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Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

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Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#131

Post by cess11 »

_akhe wrote: post #102
cess11 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure human judgement is as comparable to medical terminology or technical manuals as you think it is. How did you come to this conclusion?

Maybe I wasn't that clear, but I did say in my original post: I used to think AI would replace doctors before nurses, and lawyers before court clerks - now I think it's the other way around. The doctor, the lawyer - like the software engineer - will simply be more powerful than ever and have lower overhead. The lower-down jobs will get eaten, never the knowledge work. Yet you and a few other people insist I'm saying…

I did not. I pointed out that you assumed a similarity between human judgement in courts to technical documentation and medical diagnostics, and asked on what grounds you make this assumption.

It can't be that engineering and biology are so similar to jurisprudence, because they aren't. There has to be another reason for you to lump them together.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#132

Post by niemandhier »

Legal reasoning is extremely interconnected, sometimes directly via inter law references, sometimes indirectly via agreement in the field. This makes setting a sensible context difficult.

I believe that it would be possible to teach an LLM to reason about law, but simple RAG will probably not work. Even the recursive summary trick outlined in the post probably is not enough, at least I couldn't make it work.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#133

Post by RecycledEle »

LLMs are Internet simulators. They will give you an answer the Internet thinks is a good answer. If you live in CA or NY, the legal advice might be passable. If you live in TX, the legal advice is horrible.

LLMs are biased because the Internet is biased.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#134

Post by jazzyjackson »

barrenko wrote: post #72
_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…

We have a kind of popular legal forum in my country and I'm convinced if I managed to scrape it properly and format QA pairs for fine-tuning it would make a kick-ass legal assistant (paralegal?). Supply it with some actual laws and codification via RAG and voila. Just need to figure out how to take no liability.

taking no liability is one thing, making money while doing so is entirely another xD

maybe you can do what linux does for proprietary media codecs, ship everything that's needed to work with the media, but have a checkbox during install that says "include paralegalbot, subject to local laws which are your responsibility"

(ah but now we have a paradox, who do i consult for the legality of downloading a legal counsel?)

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#135

Post by _akhe »

cess11 wrote: post #131
_akhe wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I wasn't that clear, but I did say in my original post: I used to think AI would replace doctors before nurses, and lawyers before court clerks - now I think it's the other way around. The doctor, the lawyer - like the software engineer - will simply be more powerful than ever and have lower overhead. The lower-down jobs will get eaten, never the knowledge work. Yet you and a few other people insist I'm saying…

I did not. I pointed out that you assumed a similarity between human judgement in courts to technical documentation and medical diagnostics, and asked on what grounds you make this assumption. It can't be that engineering and biology are so similar to jurisprudence, because they aren't. There has to be another reason for you to lump them together.

> human judgement

Again the human judgment is not replaced in either scenario, I'm talking about a tool the lawyer, the doctor, etc. would use.

Lawyer and doctor are often listed as comparable examples because both involve sensitive info you can't afford to get wrong, unlike creative use cases for AI like image or song generation.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#136

Post by cess11 »

_akhe wrote: post #135
cess11 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not. I pointed out that you assumed a similarity between human judgement in courts to technical documentation and medical diagnostics, and asked on what grounds you make this assumption. It can't be that engineering and biology are so similar to jurisprudence, because they aren't. There has to be another reason for you to lump them together.

> human judgement Again the human judgment is not replaced in either scenario, I'm talking about a tool the lawyer, the doctor, etc. would use. Lawyer and doctor are often listed as comparable examples because both involve sensitive info you can't afford to get wrong, unlike creative use cases for AI like image or song generation.

Not sure why you keep bringing that up instead of answering my question.

Lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#137

Post by freejazz »

_akhe wrote: post #100
freejazz wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can load an entire product catalog into LlamaIndex and the LLM will have perfect knowledge of pricing, inventory, etc. This specific domain knowledge of inventory allows you to have the accurate, transactional conversations that a regular LLM isn't designed for. Aren't we talking about caselaw? You didn't really respond to the point, which distinguished caselaw from information like a product catalog. And rather…

Rudely? Ha - they misrepresented my point about RAG tooling not replacing lawyers into a straw man about replacing lawyers - I never said that, said the opposite. Secondly, it's obvious they have not used RAG, or they wouldn't say things like "inaccurate responses" etc. RAG is as accurate as any database (because it is a database). It puts all the information from your uploaded files into a database and reads from th…

>Could the same LLM technology be used except on a body of specific case documents to surface information through a convenient language interface to a legal expert? Yes. It's as safe as SQL.

I see no reason at all to believe this at all.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#138

Post by _akhe »

freejazz wrote: post #137
_akhe wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rudely? Ha - they misrepresented my point about RAG tooling not replacing lawyers into a straw man about replacing lawyers - I never said that, said the opposite. Secondly, it's obvious they have not used RAG, or they wouldn't say things like "inaccurate responses" etc. RAG is as accurate as any database (because it is a database). It puts all the information from your uploaded files into a database and reads from th…

>Could the same LLM technology be used except on a body of specific case documents to surface information through a convenient language interface to a legal expert? Yes. It's as safe as SQL. I see no reason at all to believe this at all.

RAG is the indexing and querying of info inside documents. It puts it in a vector database, for example, pgvector - an extension of SQL to allow you to store data in numerical form - then you can query it using natural language (via the LLM).

There's a possibility for errors in regular SQL querying too, like a user-facing search input. I'm not saying language interfaces are foolproof, but it's not generally wrong when you ask specific things like a person's age, blood pressure, criminal history, etc. if querying against a vector DB of that exact info.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#139

Post by _akhe »

cess11 wrote: post #136
_akhe wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> human judgement Again the human judgment is not replaced in either scenario, I'm talking about a tool the lawyer, the doctor, etc. would use. Lawyer and doctor are often listed as comparable examples because both involve sensitive info you can't afford to get wrong, unlike creative use cases for AI like image or song generation.

Not sure why you keep bringing that up instead of answering my question. Lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time.

> Lawyer and doctor are often listed as comparable examples because both involve sensitive info

Doesn't it answer it?

> Lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time

This is a tool that helps them get it right

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#140

Post by _akhe »

spmurrayzzz wrote: post #54
_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 mention this because RAG is perfect for these kinds of use cases, where you really can't afford the hallucination - where you need its information to be based on specific cases - specific information. I think it's worth cautioning here that even with attempted grounding via RAG, this does not completely prevent the model from hallucinating. RAG can and does help improve performance somewhat there, but fundamental…

Sure, everything has some margin of error, even conventional tech: I can say "at the end of the day it's just SQL queries so there's some chance of a mistake" or "at the end of the day a human could read it wrong", no tech is completely foolproof, even writing.

RAG/LLMs are a clear improvement to the baseline though. People will unfairly judge LLMs even when they provide more accuracy and better results, even if they save lives, simply because they can't meet the impossible demands of neo-luddites. People want it to be like "an evil force" and I blame OpenAI and the news for this narrative.

This take reminds me of some of the (weaker) arguments against blockchain when it was popular. For some - just because there was not a 100% chance a blockchain can prevent every conceivable exploit and hack it was therefore useless hype - they ignore the decentralization utility, throw out the peer-to-peer ledger concept, throw out the consensus protocols, etc. How could something like git have been invented in such a political, anti-tech environment? Git would have been shut down by the masses, otherwise smart people would label it as a scary evil force. Thankfully peer-to-peer was very cool back then and so git is useful tech that we get to use.

I'm seeing the same thing with LLMs, all people are focused on is: Prove to me AI isn't evil - people can see a valuable use case in a demo but it doesn't matter, I think like blockchain some are beyond convincing. They just aren't into technology anymore.

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