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Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

arstechnica.com

121–130 of 156 posts

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#121

What is it with the American far-right and hiring the most _incompetent possible lawyers_? Like, between this and Giuliani...

This. As a junior lawyer at a large law firm, one of my jobs was checking every cited case to confirm that it was cited correctly, that it actually supported the theory that it was being used to support, and that it hadn't been overturned or qualified by subsequent case law. It's a process called Shepardizing that every law student does. So I can't fathom how fictitious cases could possibly be included in a brief. Also, just slightly mischaracterizing a case in a brief could be cause for being sanctioned. So I don't see how this type of issue would not undoubtedly result in sanctions.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#122
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, hallucinations occur when LLM is missing information.

That's not correct, and seems to be based on a common misunderstanding of how LLMs work, the rough idea being that when the info the model is being asked for had been in the data used for training, it "looks it up" not unlike software looking up info from a huge database of general knowledge, and that when that lookup fails it falls back to making stuff up. But that's wrong, the models are actually doing the exact sa…

If an LLM happens to know the answer to your question, that answer will have the greatest weight, and will therefore become a non-hallucinated output. Otherwise the output will be hallucinated. Note that a hallucination may manifest as an attempt to extrapolate, which may be successful. If you query an LLM with prior knowledge that the LLM doesn’t know the answer, you are guaranteed to receive a hallucinated output.

Or at least this is how I interpret the term.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#123
post #28

As an attorney, I’ve found that this isn’t the issue it was a year ago. 1. Use reasoning models and include in the prompt to check the cited cases and verify holdings. 2. Take the draft, run it through ChatGpt deep research , Gemini deep research and Claude , and tell it to verify holdings. I still double check, for now, but this is catching every hallucination.

> still double check, for now Whew, that's 4 LLM inference requests and still requires manual checking. Criminal levels of waste and inefficiency. Learn how to use LexisNexis, spend some time in a law library handling actual physical casebooks. Learn to do your job.

Even with checking, it turns a 3 day brief into a 4 hour brief.

And, part of the process is to do some research first, find the key cases, and the briefs of better lawyers on the same issue, and include them in the context.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Trump, Musk, Lindell, etc are all extremely arrogant and constantly disregard sound legal advice. Their lawyers aren't merely associated with a controversial client; their professional reputation is put at risk because they might lose easily winnable cases due to a client's dumb tweet. You have to be a crappy lawyer (or an unethical enforcer like Alex Spiro and Roy Cohn) to even want to work with…

>The problem is that Trump, Musk, Lindell, etc are all extremely arrogant and constantly disregard sound legal advice. Their lawyers aren't merely associated with a controversial client; their professional reputation is put at risk because they might lose easily winnable cases due to a client's dumb tweet. Bingo. This has nothing to do with ideology. Good lawyers like to win. And when a client is demonstrably too stu…

Being stupid and controversial is now a popular ideological option.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#125

What is it with the American far-right and hiring the most _incompetent possible lawyers_? Like, between this and Giuliani...

One of the defining characteristics of this crop of alt-right, populist nutters is disdain for experts. Doesn't work so well when they need legal or medical advice.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#126

What I find really strange about this is I use AI a lot as a “smart friend” to work through explanations of things I find difficult etc and I am currently preparing for some exams so I will often give the AI a document and ask for some supporting resources to take the subject further and it almost always produces something that is plausibly close to a real thing but wrong in specifics. As in when you ask for a refere…

The media really hypes the capabilities up, so if you're new to it and it spews out something that looks very detailed and plausible, you just think "wow it worked". They would have no instinct for the failure modes either. The reference points here would be like a paralegal or a computer search tool. You would only really expect errors of omission: the paralegal wants to keep their job, and search cannot find things that don't exist. In that frame of mind when you see that the returned document seems to cover the relevant points and makes sense when you skim it, it seems like job done. The public doesn't get that the LLM will just completely bold-faced make stuff up.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> still double check, for now Whew, that's 4 LLM inference requests and still requires manual checking. Criminal levels of waste and inefficiency. Learn how to use LexisNexis, spend some time in a law library handling actual physical casebooks. Learn to do your job.

Even with checking, it turns a 3 day brief into a 4 hour brief. And, part of the process is to do some research first, find the key cases, and the briefs of better lawyers on the same issue, and include them in the context.

And the time savings are passed onto the clients?

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#128
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are lazy. I’m enrolled in a language class in a foreign country right now - so presumably people taking that class want to actually get good at the language so they can actually live their life here - yet a significant portion of students just turn in ChatGPT essays. And I don’t mean essays edited with chatGPT, but essays that are clearly verbatim output. When the teacher asks the students to read them out lou…

LLMs were originally designed for translation, so it makes sense. We have basically elimated the need to learn foreign languages for day to day use anyway, its only helpful for high professional tasks or close literary study or prestige.

That’s such a ridiculous statement.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse, because the magic robot's output is often _wrong_.

Well wrong more often. It's not like Google et al has a monopoly on truth.

The thing is, the magic robot's output can be wrong in very surprising/misleading/superficially-convincing ways. For instance, see the article we are commenting on; you're unlikely to find _completely imaginary court cases to cite_ by googling (and in that particular case you're likely using a specialist search engine where the data _is_ somewhat dependable, anyway).

_Everything_ that the magic robot spits out needs to be fact checked. At which point, well, really, why bother? Most people who depend upon the magic robot are, of course, not fact checking, because that would usually be slower than just doing the job properly from the start.

You also see people using magic robot output for things that you _couldn't_ Google for. I recently saw, on a financial forum, someone asking about ETFs vs investment trusts vs individual stocks with a specific example of how much they wanted to invest (the context is that ETFs are taxed weirdly in Ireland; they're allowed accumulate dividends without taxation, but as compensation they're subject to a special gains tax which is higher than normal CGT, and that tax is assessed as if you had sold and re-bought every eight years, even if you haven't). Someone posted a ChatGPT case study of their example (without disclosing, tsk; they owned up to it when people pointed out that it was totally wrong).

ChatGPT, in its infinite wisdom, provided what looked like a detailed comparison with worked examples... only the timescale for the individual stocks was 20 years, the ETFs 8 years (also it screwed up some of the calculations and got the marginal income tax rate a few points wrong). It _looked_ like something that someone had put some work into, if you weren't attuned to that characteristic awful LLM writing style, but it made a mistake that it's hard to imagine a human ever making. Unless you worked through it yourself, you'd come out of it thinking that individual stocks were clearly a _way_ better option; the truth is considerably less clear.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#130

What is it with the American far-right and hiring the most _incompetent possible lawyers_? Like, between this and Giuliani...

It's not like there are many lawyers left who are willing to represent them. Either because they have behaved so utterly vile like Alex Jones, the case is so clear cut due to their own behavior that there is zero chance of achieving more than a token reduction in sentence (while risking the ire of the clueless fanbase for a "bad defense job") like in this case, or because they have a history of not paying their bills…

Don't forget lawyers who are worried their clients will ask them to do something illegal and don't want to be involved with that, even to reject it.
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