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AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

law.stanford.edu

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Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#201

Post by sfn42 »

timpera wrote: post #173
em500 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The biggest trap is the hallucinated citation. It will easily insert an absolutely authentic sounding quotation from another case that perfectly proves the point you are trying to make, then it'll make up an authentic name for it, e.g. United States v. Shenzhou Electronics Inc or whatever. Naive question from an outsider: aren't there searchable databases of cases (with complete text) so that citations could be che…

It depends on the jurisdiction. I'm based in France and all cases here are now freely available online to people and agents [1], but it's very recent for lower courts. However, I recently had to work on Texas case law and we had to purchase access to a (very expensive [2]) database since most of it wasn't public. [1] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/ [2] https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/westlaw/plans-and-pricin...

US in a nutshell

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#202

Post by RataNova »

causal wrote: post #7

As a software engineer I have some intuition for what the risks are of letting agents do some tasks vs others. I don't have a similar intuition calibrated for what could go wrong when asking AI to draft a legal document. Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will, but I don't really know- our legal system is notoriously rife with footguns.

I think that's the right intuition. Legal AI feels especially dangerous because the output can look competent while hiding jurisdiction-specific footguns

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#203

Post by AlecSchueler »

gguncth wrote: post #186
godelski wrote: post #101

I find this study quite suspect. I'd have to dive deeper but there's definitely significant alarm bells that should be going off for anyone reading. Figure 2 (page 6) screams problems. There's only 16 professors (3k comparisons each?!?!) and the professors are all over the place. That's very high variance, suggesting the study has no meaningful statistical power. Poor instructor 16 can't catch a break lol There's als…

Sure, but in two years AI has gone from “impressive tool, but not a replacement for knowledge workers” to “the study where it beats our highest caliber of knowledge workers may have some methodological deficits.” In another two years it’s going to be curtains.

> the study where it beats our highest caliber of knowledge workers may have some methodological deficits

The point is that if the study can't validate the claims being made then we can't actually extrapolate from that claim. What you're predicting may or may come true, but the study (which is the topic at hand) isn't useful for supporting the assertion.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#204

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

goolz wrote: post #198
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is, it almost always outperforms knowledge workers. IF the right questions are asked, and IF steered into and corrected at a few crucial points. IF not it goes off in the wrong direction really quick and that's a problem that's still mostly unsolved in the last 2 years. And that can be catastrophic in high risk environments, like legal, medical or high risk software products where being wrong in the wrong p…

Ya, while the tools are really solid and have seen huge leaps these past two years, in no way will an LLM be able to do any of it unguided in two years. Just a humble opinion that I would love to see be wrong.

Yeah it can do things unguided if the tests to confirm its correctness are very solid. Thats where a lot of progress has been made and where agents are good, but this is domain specific, and a chance where startups can shine.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#205

Post by RataNova »

qingcharles wrote: post #152
causal wrote: post #7

As a software engineer I have some intuition for what the risks are of letting agents do some tasks vs others. I don't have a similar intuition calibrated for what could go wrong when asking AI to draft a legal document. Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will, but I don't really know- our legal system is notoriously rife with footguns.

I've used general purpose LLM AI (e.g. run-of-the-mill Claude, GPT etc) heavily to draft legal documents. The biggest trap is the hallucinated citation. It will easily insert an absolutely authentic sounding quotation from another case that perfectly proves the point you are trying to make, then it'll make up an authentic name for it, e.g. United States v. Shenzhou Electronics Inc or whatever. You can get really comf…

I think the paralegal analogy is right, but with one important difference: a human paralegal usually knows when they are unsure, or at least can be trained to flag uncertainty

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#206

Post by dguest »

I'm not a lawyer, I program.

My understanding is that Civil Law (most of the world excluding UK, US, AU) is like a program: you feed it a situation, it outputs a decision, every once in a while you edit it.

