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The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#22I think the most likely situation with AI lawyers is simply Jevon's paradox. We'll simply ask for lawyer support in 1000's of more situations where we didn't before.
It's so counter-intuitive that even seasoned AI researchers get it wrong. It happened to radiologists, it's about to happen to Lawyers too [1].
[1]:https://fortune.com/2026/05/04/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hint...
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#23Lawyers bill by the hour. It is not in their interest to speed up what they do, because they only have so many clients. They would need far more clients to bill the same hours.
I used AI to save my last company thousands of dollars, and more importantly weeks of time. When I had to negotiate a contract, I'd just have Claude legal make the redlines against the counterparty for me. Sometimes their lawyer even complimented my "lawyer" on how thorough it was.
Only when a final contract was agreed on did I engage my human lawyer for final review (and usually they didn't find anything of concern).
For standard contracts, AI is pretty good.
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#24The 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
I found the opposite to be true. Did you use a legal specific plugin?
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#25Nilay 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.
I agree that you can apply this same argument to everything. And it's still a correct argument.
Programmers will have jobs for a long time, and our most valuable skill will be figuring out what the heck management wants us to make.
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#26A massive firm in the UK has reported itself to the regulator for using AI not once, but twice in a submission to a court.
https://www.ft.com/content/5ba4690b-8b98-43b3-ba0b-f2ec5591a...
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#27Lawyers bill by the hour. It is not in their interest to speed up what they do, because they only have so many clients. They would need far more clients to bill the same hours. I used AI to save my last company thousands of dollars, and more importantly weeks of time. When I had to negotiate a contract, I'd just have Claude legal make the redlines against the counterparty for me. Sometimes their lawyer even complimen…
These are probably contracts where a lawyer would struggle to add value anyway, or you wouldn’t have hired them in the first place. Seems more likely a Jevon’s paradox example to me than anything.
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#28I’m thinking the structural barrier is always going to be AI confabulations and misalignment.
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#29> 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…
There may also be a Bitter Lesson element here. Ultimately, if law is like other domains, we may be able to solve legal applications with more compute on the limited freely-available data.
That's a load-bearing "if", though, given the incohesiveness of legal systems compared to typical Bitter Lesson examples.
Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
#30Courts are already overflowing with years of backlogs. I would argue if everyone had a legal bot to represent their interests against others according to the law, and they could come to an automatic traceable agreement, that would be an overall benefit.
However there are highly (self) regulated industries like lawyering that will try to protect their business model with tooth & nails before yielding to what's good for the population.