The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
diffuseai.pub
The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
1–10 of 90 posts
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#2It would seem these structural barriers are increasingly become either more porus or more malleable as AI has brought more OSS legal initiatives to empower both attorneys and regular users. The Law and lawyers are being dragged kicking and screaming into e/acc.
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#3This does not mention either interpretation or hermeneutics. For a computer to function as a lawyer it would have to be able to perform interpretation.
I would expect such an article to start there, or at least make some argument that concludes that a computer actually could perform professional legal tasks. Which I don't think they can, just as they can't do philosophy.
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#4I assume also that LLMs are not very good at chronology.
Since law evolves, I wouldn’t be suprised that LLMs would spit out arguments that are out of date.
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#5Nilay Patel argues that law is undeterministic (and its application ambiguous) to begin with:
> But law isn’t actually code, and society and courts aren’t computers. [...] the law is not deterministic. You simply cannot take the facts of a case, the law as written, and predict the outcome of that case with any real certainty, even though the formality of the legal system makes people think it works like a computer — that it’s predictable.
> [...] it’s actually ambiguity that’s at the very heart of our legal system. It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side, and it’s always possible to find the gray area in the law. That’s why prosecutors end up working as defense attorneys and why our regulators tend to end up working for big corporations.
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...
IMO, as with most domains, AI _tools_ will save a huge amount of time, but it's the human specialist making judgment calls based on real world context.
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#6I suppose one way is that the Lawyers and Legal Assistants use Legal AI as a replacement for standard search. Instead of parsing content and creating new notes, let AI search and create but humans spend the same amount time instead for verifying what was created.
That way the billable hours can match, but like the article says, who does this benefit? Ultimately the transfer of time to another task will keep law just as expensive. Perhaps there is room to save time on verification vs creation. Is it worth all the investment though?
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#7This does not mention either interpretation or hermeneutics. For a computer to function as a lawyer it would have to be able to perform interpretation. I would expect such an article to start there, or at least make some argument that concludes that a computer actually could perform professional legal tasks. Which I don't think they can, just as they can't do philosophy.
AI can't do novel research either right?
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#8> Only three entities in the United States have anything approaching complete coverage
> They sell the editorial infrastructure built on top: headnote taxonomies that organize millions of opinions into searchable categories, practice guides written by specialists over decades, and treatises that synthesize primary law into usable guidance.
> The Free Law Project’s CourtListener provides free access to millions of federal and state court opinions, oral arguments, and PACER documents.
I think issue of a data-moat is somewhat overstated, or at least it is not argued very well here. If secondary organization and interpretation of open data is their moat, and if it is mostly focused on guiding humans through the complex web of knowledge, then AI should make short-order of that.
But, as usual, the issue of structural and organizational barriers is definitely convincing. Sometimes existing players are too entrenched to change. A new kind of AI-oriented law-firm might need to emerge and show itself to be competitive to either make mainstream firms truly change or push them out of the market.
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#9Nilay Patel argues that law is undeterministic (and its application ambiguous) to begin with: > But law isn’t actually code, and society and courts aren’t computers. [...] the law is not deterministic. You simply cannot take the facts of a case, the law as written, and predict the outcome of that case with any real certainty, even though the formality of the legal system makes people think it works like a computer —…
This isn't really true though. This is how the law used to work, until people did the research and discovered it let to absolutely loads of mad variation in outcomes, with people with similar offences getting totally different sentences based on random luck. Hence most countries not have pretty strict sentencing guidelines, with a bit of space for judgement on top (despite a lot of protesting from judges).
https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/what-we-do/our-brand/...
You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#10> As AI becomes capable of producing entire work products, the profession that has spent decades treating “I reviewed it myself” as the standard of care has no framework for what happens when that review becomes economically irrational. The ethical rules assume a human at the center. The technology is moving humans to the periphery.
What horrendous morals behind this article. Why would anyone advocate for prioritizing economics and technology before ethics, especially in something as important as law?
The "won't someone think of the all the poor people with no access to legal counsel" part sounds a lot worse once you realize they actually mean "won't someone think of the money we're leaving on the table by not getting some revenue from selling cheaper AI slop, uh I mean AI legal representation, to those who can't afford anything else".