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The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

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Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#11

Post by wisty »

jorisw wrote: post #5

Nilay 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 —…

Counter argument - even stone age Chat GPT 3 was great at making reasonably convincing sounding arguments and newer models are great at aligning those arguments to souces (laws or cases). Chat is IMO better at ambiguous nonsense than objective analysis.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#12

Post by mirsadm »

jorisw wrote: post #5

Nilay 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 —…

You can apply this same argument to everything. Code is deterministic but what is being made is often not because people don't know what they want to make. Society can choose just to make everything boring and deterministic so that computers can do everything.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#14

Post by plastic-enjoyer »

cess11 wrote: post #3

This 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.

> This does not mention either interpretation or hermeneutics. For a computer to function as a lawyer it would have to be able to perform interpretation.

Don't overwhelm engineers with hermeneutics

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#15

Post by fontain »

crimsoneer wrote: post #9
jorisw wrote: post #5

Nilay 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://ww…

“most countries now have pretty strict sentencing guidelines”

That’s a vast, vast overstatement.

“You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.”

Too much of a simplification. The role of a jury is to interpret the evidence, every jury is unique. Evidence is not an absolute, there are no “facts”. A judge can include/exclude evidence that would sway a jury one way or the other. Sentencing, even without guidelines, is the least variable part of the criminal justice system in the western world.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#16

Post by crimsoneer »

fontain wrote: post #15
crimsoneer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://ww…

“most countries now have pretty strict sentencing guidelines” That’s a vast, vast overstatement. “You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.” Too much of a simplification. The role of a jury is to interpret the evidence, every jury is unique. Evidence is not an absolute, there are no “facts”. A judge can include/exclude evidence that woul…

Fair, most countries that follow the common law judicial system I should have said.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#17

Post by throwaway667555 »

oersted wrote: post #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 fed…

Precedent in law is like discovery in science. It advances the boundary of human understanding so a probabilistic regurgitator will have trouble applying it without treatise roadmaps.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#18

Post by throwaway667555 »

d--b wrote: post #4

I 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.

The good thing is new law usually references old law and explains why it has evolved so I wonder if arranging the law in chronological order will help the LLM follow the thread.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#20

Post by yread »

The LLMs are not even that good at law. I have a license agreement that I wanted to turn into General Terms and Conditions and they kept failing or rewriting the whole thing from scratch when a competent lawyer would just do a few pinpoint changes
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