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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

#51

Post by tossandthrow »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #44
tossandthrow wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A tired programmer usually knows he's tired 6 months ago everybody talked about how AI was not able to plan their work. They could only do minor changes. The introspective property of knowing when you are "tired" and acting appropriately will likely be trivially observed in 6 months.

human fatigue is detected by sensory experience and there's no sensory experience for llms. so it can just guess. operators will never expose this guess to the user (who wants to pay for a tool that complains and refuses work?) so they probably will use it to load balance differently. and if they are out of resources then they can't load balance so they'll just hope you won't notice, so we're back to where we started…

Ahh sorry, I see that you explicitly wrote that deteriorated performance was due to throttling.

Naturally, LLMs do not get fatigue. As such they also don't need to detect it. That is correct. But LLMs can see if their performance have fatigue-like deterioration and correct for it.

That case is even more trivial and has nothing fundamentally to do with LLMs. Capacity is added everyday.

I would not base my long term projects on what happens in the market based on the fact that a single provider needs to throttle to satisfy demand now.

Your assumption that the current pricing is not sustainable might be fair. Personally I believe the opposite, and I havde not seen any indication that inference should not continue to decline in price.

In particular, LLMs appear to be hyper commoditisable. So if Anthropic or OpenAI is doing pricing shenanigans, people will likely move on.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#52

Post by ShinyLeftPad »

tossandthrow wrote: post #51
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

human fatigue is detected by sensory experience and there's no sensory experience for llms. so it can just guess. operators will never expose this guess to the user (who wants to pay for a tool that complains and refuses work?) so they probably will use it to load balance differently. and if they are out of resources then they can't load balance so they'll just hope you won't notice, so we're back to where we started…

Ahh sorry, I see that you explicitly wrote that deteriorated performance was due to throttling. Naturally, LLMs do not get fatigue. As such they also don't need to detect it. That is correct. But LLMs can see if their performance have fatigue-like deterioration and correct for it. That case is even more trivial and has nothing fundamentally to do with LLMs. Capacity is added everyday. I would not base my long term pr…

> Naturally, LLMs do not get fatigue

they are not human so human sensations don't apply. but I heard when you run out of tokens it's also kind of like fatigue, just less predictable

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#53

Post by dgellow »

matwood wrote: post #42
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…

> As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible This is many people at many jobs. We continue to see this weird thing when AI comes into an industry that suddenly the product being produced by the people was perfect/amazing/whatever. Maybe that's true for the majority of HN who are lucky enough to work with experts in every field, but in the general population th…

The problem is that a layman has no way to know if what the llm told them is better than experts around them, or even just remotely correct. A wrong response and a correct, informative, helpful response look exactly the same, the LLM will express the same level of confidence and will defend them in both cases.

So, on one hand you can get an expert take that might be wrong, but is linked to an actual person, with a reputation and some level of ownership. On the other hand you have an over confident LLM that might be wrong and has no reputation, no ownership. How does that actually improve things compared to the older status quo?

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#54

Post by dgellow »

keiferski wrote: post #28

It’s interesting to think that the “public speaking skills” aspect of some legal jobs will probably continue to be AI-proof for the indefinite future. No one is going to present ChatGPT on an iPad as their defense attorney. On the other hand, the paperwork-first side of law is probably in for a tough future. Especially if your clients are not big corporations or rich celebrities. In general I think my advice to young…

> No one is going to present ChatGPT on an iPad as their defense attorney.

That already happened! https://youtu.be/MkmfZPt-gaw?si=gk1k3sGsFq9npp0X

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#55

Post by dgellow »

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…

> This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided.

A bubble doesn’t say anything about how useful the underlying technology is. We are in an AI bubble, in the sense that the allocated resources is completely out of line with the underlying businesses. AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#56

Post by zer00eyz »

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. We review 100s of old contracts every week

I hope the irony is lost on no one that "Attention Is All You Need" was the paper that kicked the LLM boom off.

Part of the distinction between a how good one lawyer will be vs another is exactly that: attention to detail. And, as a trade, a practice, it seems like a skill that they try to hammer into the people who pursue this career (to varying degrees of success clearly).

