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Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

mashable.com

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Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#31

Post by dghf »

dbcurtis wrote: post #24
js8 wrote: post #15

I wish such a technology could be in hands of ordinary people, so that one wouldn't need an expensive lawyer to spot a contract that is being unfair to him.

cat contract.txt | grep -i "indemnify" | wc There's your MVP right there. Seriously, over time I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the most egregious things put in contracts are around open-ended liabilities and indemnifications. It seems like it would be straight-forward to create a tool that simply scanned for which party has liabilities, and what limits there are on those liabilities. It is not everything, b…

> cat contract.txt | grep -i "indemnify" | wc

I hate to be that guy, but you have a Useless Use of Cat[0] there.

[0] http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html#cat

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#32

Post by mrleiter »

nopinsight wrote: post #19
mrleiter wrote: post #9

> "I strongly believe that law students and junior lawyers need to understand these AI tools, and other technologies, that will help make them better lawyers and shape future legal practice," Buell told Mashable in an email. I am a law student and that is not what is going through my head. What I see is a tougher job market, justifiably. Understanding, and more importantly, developing legal tech will help me make to…

The AI's effect is that some tasks get automated and require much less labor but in many cases a real human lawyer is still required to communicate with the client. * Does that mean some lawyers or law firms which make good use of the technology might offer lower prices and gain market share? * Is there latent demand that may be induced into the legal market once the costs are cheaper? * Can lawyers retrain to specia…

Premise: I study in Austria, so this is the Austrian legal market.

> Does that mean some lawyers or law firms which make good use of the technology might offer lower prices and gain market share?

In law, lower prices do not necessarily reflect on getting bigger market share. A lot of clients come from hear-say or publicly defended or publicly known cases. When such companies make good use of such technology they will most definitely gain market share by being able to accept more clients/increase "output" so to speak.

> Is there latent demand that may be induced into the legal market once the costs are cheaper?

That I unfortunately cannot answer, but interesting question!

> Can lawyers retrain to specialize in other laws and thus increase supply and lower costs for less automatable areas over time?

In Austria, that is common practice for law firms. You generally do a broad service, usually only divided into criminal law and tort/contract law and maybe public law. But within those, you specialise (e.g. NDAs etc...). Lawyers tend not to retrain, rather hire someone who is trained in specified subject. So maybe yes, "AI-hostile" trained lawysers will tend to be more sought after. Whether that is in criminal law or somewhere else, I cannot say.

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#33

Post by personjerry »

AIs are terrible at open-ended questions, and interpretation of law is usually open-ended. In this experiment they had pretty well-defined structure and evaluation criteria, which sets the AI up to be successful, whereas in real life there is rarely such definition.

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#34

Post by yodon »

mfoy_ wrote: post #26
js8 wrote: post #15

I wish such a technology could be in hands of ordinary people, so that one wouldn't need an expensive lawyer to spot a contract that is being unfair to him.

I'm imagining a tool that you run against a ToS or a EULA or whatever and it spits out bullet point plain-English results. It would make actually reading the damn things plausible.

I was in an accelerator with a company called beagle.ai that did exactly this (among other things). Their site appears to be down this morning, I don’t know if that is a temporary or permanent state.

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#35

Post by gremlinsinc »

> This technology will never fully replace a human lawyer, but it can certainly speed up their work by highlighting the most important sections of a story.

That's optimistic thinking but AI can and probably will replace lawyers and doctor's at some point. At least a large majority. All legal consulting could easily be replaced, courtroom lawyering will probably be the last to go because a lot of that is emotional to sway jurors one way or another..

Unless the jurors are replaced by ai as well...

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#36

Post by tabtab »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #10
crabl wrote: post #6

"The AI also completed the task in 26 minutes, while the human lawyers took 92 minutes on average", should be 26 _seconds_, according to the infographic on the source page: https://www.lawgeex.com/AIvsLawyer/

That makes WAY more sense. If the model is pre-trained it would be really tough to hit 26 minutes. Maybe put a few "sleep" calls in there?

The older I get, the more "sleep" calls my brain makes ;-)

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#38

Post by C4stor »

nopinsight wrote: post #19
mrleiter wrote: post #9

> "I strongly believe that law students and junior lawyers need to understand these AI tools, and other technologies, that will help make them better lawyers and shape future legal practice," Buell told Mashable in an email. I am a law student and that is not what is going through my head. What I see is a tougher job market, justifiably. Understanding, and more importantly, developing legal tech will help me make to…

The AI's effect is that some tasks get automated and require much less labor but in many cases a real human lawyer is still required to communicate with the client. * Does that mean some lawyers or law firms which make good use of the technology might offer lower prices and gain market share? * Is there latent demand that may be induced into the legal market once the costs are cheaper? * Can lawyers retrain to specia…

> Is there latent demand that may be induced into the legal market once the costs are cheaper?

If I could get legal documents reviewed cheap (10-20 bucks ?) and fast for problems (new job contracts for example), I'd happily pay for that !

I don't "have a lawyer", and always have had the (probably wrong admittedly) feeling I'll go bankrupt just saying hello to one...

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#39

Post by [deleted] »

dghf wrote: post #31
dbcurtis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cat contract.txt | grep -i "indemnify" | wc There's your MVP right there. Seriously, over time I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the most egregious things put in contracts are around open-ended liabilities and indemnifications. It seems like it would be straight-forward to create a tool that simply scanned for which party has liabilities, and what limits there are on those liabilities. It is not everything, b…

> cat contract.txt | grep -i "indemnify" | wc I hate to be that guy, but you have a Useless Use of Cat[0] there. [0] http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html#cat

[deleted]

Re: Stanford, USC, Duke study shows AI can read contracts better than lawyers

#40

Post by j-c-hewitt »

A "new study" AKA a marketing gimmick dutifully reported as if it were the truth from God's lips by press release dumping ground websites. One important point: are the bots liable for malpractice, or no? That's one of the things that you pay for when you pay for a lawyer: you pay them to put their necks on the line, also.
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