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Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

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Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#151

Post by _akhe »

cess11 wrote: post #147
_akhe wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

No, it does not. Why do you think technical documentation and medical diagnosis is similar to what judges in courts are doing? OK, so why do lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time then, if it does?

> No, it does not.

Yeah huh.

> Why do you think medical is similar to legal

As stated, because both involve sensitive and personal information about people - unlike say, Stable Diffusion which is using AI for creative image creation etc.

> why do lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time

Because they're human. "Medical error" has been in the top 5 causes of death in the United States for several years. Our legal system is also far from perfect and could use the help - consider systemic biases and wrongly convicted people who spent their lives behind bars unfairly due to human error or bias, omissions of information, etc.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#152

Post by freejazz »

_akhe wrote: post #148
freejazz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not true. How would people look up cases online if that was the case? Have you ever used LexisNexis or WestLaw? It's not an SQL database of facts from a case. It's literally just string searching. Do you have any experience with the legal industry at all as you repeatedly make statements about what lawyers would/should/could do? >While others are on-prem servers the state/county runs. But they definitely use databas…

> no reason at all to believe this at all > Do you have any experience with the legal industry at all > Rude Your repeated use of "at all" also comes across as slightly rude FYI :) As stated, yes I built background check software for a major background check company (they're yc, now worth billions) - in particular I developed their background check ETA and built their React app which is used millions of times per yea…

>As stated, yes I built background check software for a major background check company (they're yc, now worth billions) - in particular I developed their background check ETA and built their React app which is used millions of times per year by Uber, DoorDash, and others, for background checks. I'm familiar with the space and had to become a background investigator to work there. What you say just isn't true.

What does this have to do with the legal industry? Nothing? Got it.

>Again wrong - yes they do. How would courts operate if they didn't, think about it for 2 seconds.

No, they don't. I repeat my previous question, have you ever actually used LexisNexis or WestLaw? They do not index specific facts about any cases.

>Your repeated use of "at all" also comes across as slightly rude FYI :)

I can see why you would think that given your insistence on discussing something you clearly know nothing about.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#153

Post by spmurrayzzz »

_akhe wrote: post #140
spmurrayzzz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

You might be shadowboxing a bit with a point I didn't make (or maybe your comment was intentionally orthogonal to what I raised, not sure). I work with this technology every day in a professional, commercial context. Not just LLMs, but many other ML/DL implementations that walk the gamut of downstream tasks from anomaly detection, time series forecasting, etc. I think its useful enough to be building real things with it to improve the way my business functions. In the efforts of building those inference and training stacks from scratch, I've also seen how spectacularly they can fail and how often.

I don't think AI is evil. I think autoregressive token prediction is stochastic enough to be considered unreliable in its current state. That doesn't mean I am going to stop building things with it, it just means that I've seen these systems implode regularly enough, even with grounding via RAG, that I tend to push caution first and foremost (as I did in my original message).

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#154

Post by _akhe »

freejazz wrote: post #152
_akhe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no reason at all to believe this at all > Do you have any experience with the legal industry at all > Rude Your repeated use of "at all" also comes across as slightly rude FYI :) As stated, yes I built background check software for a major background check company (they're yc, now worth billions) - in particular I developed their background check ETA and built their React app which is used millions of times per yea…

>As stated, yes I built background check software for a major background check company (they're yc, now worth billions) - in particular I developed their background check ETA and built their React app which is used millions of times per year by Uber, DoorDash, and others, for background checks. I'm familiar with the space and had to become a background investigator to work there. What you say just isn't true. What do…

Do you know what is on a criminal background report? It's exactly their criminal history. You claimed that courts do not store documents about cases in SQL databases (e.g. case number, defendant name, their plea, etc.) but that's wrong, they do.

> you clearly know nothing about

I have more direct experience than you do - and startups already exist that do this very thing with LLMs, but go ahead, have fun on the wrong side of history making false claims and straw manning arguments

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#155

Post by freejazz »

_akhe wrote: post #154
freejazz wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As stated, yes I built background check software for a major background check company (they're yc, now worth billions) - in particular I developed their background check ETA and built their React app which is used millions of times per year by Uber, DoorDash, and others, for background checks. I'm familiar with the space and had to become a background investigator to work there. What you say just isn't true. What do…

Do you know what is on a criminal background report? It's exactly their criminal history. You claimed that courts do not store documents about cases in SQL databases (e.g. case number, defendant name, their plea, etc.) but that's wrong, they do. > you clearly know nothing about I have more direct experience than you do - and startups already exist that do this very thing with LLMs, but go ahead, have fun on the wrong…

>You claimed that courts do not store documents about cases in SQL databases (e.g. case number, defendant name, their plea, etc.) but that's wrong, they do.

That's not what I said at all and it's absurd for you to even pretend otherwise considering how many times I pointed it out to you in our short correspodence.

