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Rethinking legal education in the AI era

law.uchicago.edu

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Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#31

Post by Terr_ »

rayiner wrote: post #4
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #3

This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided. Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree. But this is “just another an AI cycle” and if you’re a practitioner it does look different than the previous ones. However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were…

AI is a real thing and it's the most significant development in the legal sector since the Internet. Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery, which before would've taken me the whole day. Even if it never gets any better it's a huge step forward. It's not only going to change legal education, it's going to change what the pipeline looks like in law firms. Similarly to the cha…

> Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery

It might be worth distinguishing between LLMs as tools for fuzzy-searching hard facts, versus using them to craft logical arguments. [0] The risk-profile and verification difficulty are rather different.

[0] Or, more-precisely, using them to craft a pattern-fitting text artifact, which hopefully maps onto a sane concept when reinterpreted by a human.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#32

Post by KaiserPro »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #3

This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided. Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree. But this is “just another an AI cycle” and if you’re a practitioner it does look different than the previous ones. However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were…

I am at a company that currently has a whole bunch of lawyers, because we are dealing with multi-year >100s million infra projects.

One of the things that AI has helped with is automatic breech notifications. They are largely proforma, but depending on which generation of contract they are notifying from, subtle changes are needed.

Law is mostly highly structured text, and you know what loves highly structured and documented text? LLMs.

Legal LLMs do share the same issue with coding LLMs, they tend to default to lazy/insecure. Its not the case where you as a non-lawyer can prompt it to make a "water tight" contract from scratch.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#33

Post by cognitiveinline »

bonzini wrote: post #30
kozzion wrote: post #25

As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week and most of them have 10-20 serious drafting errors on them. The most common ones are of the order of defining the same concept like 'a working day' in various conflicting ways without every specifying when which of the conflicting definitions should be used. Lawyers still h…

But the real question is 1) whether other human lawyers would catch the error 2) in how much time 3) which of the errors introduced by AI vs. human would have bigger consequences. On 1 and 2 the answers are very likely to be "yes" and "it would take humans more time", but the question that really matters is 3.

Adversarial agents and reviews means 3 is very clearly giving the benefit to AI.

Let's face it, only thing lawyers are there for right now is to take liability. And even that may not be needed 5 years from now.

Middlemen that can be automated will be automated.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#34

Post by tossandthrow »

kozzion wrote: post #25

As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week and most of them have 10-20 serious drafting errors on them. The most common ones are of the order of defining the same concept like 'a working day' in various conflicting ways without every specifying when which of the conflicting definitions should be used. Lawyers still h…

> most human lawyers are absolutely terrible.

I think this extends to the other areas that AI is also disrupting.

Software engineers are also absolutely terrible: In being sloppy with handling errors, doing coercions, etc. All because always engineering after best practice simply takes too much time and mental load.

The real disruption from AI is likely that it does not get mentally fatigue. It can keep on, launch adversarial audits, make sure that everything is up to all standards.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#35

Post by anon373839 »

ElProlactin wrote: post #17
anon373839 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I've seen, the top AI models can now produce contracts that are on par with what I would have had to pay thousands of dollars for a decade ago How would you know? Unless you have expertise in this area, you can't really know if you have a good contract until you have to litigate it. > you still run everything by a real attorney of course for the accountability piece Your attorney can make better use of AI…

> How would you know? Unless you have expertise in this area, you can't really know if you have a good contract until you have to litigate it. I ran multiple businesses for over 20 years, and during that time had to deal with countless contracts involving commercial transactions, leases, funding events and employment. I worked closely with outside counsel, and had to deal with numerous disputes and lawsuits. Many con…

Good points.

For contracts, I was thinking of the more complex deals where a battle-tested template is unavailable. Though even where one appears to fit, it doesn't always. One of the difficulties in professional/client relations is that there are often details that one party sees as minor or completely unremarkable, and the other party sees as changing the whole frame of analysis. I haven't been too impressed with LLMs being able to identify things like this -- they have reams of knowledge, but no practical sense.

The issue about halting the training pipeline is an interesting one. In law firms, a lot of "training" of young lawyers is really glorified bates-stamping charged out at professional rates. I think we could find that the work just gets more substantive and interesting. And yes, pyramid-shaped firms do rely on this type of stuff for revenue. But if all parties can do more sophisticated work, then AI may only nudge forward an arms race without fundamentally changing much (at least for work that has adversarial backpressure).

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#36

Post by sublinear »

slopinthebag wrote: post #12
agentprose wrote: post #11

I recent beat an actual lawyer as a pro se plaintiff in a civil suit. It was all codex and claude, using the cli agents to write the "import docx" scripts that wrote all the filings, and scripts to assemble exhibits. I don't know how long the bars will be able to hold onto their monopoly powers when confronted with LLMs that are measurably superior.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#37

Post by avaer »

This is a more reasoned take than most reactions to AI. But nobody wants to consider the possibility that maybe we won't actually need what was traditionally called lawyers in the mid/near term future; certainly before the new grad's careers are up.

I would never expect Harvard Law school to admit this, their hands are tied by many interests, but IMO they still aren't being pragmatic enough to evolve.

I would make the courses 50% AI based immediately, the other 50% being based on validating and applying the AI's work with traditional rigorous work. Anyone who rejects this should drop out, because they won't have a career anyway. And if Harvard Law disagrees then they can find out how meaningful their degrees are going to be in 10 years.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#38

Post by Kaibeezy »

The posted article is about law school, but the comments are focusing on practice. These overlap but are not the same.

“Lawyer” is one of many possible career paths. Law graduates are uniquely qualified as premium law-aware generalists. In my opinion, there is no better education to prepare for future business uncertainty.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#39

Post by dozerly »

kozzion wrote: post #25

As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week and most of them have 10-20 serious drafting errors on them. The most common ones are of the order of defining the same concept like 'a working day' in various conflicting ways without every specifying when which of the conflicting definitions should be used. Lawyers still h…

Most people are terrible at what they do, period, regardless of profession.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#40

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

tossandthrow wrote: post #34
kozzion wrote: post #25

As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week and most of them have 10-20 serious drafting errors on them. The most common ones are of the order of defining the same concept like 'a working day' in various conflicting ways without every specifying when which of the conflicting definitions should be used. Lawyers still h…

> most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. I think this extends to the other areas that AI is also disrupting. Software engineers are also absolutely terrible: In being sloppy with handling errors, doing coercions, etc. All because always engineering after best practice simply takes too much time and mental load. The real disruption from AI is likely that it does not get mentally fatigue. It can keep on, launch ad…

> The real disruption from AI is likely that it does not get mentally fatigue

It's worse than mental fatigue. A friend had GLM 5.2 suddenly become dumb for hours. It started forgetting instructions, randomly inserted some bits in simplified chinese... Apparently throttled due to demand. there was tons of tokens left. (btw when your llm runs out of tokens is another example that's worse than fatigue)

A tired programmer usually knows he's tired (and can take a break) and fucks up in more expected ways

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