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Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

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Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#31
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've 100% found AI to be super helpful in learning a new programming language or refreshing on one I haven't used in a while. Hey how do I this thing in Gleam? What's Gleams equivalent of y? I turn it first instead of forums/stackoverflow/google now and would say I only need to turn to other sources less than maybe 5% of the time.

Absolutely, I can't imagine doing Angular without an LLM sidekick.

Curiosity + LLM = instant knowledge

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#32
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've 100% found AI to be super helpful in learning a new programming language or refreshing on one I haven't used in a while. Hey how do I this thing in Gleam? What's Gleams equivalent of y? I turn it first instead of forums/stackoverflow/google now and would say I only need to turn to other sources less than maybe 5% of the time.

I found this to be the case recently when I built something new in a framework I hadn't used before. The AI replaced Google most of the time and I learned the syntax very fast.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#33

A tool like this should live in service to the legal profession. Like Copilot, without a human verifying, improving, and maintaining the work, it is risky (possibly negligent) to provide this service to end users.

At some point computers will be able to provide better, cheaper, and faster legal advice than humans. No human can fit all of the law in their head, and don't always offer the 100% accurate advice. Not everyone can afford a lawyer.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look i think its true that technology makes life worse in many ways but making the legal system complex is not one of those things in my opinion. There is nothing wrong with your position its just that you are trying to make weak generalizations driven primarily by your emotions and anecdotal experience and not data

Well, I look forward to an easy refutation then.

Well yes. This makes life better because

1) This tech makes it easy for anyone to file a complex legal complaint to a situation and then send it to the right legal department for almost free.

2) You can now ask a complex legal question and get a response for almost free. (Example is reckless driving a crime here ? What is the fine? LLM looks up your coordinates, the laws there and then gives you the exact response)

3) Even if you dont know the language this tech translates the laws for you and gives you an expert analysis for almost free.

I easily see this as a win for the less powerful.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#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 embeddings of legal paragraphs in a vector database, and then finding the top N closest results given the embedding of a legal question? Then its no longer a question of an LLM making stuff up, but more of a semantic search.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#36
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 used to think AI would replace doctors before nurses, and lawyers before court clerks - now I think it's the other way around.

I've come to this conclusion as well. AI is a power tool for those that know what questions to ask and will become a crunch for those that don't. My concern is with the latter, as I think they will lose the ability develop critical thinking skills.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#37
post #33

A tool like this should live in service to the legal profession. Like Copilot, without a human verifying, improving, and maintaining the work, it is risky (possibly negligent) to provide this service to end users.

At some point computers will be able to provide better, cheaper, and faster legal advice than humans. No human can fit all of the law in their head, and don't always offer the 100% accurate advice. Not everyone can afford a lawyer.

Planes with autopilots can fly cheaper and "better" than human pilots. We still have human pilots.

I want a lawyer who can do their work more effectively because they have assistance from LLM-powered tools.

I might turn to LLM-only assistance for very low-stakes legal questions, but I'd much rather have an LLM-enhanced professional for the stuff that matters.

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#38

A tool like this should live in service to the legal profession. Like Copilot, without a human verifying, improving, and maintaining the work, it is risky (possibly negligent) to provide this service to end users.

This service may have been better with a higher context window but with the required accuracy of legal document writing the inaccuracy of the RAG systems are too high. Also, people have actually used it in practice and it didn’t go that well. So human in the loop systems in practice should have users finding corrections but won’t occur when you release the product. https://qz.com/chat-gpt-open-ai-legal-cases-18512144…

The systems described in the article don’t sound like RAG at all.

RAG systems have a much lower propensity to hallucinate, and generate verifiable citations from the source material.

Though I think they’re better as research aides than “write the final product for me.”

Re: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs

#39
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've 100% found AI to be super helpful in learning a new programming language or refreshing on one I haven't used in a while. Hey how do I this thing in Gleam? What's Gleams equivalent of y? I turn it first instead of forums/stackoverflow/google now and would say I only need to turn to other sources less than maybe 5% of the time.

Absolutely, I can't imagine doing Angular without an LLM sidekick. Curiosity + LLM = instant knowledge

Yup. Entirely replaced the "soft" answers online like stack overflow for me. Now its LLM and if that isnt good enough then right to docs. I actually read documentation more often now because its pretty clear when I'm trying to do something common (LLM handle this well) vs uncommon (LLM often do not handle this well).
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