Common Law (UK, US) isn't really a program, but you could stretch and say it's a state machine that has been running since the country started. Every interaction sets a new precedent and changes the state. But the programming analogy falls apart because no one in the right mind would design such a program.

LLMs might actually be the best example of such a program though: Common Law is basically one long chat with an LLM, hundreds of years long.

Before LLMs came along, a Common Law system seemed to have a finite time limit before it's co-opted by wealthy people with the resources to read the whole history. Now I think maybe can push it a bit further.

But it's still a terrible program.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#207

Post by ulrischa »

By its very nature, the field of law is ideally suited for AI language models. Fundamentally, everything is based on interconnected texts. I believe that even larger waves of layoffs could loom here than in the IT sector. However, it is likely that a more powerful lobby will be at work here—one that will grossly inflate the perceived value of their work and shield it from outside intrusion.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#208

Post by bonesss »

TrackerFF wrote: post #192

In many (most?) countries you can defend yourself, waive your court appointed attorney. You are of course highly discouraged to do so. But sometimes people do it, mostly for smaller claims where they don't want to rack up legal bills for things which might cost more than what is at stake. But, it makes me wonder, will clients be able to use these AI-attorney systems in the future, in the court. Where they basically e…

Pro se litigants are hyper vulnerable to LLM hallucinations.

One wrong advice clump and, like a step onto the wrong path while hiking, all subsequent steps go in the wrong direction. And sycophancy tuning means marginal one-sides takes get presented as sure-fire things.

I’m of the opinion that the big wins aren’t in using the LLMs to do the work (legal, in this case), but rather to refine and improve the dialog and presentation from all parties. A court-centric LLM that could give likely procedural needs to a litigant, and a law-firm-centric LLM could help a pro se litigant create a meaningful and refined set of questions for lawyer consideration, condensed and targeted, saving all parties time and confusion while meeting the clients linguistic needs ‘where they are’.

All the lawyers know things LLMs never will, the law is interpreted, and the written part isn’t engineering grade facts but suggestions interpreted in context. Arguably this is a racket and a thin veneer of plausible deniability for authoritarian rule. But as the law stands even with federal statues and citations from the courts website, practicing lawyers will frequently end up explaining that in this county/country/court/jurisdiction The Way of Things is different.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#209

Post by lukan »

BartjeD wrote: post #164
qingcharles wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used general purpose LLM AI (e.g. run-of-the-mill Claude, GPT etc) heavily to draft legal documents. The biggest trap is the hallucinated citation. It will easily insert an absolutely authentic sounding quotation from another case that perfectly proves the point you are trying to make, then it'll make up an authentic name for it, e.g. United States v. Shenzhou Electronics Inc or whatever. You can get really comf…

A legal professional can be personally liable for not finding the most recent case-law. The knowledge cut off gap means the models sometimes don't know about the most recent case-law, in a given situation. I've seent his happen multiple times now. Accountants and legal professionals advising clients based on outdated information assembled through chat-gtp, claude and copilot. Professionals drafting letters and missin…

"The knowledge cut off gap means the models sometimes don't know about the most recent case-law, in a given situation."

But they can perform live websearches or go directly to a DB specified.

Re: AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study

#210

Post by amelius »

gguncth wrote: post #186
godelski wrote: post #101

I find this study quite suspect. I'd have to dive deeper but there's definitely significant alarm bells that should be going off for anyone reading. Figure 2 (page 6) screams problems. There's only 16 professors (3k comparisons each?!?!) and the professors are all over the place. That's very high variance, suggesting the study has no meaningful statistical power. Poor instructor 16 can't catch a break lol There's als…

Sure, but in two years AI has gone from “impressive tool, but not a replacement for knowledge workers” to “the study where it beats our highest caliber of knowledge workers may have some methodological deficits.” In another two years it’s going to be curtains.

> Sure, but in two years AI has gone from “impressive tool, but not a replacement for knowledge workers” to “the study where it beats our highest caliber of knowledge workers may have some methodological deficits.”

With that kind of logic ... anything is possible.

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