuals with human-level intelligence.

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

#306

Post by ethanbond »

freejazz wrote: post #298
ethanbond wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"DoNotPay seems to know very well what they’re doing." What makes you think that? What they are doing is illegal. It's the unlicensed practice of law.

Their track record? Seems like this is the first you’re hearing of them, but this is just the latest (and yes, most ambitious) experiment. They’ve been successfully using technology to help normal people defeat abusive systems built by “the professions” for years.

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

#307

Post by freejazz »

fallingknife wrote: post #292
lolinder wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

They are not scared that it will fail. They are scared that it will succeed. And there's a great reason to allow a company to sell a stand-in for a lawyer. Cost. This isn't targeted at people who can afford lawyers, it's targeted at people who can't, for now at least.

Lawyers aren't scared at all. It's traffic court, you are really overstating things. If it was a serious case, it'd be even more ridiculous to put more on the line by being represented by a computer algorithm that isn't subject to any of the licensing standards of an atty, none of the repercussions, and being run by a business that is disclaiming all liability for their conduct.

You know what an attorney can't do? Disclaim malpractice liability!

It'd be wondrous if the esteemed minds of hackernews could put their brain cycles towards actually applying common sense and other things rather than jerking off to edgy narratives about disruption while completely disregarding the relevant facts to focus on what they find politically juicy ("lawyers are scared it will succeed". It's a tautological narrative you are weaving for yourself that completely skirts past all the principles underlying the legal profession and it's development over hundreds of years.

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

#308

Post by matthewheath »

enraged_camel wrote: post #275
lolinder wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

>> 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. But why would the opposing side's lawyers care about this? They presumably want their client to win the lawsuit.

I only have immediate knowledge of UK law, but lawyers will generally have a duty to the court to act with independence in the interests of justice. This tends to mean that in situations where one side are self-represented or using the services of ChatGPT, etc. the opposing side is under a duty not to take unfair advantage of the fact that one side is not legally trained.

They don't have to help them, but they can't act abusively by, for example, exploiting lack of procedural knowledge.

If they deliberately took advantage of one side using ChatGPT and getting it wrong because the legal foundation of knowledge isn't there for that person, that could be a breach of their duty to the court and result in professional censure or other regulatory consequences.

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

#310

Post by JumpCrisscross »

fallingknife wrote: post #292
lolinder wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

They are not scared that it will fail. They are scared that it will succeed. And there's a great reason to allow a company to sell a stand-in for a lawyer. Cost. This isn't targeted at people who can afford lawyers, it's targeted at people who can't, for now at least.

> are not scared that it will fail. They are scared that it will succeed

Lawyers make heavy use of automated document sifting in e.g. e-discovery.

Junior lawyers are expensive. Tech that makes them superfluous is a boon to partners. When we toss the village drunk from the bar, it isn’t because we’re scared they’ll drink all the booze.

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