It makes the last 20 years of leet code hiring look downright wrong. Your ability to recall what sorting algo to use, or solve some brain teaser conveys nothing about your ability to read (massive amounts) of code, and think critically about it.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#57

Post by benj111 »

Problem is. The law isn't actually what is written. Lawyers aren't truthful or honest. Being a lawyer is just getting a licence to lie in court, and for some reason the judge takes it seriously.

Lawyers are going to use ai, because it's easy. The only time they won't is when the AI won't come up with a plausible enough excuse. The lawyer will always have a job, because a non lawyer using the same arguments will be ignored.

So these are rules to maintain the appearance that the system has integrity.

And that's the annoying thing. They know what integrity and justice and fairness look like, just as the rest of the justice system does, but they ignore it all.

At this point, it would be preferable for both sides to put their argument to an AI and let the AI decide what is fair. Wouldn't be any worse than judges who were themselves lawyers looking after their own.

Sorry for the rant, I've had experience of the 'justice' system.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#58

Post by jrm4 »

w10-1 wrote: post #27
wxw wrote: post #2

I think this plan is really quite well-balanced and sane. Also kudos to UChicago Law School for including an actual implementation plan here, not just vague thoughts. Some bits I found interesting: [For required courses in year 1] > Across all 1L sections, we will prohibit the use of electronic devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones in the classroom. > Additionally, examinations will be in-class without access…

These are the right bits to call out. But the effect is to make success more dependent on networks. (If they are using AI as an excuse to make networks more relevant than skills, it relieves competitive pressure.) First, a main draw of law journals is the filing cabinet of past exams as remembered by past students, available only to journal members i.e., friends of connected people. Reducing one's ability to remember…

So, I graduated from law school 20 years ago, and -- given even the internet THEN, like, pdfs over mail -- that law journal filing cabinet thing was actually already dying; I had more than enough past history of outlines and stuff.

That all being said, I would be entirely unsurprised if the "mythology" of "YES the journals have the secret fancy sauce that no one else can get" lived on.

Also -- and I don't necessarily want to denigrate law school professors, it's another thing that's just gone on so long that "this is how we do it" -- yes, the law School "Socratic method" (at worst) is an effective form of possible professor laziness; they can just "ask questions about the cases" and not really teach.

Related to how law school "textbooks" aren't textbooks. They're literally just a bunch of cases slapped together with a tiny bit of commentary (unless that's maybe changed too, I hope?)

Again, not all professors, you CAN still teach very well under this framework. -- but it is an out for those fancy people who's forte isn't teaching.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#59

Post by uneoneuno »

agentprose wrote: post #46
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it perhaps possible that you won your case because you didn't break the law, or conversely because the other party did break the law? Unless ChatGPT persuaded a judge to side in your favor even though you were legally in the wrong, this really doesn't tell us anything at all. (And even in that circumstance, it might speak more to the complete incompetence of the other party's legal representation.)

In my case, the defendant was indeed breaking the law, but it was a "new" law untested by case law, so it was somewhat risky how a judge would interpret it. The counsel of record for the defendant was bringing "recycled briefs" energy, possibly out of overconfidence.

It is clear by how you're talking you may not be a 'lawyer' but your exposure to building and handling your case (very cool with AI I agree) has clearly elevated your lawfare knowledge above average levels.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#60

Post by rglullis »

j4yav wrote: post #24
mag7269 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All nice and all, but their grads will be wrecked by a street-wise guy with AI glasses (and eventually an implanted chip). There’s no competition in a machines vs humans match. It’s over. Of course these elite centers of knowledge want to keep the status quo, they base their entire existence on gate-keeping useful shit from the riff-raff. Well, fuck them.

A street wise moron used as a sort of meat puppet to carry a computer around that answers questions for him? What does that even mean practically? Won’t the graduates who learned how to think also have access, but then also be able to think for themselves too?

I think the real question here is: if you are smart and can find the resources to "learn how to think", and if a "smart guy with access to AI tools" can perform as well as any other trained lawyer, then what is the point of going to a competitive school in the first place?
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