31–40 of 90 posts
Lawyers, especially appealing to juries, require appealing to humanity. I'm sure the state will force software defense on us but it will fuck our neighbors over. I do not understand why we do not abandon english common law and find common sense.
What's common sense?
The clients simply do not care about the multimillion dollar legal bills, since it is just a rounding error at that scale.
I find it hard to see AI being integrated at that end of the market.
Nilay 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 —…
This isn't really true though. This is how the law used to work, until people did the research and discovered it let to absolutely loads of mad variation in outcomes, with people with similar offences getting totally different sentences based on random luck. Hence most countries not have pretty strict sentencing guidelines, with a bit of space for judgement on top (despite a lot of protesting from judges). https://ww…
If a case reaches court then that means that either the evidence or the law isn't clear enough for the person to simply plead guilty (or the case to be dropped).
Lawyers 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…
This isn't how markets work.
If one lawyer starts doing 10x as much work in the same number of hours, then all the customers will move to that lawyer as soon as they find out, and the other lawyers will have to adapt to remain competitive.
Ach, it's probably a mostly human-generated piece, but any time I see the 'Not [x] but [y]' formulation, I tune out.
Legal document templates and generating them with given constraints existed before the LLM boom. They are accurate and predictable. Many easy and clear cases are already automated. You get a basic case, you take a template, and if the case has something specific, you add it.
I can see LLMs helping with: some paralegal work, legal searches when humans are there to judge the results, spotting and reporting errors in writing. Small modifications for templates.
The problem with the "AI lawyer" idea is that after things are written down, most of the thinking is already done. The text is the output of a hard-to-automate process involving:
* "Asking questions," being curious, and spotting things visually or by listening.
* figuring out the angle (formulating a case theory),
* identifying what is special in the case (the core anomaly),
* what the client wants (the true client objective). That's almost never what they say unless it's another corporate lawyer. You need to figure out emotional drivers, risk tolerance, and what constitutes a "win."
* what the opponent wants (adversarial motives),
* identifying ambiguities. Society is always shifting, and new ambiguities are created steadily.
A lawyer does all this and writes down their thinking. Lawyers think in writing. The legal profession has a really amazing blogosphere.
Lawyers 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…
> Lawyers bill by the hour. It is not in their interest to speed up what they do, because they only have so many clients. This isn't how markets work. If one lawyer starts doing 10x as much work in the same number of hours, then all the customers will move to that lawyer as soon as they find out, and the other lawyers will have to adapt to remain competitive.
Something is forcing them to put in long hours. It's the market.
Nilay 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 —…
This isn't really true though. This is how the law used to work, until people did the research and discovered it let to absolutely loads of mad variation in outcomes, with people with similar offences getting totally different sentences based on random luck. Hence most countries not have pretty strict sentencing guidelines, with a bit of space for judgement on top (despite a lot of protesting from judges). https://ww…
Nilay 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 —…
Counter argument - even stone age Chat GPT 3 was great at making reasonably convincing sounding arguments and newer models are great at aligning those arguments to souces (laws or cases). Chat is IMO better at ambiguous nonsense than objective analysis.
https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
Just because GPT can make an argument sound convincing it doesn't mean that the argument is convincing. Or based on objective truth, even.