>I have more direct experience than you do - and startups already exist that do this very thing with LLMs, but go ahead, have fun on the wrong side of history making false claims and straw manning arguments

You do not. I'm an attorney, you've clearly never used Lexis or WestLaw and have no idea how attorneys actually do their work based upon everything you've written in this thread. That's what has been pointed out to you, not that you don't know SQL, but that you clearly have no idea what attorneys do, why they do it, how they do it. And yet you are insisting that this tool will be something that facilitates the work of an attorney while demonstrating complete ignorance about that actual work.

>You claimed that courts do not store documents about cases in SQL databases (e.g. case number, defendant name, their plea, etc.) but that's wrong, they do.

LOL, do you think these are the "facts" about cases that attorneys need? Get a f**king grip.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#156

Post by _akhe »

spmurrayzzz wrote: post #153
_akhe wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. You might be shadowboxing a bit with a point I didn't make (or maybe your comment was intentionally orthogonal to what I raised, not sure). I work with this tech…

Sorry - straw manning on internet comments is so bad I shouldn't have even gone there with the crypto analogy, couldn't help because I see parallels with regards to general reception.

I agree with what you said here 100%.

Working with it daily I can't help but be slightly more optimistic though. I see LLMs as being a major component of future apps. You have servers, databases, game engines, and now there's this generative token thing you can use for... quite a lot - without an internet connection no less. It will only get better.

The fact that RAG isolates specific document data in a db and is based on regular database querying IME solves the problem with regular LLM accuracy, but yeah ofc still could be some errors like with anything

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#157

Post by cess11 »

_akhe wrote: post #151
cess11 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it does not. Why do you think technical documentation and medical diagnosis is similar to what judges in courts are doing? OK, so why do lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time then, if it does?

> No, it does not. Yeah huh. > Why do you think medical is similar to legal As stated, because both involve sensitive and personal information about people - unlike say, Stable Diffusion which is using AI for creative image creation etc. > why do lawyers and doctors get it wrong all the time Because they're human. "Medical error" has been in the top 5 causes of death in the United States for several years. Our legal…

So every time sensitive personal information is involved, "AI" is a good fit?

But you just said there are tools that solve this.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#158

Post by TwitBar »

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…

Arguments will be formulated by AI with another AI attempting to poke holes. You get a government appointed AI if you cannot afford one. This will kick off an arms race between plaintiffs and defendants. Legal companies then build moats around their bespoke AIs and it all boils down to a judge/jury voting based on a generated slideshow presentation (hopefully avoiding a miscarriage of justice /s).

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#159

Post by _akhe »

freejazz wrote: post #155
_akhe wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what is on a criminal background report? It's exactly their criminal history. You claimed that courts do not store documents about cases in SQL databases (e.g. case number, defendant name, their plea, etc.) but that's wrong, they do. > you clearly know nothing about I have more direct experience than you do - and startups already exist that do this very thing with LLMs, but go ahead, have fun on the wrong…

>You claimed that courts do not store documents about cases in SQL databases (e.g. case number, defendant name, their plea, etc.) but that's wrong, they do. That's not what I said at all and it's absurd for you to even pretend otherwise considering how many times I pointed it out to you in our short correspodence. >I have more direct experience than you do - and startups already exist that do this very thing with LLM…

An attorney with takes like "they don't put the facts from cases into SQL databases to query" yikes! They literally do

> you've clearly never used the software I use

> this tool doesn't know my workflow

> etc.

LLMs already train on knowledgebases like WestLaw. You really think there will never exist an LLM for legal research, etc.? That much is probably happening now, I just haven't heard of the startup.

> Get a f*king grip

So a defendants PII, plea, criminal history, time served, etc. are not important to a defense attorney?

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#160

Post by freejazz »

_akhe wrote: post #159
freejazz wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You claimed that courts do not store documents about cases in SQL databases (e.g. case number, defendant name, their plea, etc.) but that's wrong, they do. That's not what I said at all and it's absurd for you to even pretend otherwise considering how many times I pointed it out to you in our short correspodence. >I have more direct experience than you do - and startups already exist that do this very thing with LLM…

An attorney with takes like "they don't put the facts from cases into SQL databases to query" yikes! They literally do > you've clearly never used the software I use > this tool doesn't know my workflow > etc. LLMs already train on knowledgebases like WestLaw. You really think there will never exist an LLM for legal research, etc.? That much is probably happening now, I just haven't heard of the startup. > Get a f*ki…

>An attorney with takes like "they don't put the facts from cases into SQL databases to query" yikes! They literally do

Oh, so now its back to facts and not just documents? I said they don't abstract the facts into an SQL database. Westlaw is not an SQL database of facts. It does not have a series of different entries of different types of facts about a case. When you search for something on Westlaw, it's not filtering through different kinds of facts to see if there is a pertinent entry, it's just string searching. I pointed this out to you earlier.

>LLMs already train on knowledgebases like WestLaw. You really think there will never exist an LLM for legal research, etc.? That much is probably happening now, I just haven't heard of the startup.

I never said that.

>So a defendants PII, plea, criminal history, time served, etc. are not important to a defense attorney?

No, not to the extent that it would ever justify what you claimed about the utility a RAG would provide.

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