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The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

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Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#41

Post by Traubenfuchs »

jedberg wrote: post #23

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.

Just like in IT, in law billed hours by one person have little correlation to hours spent working by that person (or others!). The billing does affect customer/client retention and reputation though.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#42

Post by pu_pe »

The problem with measuring AI productivity is that the people doing the actual job (paralegals, developers, etc.) are doing it for someone else (judges, managers, etc.). More work, or even a speedup does not actually benefit them. So when you give professionals a tool that speeds them up, they increase their slack and/or focus on other, less productive activities rather than work more.

The article captures this too, mentioning a couple of examples of startups where presumably this feedback loop is tighter.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#43

Post by Yokohiii »

oblio wrote: post #31
throwaway27448 wrote: post #13

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.

> I do not understand why we do not abandon english common law and find common sense. What's common sense?

> What's common sense?

An intuition of the right thing that is easily overthrown when facing reality.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#44

Post by cess11 »

moostee wrote: post #7
cess11 wrote: post #3

This does not mention either interpretation or hermeneutics. For a computer to function as a lawyer it would have to be able to perform interpretation. I would expect such an article to start there, or at least make some argument that concludes that a computer actually could perform professional legal tasks. Which I don't think they can, just as they can't do philosophy.

AI can't do novel research either right?

It depends. If you're asking whether one could set up databases and generate new information from them that helps researchers, yeah, sure, you could do that. We've been doing it for a long time by now.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#45

Post by zuzululu »

I've successfully sued my neighbor over land disputes. I've won small claims against companies. I've used AI to do it. I'm no longer afraid.

Obviously I'm not going to be taking on huge law firms but AI has opened up a whole new vector for me in that I am able to sue people at will without paying for any legal fees and I think that is the most powerful outcome of all.

My days are spent now not asking what mobile apps or SaaS I need to make but who I can apply pressure to. The fact is most companies do not like to go to court as it costs them a lot of money. For me I spent about $1000/month on various LLMs for software mostly but I am amused the amount of sway I can have on companies now.

So far I've gotten free internet after suing my ISP for overcharging me, won injunctions against a neighbor over encroaching fences and trees, and now pursuing legal actions against my ex coworkers and employers in an attempt to garnish their wages.

It truly is incredible how much value one can extract from frontier models and what was out of reach due to exorbitant legal fees AI allows me to do.

My days are spent looking for ways to sue companies, employers, people to the same vigor a security vulnerability researcher would.

Please note that I've had some legal education and that its probably not for everyone and I understand if some are upset my choices.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#46

Post by another-dave »

What I always wonder is why we don't have more standardisation around end-user contracts. E.g. something equivalent to YC's SAFE (https://www.ycombinator.com/documents) but for employment agreements, leaseholds etc.

We understand what we can & can't do with software licences and creative commons because we know "this is MIT" or "that is CC, no commercial, with attribution" and we don't need to delve further.

If we had similar for employment terms - ACME Ltd want to hire me for £x at Y location using the standard "UK employee contract" - it feels like you could sidestep a lot of the need for AI parsing individual documents that are all subtly different.

Lawyers are _already_ using templates, but they're all using bespoke templates and it means that you've got ambiguity by virtue of the fact that the sentence in my contract has never been tested in court.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#47

Post by brikym »

pj_mukh wrote: post #22

I 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...

Maybe you are right but I don't think the comparison holds that well. I can't take a scan of myself and send it to some AI because I don't have the hardware. I have to go to some highly consolidated business. But the last time I did something legal with AI there was no such choke point. It walked me through filing a trade mark and I didn't have to leave my desk.

The difference in capital deployed is huge. A common laptop on my desk vs big bucks for a real estate full of medical imaging equipment. If radiology becomes less profitable the industry won't deploy as many imaging machines. Legal doesn't have that moat.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#48

Post by jjav »

jorisw wrote: post #5

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 —…

> Nilay Patel argues that law is undeterministic (and its application ambiguous)

I argue that of all things, law should be as deterministic as possible.

I've always thought that we (as a country) should maintain one single ordered list of specific crimes and punishments. Every new case that wants to set a punishment must insert it into this ordered list and explain convincingly why it fits into the list at the proposed position.

This would prevent the outrageous differences we see today where someone gets a few days of house arrest for murder and another guy gets a decade of solitary confinment for stealing a pen.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#49

Post by aussieguy1234 »

I've booked an appointment with a real lawyer, not going to rely on AI for anything important legal wise.

I am, however, going to be extensively using AI to prepare for the appointment. A list of questions to ask, what to bring etc. I've also used AI to research in advance what the likely answers will be, so I'll have an idea of follow up questions to ask.

That should hopefully save additional appointments (and billable hours).

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#50

Post by pj_mukh »

brikym wrote: post #47
pj_mukh wrote: post #22

I 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...

Maybe you are right but I don't think the comparison holds that well. I can't take a scan of myself and send it to some AI because I don't have the hardware. I have to go to some highly consolidated business. But the last time I did something legal with AI there was no such choke point. It walked me through filing a trade mark and I didn't have to leave my desk. The difference in capital deployed is huge. A common la…

"I can't take a scan of myself"

Radiologists don't do this, that's just rad techs. There's specifically been an explosion in the need for AI review of real radiology analysis and handling complex patient situations.

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