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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

#91

Post by dolebirchwood »

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.

That's cool, but bear in mind that courts in the United States are generally required to be a little more lax in their enforcement of procedural rules when a party is pro se. Not saying you did make mistakes, but if you did, you may have gotten a pass.

Additionally, you haven't given any of the details of your case, so I'm going to assume you were simply in a position where the facts of your case weighed heavily in your substantive favor, and no amount of legal maneuvers by the defendant would have made a difference.

There's nothing magical about lawyers. They are mostly just boring, studious people who excelled in non-STEM academics and were good at memorization and test taking. If you have a strong case, it won't matter very much who the lawyer is on the other side.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#92

Post by rayiner »

Terr_ wrote: post #31
rayiner wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reinterpr…

I’ve used Opus and Grok (in the last month) to make some logical arguments and they’re not usable for that. In one case, the result looked superficially compelling, but the assertions on further scrutiny often proved the opposite of what we were trying to argue (usually due to some textual source where one narrow fact was helpful but the larger thrust of the source cut directly against us). In another case, what the AI selected as the primary argument was correct based on the literal meaning of some document. But in context the literal meaning was obviously not the intended one and it would be borderline sanctionable to interpret the document that way.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#93

Post by gtowey »

lelanthran wrote: post #87
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen lawyers lose to non-lawyers who didn't use all that, just because the lawyers didn't do their work, thinking, no doubt, "I'm a lawyer I will just win", at any rate there is a well known aphorism that a lawyer who represents themselves has a fool for a client. finally, was this thing you beat the actual lawyer at in their specific specialty, since lawyers are often focused on particular aspects of the law?

> at any rate there is a well known aphorism that a lawyer who represents themselves has a fool for a client. IME, many lawyers who represent others also have fools for clients.

I don't think the saying that if you're a bad lawyer, dont represent yourself, it's that their mistake is forgetting what half the point of a lawyer is: to be objective.

And that when trying to be a lawyer will usually fail when you have an emotional stake in the outcome. Even if you're the best lawyer in the world, you need someone practical and dispassionate to make sure they can see your blind spots.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#94

Post by agentprose »

dolebirchwood wrote: post #91
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.

That's cool, but bear in mind that courts in the United States are generally required to be a little more lax in their enforcement of procedural rules when a party is pro se. Not saying you did make mistakes, but if you did, you may have gotten a pass. Additionally, you haven't given any of the details of your case, so I'm going to assume you were simply in a position where the facts of your case weighed heavily in y…

I did make one or two procedural mistakes, including sending an email to the bailiff without copying the opposing counsel (ex parte). in another instance, the opposing counsel made a mistake of their own in following the specific judge's rules for listing working copies. I agree, the facts of the case did seem strong, but there was a matter of interpretation of the statute that could have gone against me.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#95

Post by agentprose »

duped wrote: post #90
uneoneuno wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please don't make the word "lawfare" a thing. It was invented by a criminal to argue that being investigated for his crimes was somehow corrupt.

This might be an instance of unfairly giving the native Anglo-Saxon roots a lower, vulgar status. if you were to calque it to ivsdvctvs nobody would bat an eye.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#96

Post by agentprose »

lelanthran wrote: post #86
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.

> I recent beat an actual lawyer as a pro se plaintiff in a civil suit. So? I beat actual lawyers in trials and hearings five times between 2008 and 2019. That last one was actually a team of attorney + advocate (senior bar member). You could always "beat" them just by reading and preparing. Now, you+AI beat a lawyer. Tomorrow, do you really think that you+AI will beat lawyer+AI ? And once we stop getting well-traine…

I would expect the future to be more like me+stockfish vs kasparov+stockfish, where the centaur part is completely superfluous. it would be a reverse centaur sort of thing where a human with legal personhood has to own the machine's output. The interesting question is whether judges or the bars manage to ban real time earpieces in lawyers that tell them exactly what to say. My case worked strictly by filings without a physical appearance, and I would have been quite disadvantage if it were otherwise.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#98

Post by j4yav »

rglullis wrote: post #60
j4yav wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My prediction would be that the overlap between people who carry around a computer to answer any questions that come for them in real time and the people who put in effort to learn to think must be approaching zero. You become smart by doing the hard work of thinking for yourself, not by outsourcing your mental capacity.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#99

Post by rglullis »

j4yav wrote: post #98
rglullis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My prediction would be that the overlap between people who carry around a computer to answer any questions that come for them in real time and the people who put in effort to learn to think must be approaching zero. You become smart by doing the hard work of thinking for yourself, not by outsourcing your mental capacity.

This assumes that LLMs can only be used as an oracle, and smart people can leverage LLMs to do a lot more than that.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#100

Post by singleshot_ »

dgellow wrote: post #53
matwood wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 re…

> a reputation, some level of ownership, and professional insurance

ftfy

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