Live data from Hacker News

Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

hbr.org

11–20 of 104 posts

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#11

Lawsuits may become automatic when you leave a store unhappy it might have the ability to create a lawsuit and then the store's lawsuit Api will be called, then the two ais will start negotiations and end up with a $15 deposit in your account by the time you get home. And it will be all because a certain hormone raised in your head.

Good lord, I hope not. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#12
This looks like yet another example of the thing where LLMs disrupt processes which are designed to limit engagement through requiring tedious long-form writing using jargon that is not available to most people.

On the one hand this is great - real “democratization” of how society works.

But it’s going to break a whole lot of things in the short term while these processes are redesigned for this new world. And the fixes will likely be to come up with new ways of limiting the number of people who can engage.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#13
> They use an AI tool to comb public information about your company and file hundreds of copyright infringement, IP, and trade secret theft cases. The scale means you can’t just ignore it or settle for a nominal amount.

The "scale" itself is the problem. Because companies are so huge, and their reach is so huge, it invites techniques that increase the efficiency of attacks. Human beings weren't meant to handle things at such scales, and that is part of the reason we have the problem of AI in the first place.

If we lived in smaller, more self-sufficient communities, then we would not have scale and the people in such communities would not have much desire to develop AI either. AI is the natural reaction of a large populace who look for a technological solution to the immense chaos of information.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#14
post #5

Between the lines it seems the legal professions depend on strong barriers to entry to justify their high prices, and this is threatening them more than the companies.

The barriers essentially are 'we know better' which is weird as I feel it is subjectivity and biases that enable them. There is a good case for making 90% of court cases as objective as possible by rewriting from scratch, but that can never happen in this world.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#15
Compute is going to be king in the new world; if you have enough GPUs you can spam legal challenges. If you have more GPUs you can deploy those to take the other side and defend.

As with DoS, the interesting cases will be where an asymmetry exists in cost of request vs response (or amplification is possible).

In the short term it seems likely that the government will be on the losing side of this exchange.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#16
post #5

Between the lines it seems the legal professions depend on strong barriers to entry to justify their high prices, and this is threatening them more than the companies.

Here's a story from my divorce 25 years ago. We were having an easy divorce, and so we used Nolo press to get it done. But it was difficult to know what forms actually had to be filed in our case.

So we went to the clerk, and said, out of all these forms, which ones do we have to file?

And the clerk said that they couldn't tell us because that would be offering legal advice. The lawyers had gotten laws passed preventing the clerk from telling us what forms we needed to give the clerk. Nice.

After a couple of minutes of thought, we decided to just fill them all out. So we filled out everything and handed it to the clerk.

The clerk then proceeded to cherry pick the forms they needed, and handed the rest back to us. ("My sole regret is that I have but one face to palm for my country.")

I think in the last 25 years, it's probably only gotten a lot worse.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#17
If suing became an ultra-easy one-click activity, I can see two things coming: 1. maybe that would force us to shape up our tort laws a little so that not everything under the sun was actionable and 2. maybe people and companies would stop misbehaving so much because they knew there was no longer a burden to suing them. A combination of 1 and 2 sound like a great outcome.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#18
Wouldn't this make legal counter-action cheap too? The robots fighting each other with a human referee(for now), the winner gets bounty.

On a more serious note though, people not seeking justice due to complexity which leads to high costs is the real issue IMHO. Maybe the idea is that this is pushing people into finding a middle ground but it's also a known barrier to real justice.

So some years ago when Turkey wasn't as totalitarian as today but was on the way to become such, they started having a problems with the European Court of Human Rights. The cases begin to pile up.

EU proposed: Create a way for people to access the Constitutional court of Turkey, so you might resolve most of the issues before coming to us as.

Turkey's proposal: Why don't you introduce a considerable application fee, so the number of cases can drop dramatically because only a few can afford it?

So yeah, that was the Turkish style. The EU way prevailed but this time Turkey dropped its bid to join EU and it simply started ignoring it's own Constitutional Court decisions.

I think the moral of the story is, it doesn't matter that much because people will end up doing it their own way.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#19
post #4

I don't know a lot, but I do know that the legal profession will change itself as required to protect itself. Which includes protecting itself from being completely intolerable to the wider populace. This is a law of the Universe on par with the "death and taxes" adage. What this may look like is measures that will make legal action, and even public action on par with "comments", far less accessible. At least to robo…

You should sometimes review the Indian judicial system and their judgements. I have never seen a more self congratulatory, smug and confident yet incompetent people in my life. All hiding under some pretense of intellectual superiority that is enabled by a corrupt collegium system that makes it difficult to disrupt. Essentially run by a handful of families and inner circle. Just another shadow govt. type entity.

Bangladeshi Supreme Court decisions are similar. Just completely lawless. Makes “emanations from penumbras” seem rigorous in comparison.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#20

Lawsuits may become automatic when you leave a store unhappy it might have the ability to create a lawsuit and then the store's lawsuit Api will be called, then the two ais will start negotiations and end up with a $15 deposit in your account by the time you get home. And it will be all because a certain hormone raised in your head.

> $15 deposit in your account

A transfer on the blockchain, you mean.

Post reply on HN