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Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

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Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#111

Post by Der_Einzige »

sandworm101 wrote: post #62
JohnFen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It reminded me of a time I was at the ER for a rib injury and could see my doctor Wikipedia'ing stuff To be honest, I'm much more comfortable with a doctor looking things up on wikipedia than using LLMs. Same with lawyers, although the stakes are lower with lawyers. If I knew my doctor was relying on LLMs for anything beyond the trivial (RAGS or not), I'd lose a lot of trust in that doctor.

>> Same with lawyers, although the stakes are lower with lawyers. Doctors and lawyer appear to be using LLMs in fundamentally different ways. Doctors appear to use them as consultants. The LLM spits out an opinion and the Doctor decides whether to go with it or not. Doctors are still writing the drug prescriptions. Lawyers seem to be submitting LLM-generated text to courts without even editing it, which is like the D…

It was garbage lawyers doing that. Straight up a cooley law graduate (worst law school in america - the same one Micheal Cohen attended)

The good lawyers are using LLMs without being detected because they didn't submit it verbatim without verification.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#112

Post by Der_Einzige »

_akhe wrote: post #73
stult wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Preload a city's, county's etc. entire set of laws You would also need to load an enormous amount of precedential case law, at least in the US and other common law jurisdictions. Synthesizing case law into rules of law applicable to a specific case requires complex analysis that is frequently sensitive to details of the factual context, where LLMs' lack of common sense can lead it to make false conclusions, particu…

> You would also need to load an enormous amount of precedential case law Very easily done. Is that it? > lack of common sense, false conclusions The AI tool doesn't replace the judge/DA/etc. it's just a very useful tool for them to use. Checkout the "RAG-based learning" section of this app I built ( https://github.com/bennyschmidt/ragdoll-studio ) there's a video that shows how you can effectively load new knowledge…

I have tried a lot of RAG and can tell you that no LLM, including Gemini 1.5 with it's 1.5 million context, will be anywhere near as good at longer context lengths as in shorter context lengths.

Appending huge numbers of tokens to the prompt often leads to the system prompt or user instructions being ignored, and since API based LLM authors are terrified of jailbreaks, they won't give you the ability to "emphasize" or "upweight" tokens (despite this being perfectly possible) since you can easily upweight a token to overwhelm the DPO alignment lobotomization that most models go through - so no easy fix for this coming from OpenAI/Anthropic et al

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#113

Post by heycosmo »

Terr_ wrote: post #83
liampulles wrote: post #35

Key point here is that the implementation combines an LLM summary with DIRECT REFERENCES to the source material: https://hotseatai.com/ans/does-the-development-and-deploymen... That seems to me a sensible approach, because it gives lawyers the context to make it easy to review the result (from my limited understanding). I wonder if much of what would want couldn't be achieved by analyzing and storing the text embeddi…

The un-solved problem is how to ensure users actually verify the results , since human laziness is a powerful factor. In the long run, perhaps the most dangerous aspect of LLM tech is how much better it is at faking a layer of metadata which humans automatically interpret as trustworthiness. "It told me that cavemen hunted dinosaurs, but it said so in a very articulate and kind way, and I don't see why the machine wo…

I would like to see solutions (for professionals) that ditch the whole generative part altogether. If it's so good at finding references or identifying relevant passages in large corpora, just show the references. As you said, the "answer" only entices laziness and injects uncertainty.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#114

Post by jrm4 »

Yup. As a lawyer and IT instructor, the "killer" application really is "knowledgeable literate human-like personal librarian/intern"

When they can do the following, we'll really be getting somewhere.

"If I'm interpreting this correctly, most sources say XXXXXX, does that sound right? If not, please help correct me?"

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#115

Post by philipwhiuk »

aorloff wrote: post #90
sandworm101 wrote: post #55

Don't be too worried about LLM arms races. Law is not as complicated as it seems on TV. Having access to a better LLM isn't going to somehow give you access to the correct incantation necessary to dismiss a case. The vast majority, like 99.99% of cases, turn on completely understood legal issues. Everyone knows everything.

Perhaps, but a lot of lawyering is very expensive. If that turns out to not be so expensive, the practice is going to change. Right now the court system works at a snail's pace, because it expects that expensive lawyering happens slowly. If that assumption starts to change, and then the ineffectiveness of the courts due to their lack of modernization will really gum up the system because they are nowhere near prepare…

Nah, courts are already hugely backlogged.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#116

Post by cogman10 »

_akhe wrote: post #25

I saw a RAG demo from a startup that allows you to upload patient's medical docs, then the doctor can ask it questions like: > what's the patient's bp? even questions about drugs, histories, interactions, etc. The AI keeps in mind the patient's age and condition in its responses, when recommending things, etc. It reminded me of a time I was at the ER for a rib injury and could see my doctor Wikipedia'ing stuff - coul…

> I used to think AI would replace doctors before nurses, and lawyers before court clerks - now I think it's the other way around.

Nurses don't read numbers from charts. Part of their duties might be grabbing a doc when numbers are bad but a lot of the work of nursing is physical. Administering drugs, running tests, setting up and maintaining equipment for measurements. Suggesting a nurse would be replaced by AI is almost like suggesting a mechanic would be replaced by AI before the engineer would.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#117

Post by gowld »

heycosmo wrote: post #113
Terr_ wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The un-solved problem is how to ensure users actually verify the results , since human laziness is a powerful factor. In the long run, perhaps the most dangerous aspect of LLM tech is how much better it is at faking a layer of metadata which humans automatically interpret as trustworthiness. "It told me that cavemen hunted dinosaurs, but it said so in a very articulate and kind way, and I don't see why the machine wo…

I would like to see solutions (for professionals) that ditch the whole generative part altogether. If it's so good at finding references or identifying relevant passages in large corpora, just show the references. As you said, the "answer" only entices laziness and injects uncertainty.

Yes. The most "exciting" part is the worst part of the whole system, that contributes negatively.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#118

Post by Terr_ »

heycosmo wrote: post #113
Terr_ wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The un-solved problem is how to ensure users actually verify the results , since human laziness is a powerful factor. In the long run, perhaps the most dangerous aspect of LLM tech is how much better it is at faking a layer of metadata which humans automatically interpret as trustworthiness. "It told me that cavemen hunted dinosaurs, but it said so in a very articulate and kind way, and I don't see why the machine wo…

I would like to see solutions (for professionals) that ditch the whole generative part altogether. If it's so good at finding references or identifying relevant passages in large corpora, just show the references. As you said, the "answer" only entices laziness and injects uncertainty.

I think the important product-design issue here (which may be sabotaged by the Attract Investor Cash issue) is that labor-savings can backfire when:

1. It takes longer to verify/debug/fix specious results than to just do it manually.

2. Specious results were not reliably checked, leading to something exploding in a very bad way.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#119

Post by fsdafsafdsafv »

epcoa wrote: post #92
guidzgjx wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“wealthy institutions easily have access, poorer ones do not),” Everything you said is agreeable except that statement. The institution’s wealth doesn’t trickle down to the docs, who pay out of pocket for many of these tools.

Not sure how this is disagreeable it’s just relaying an easily verifiable fact. In the US any decent academic affiliated institution or well funded private one will have institutional memberships to one or more of these products. I’ve never paid out of pocket for either UpToDate or Dynamed, for instance, but obviously not everyone has that benefit, especially on a global level. > The institution’s wealth doesn’t tric…

[flagged]

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#120

Post by [deleted] »

JohnFen wrote: post #108
_akhe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These tools will absolutely be replacing workers of many types Yeah I agree with that, that's why I specified knowledge workers. I don't think it's bad if cashiers get replaced by self-checkout or if receptionists get replaced by automated agents on either end. Emergency/police dispatchers - obviously increased sensitivity that makes it a special case, but I still think AI can eventually do the job better than a hu…

> that's why I specified knowledge workers. I don't think all knowledge workers are immune. Some will be, but companies are going to shed as much payroll as their customers will tolerate. > I don't think it's bad if cashiers get replaced by self-checkout or if receptionists get replaced by automated agents on either end. Well, it's bad for those workers. And, personally, I'd consider it bad for me. Having to use self…

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