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The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

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Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#61

Post by subjectivationx »

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...

Jevon's paradox is a 19th century economic observation about coal that has turned into a meme that people are using to support the most profound bullshit that they already believe to be true a priori.

Lawyers are exactly the counter example and how stupid this meme is.

If I was convicted of a crime and had access to Claude in jail, of course I would use profoundly more "law research". You wouldn't hire more lawyers though, you would do the law research yourself because you would be empowered to do law research in ways you wouldn't have been able to do previously and an order of magnitude cheaper than a human lawyer.

Food/farming is really the best example of the stupidity of this meme though. As if the increase in farming automation leads to more farmers as opposed to an increase in the consumption/quality/diversity/output of food.

The meme is a category error as it relates to the output vs the paid for human activity.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#62

Post by amanaplanacanal »

crimsoneer wrote: post #9
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 —…

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…

Our sense of what is fair evolved over millions of years, and is not internally consistent. How could the law ever be completely fair?

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#63

Post by yread »

jedberg wrote: post #24
yread wrote: post #20

The LLMs are not even that good at law. I have a license agreement that I wanted to turn into General Terms and Conditions and they kept failing or rewriting the whole thing from scratch when a competent lawyer would just do a few pinpoint changes

I found the opposite to be true. Did you use a legal specific plugin?

No, just Cline with Qwen 3.5 35B A3B.

I was thinking it's highly confidential (contract!) but thinking about it again I'll just publish the T&Cs so it didn't make sense to protect it.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#64

Post by NoboruWataya »

Law is a very large and varied field. I have met other lawyers in the past and thought to myself, it's crazy that people would consider us to have the same job. In terms of the kind of work involved, the expected output, the training materials required and the economics of the business, law is in reality more like several distinct fields with varying degrees of overlap.

Usually when people talk about the legal field online they focus on the act of advocating in court, appealing to juries etc. But that is a relatively small fraction of the actual work that lawyers do. Drafting, negotiating and advising is the bread and butter of legal work.

A lot of the value added by lawyers isn't just in knowing how a particular clause would be interpreted by a court or whether it is in compliance with statute, but also knowing what terms are "market", what would likely be acceptable to counterparties or regulators, etc. LLMs could learn that stuff but it isn't enough that they are trained on case law and statute (which in itself is not a particularly difficult problem IMO). They would also need to be trained, at the very least, on actual contracts, and ideally also on deal correspondence and notes of advice (all of which are going to be much more difficult to come by). Otherwise, expecting an LLM to output quality legal product is like expecting it to produce quality C code when it has only been trained on the spec and no actual code.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of legal work that could be automated relatively easily. But probably a lot of that is at the low end of the market, where there just isn't that much money to be made by doing so. Your local small town lawyer who will draft your will or work on the sale of your home is not in the same bracket as the New York or London lawyer who advises on blockbuster private equity deals or IPOs. The latter is probably what will interest firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. Within those high value fields, I do think AI will make significant inroads but it will be through the firms themselves adopting AI rather than human lawyers being replaced en masse by AI lawyers.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#65

Post by NoboruWataya »

another-dave wrote: post #46

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…

Interestingly this already does happen a lot, but usually in more complex and high-value B2B contexts. ISDA Master Agreements, (G)MRAs, GMSLAs, LMA documentation, EFET General Agreements, Incoterms, etc. The fact that it is more common in B2B contexts than B2C is IMO a reflection of the power imbalance in the latter as it benefits a large corporation to have consumers contract on its terms. Where there is standardisation in consumer contracts it is usually driven by law or regulation as the market isn't otherwise incentivised do it. For example some countries do have template tenancy agreements published by the government or a regulatory body.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#66

Post by throwaway27448 »

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?

Democratic legislation

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#67

Post by HyperL0gi »

roenxi wrote: post #38
jstanley wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And for a thought experiment - if a lawyer controls the pace of their work, why work at any reasonable speed? They could take the client's money and go picnic or something then put in 20 minutes at the end of the day. Something is forcing them to put in long hours. It's the market.

That’s a supply and demand issue. If there were more clients than lawyers, I can totally see a reality where they speed things up because now in one week they can work on 20 cases instead of 2, thus 10x more money, but as you said, it doesn't seem to be the reality of the market.

edit: tldr; it does not seem in their best interests to be more efficient at this point

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#68

Post by dash2 »

jstanley wrote: post #35
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. 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.

Lawyers are extremely well-organized, and not surprisingly, know the law. They always have found ways to limit competition. (Why else would it be such a well-paid job?)

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#69

Post by oblio »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #66
oblio wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Democratic legislation

The judicial branch is one branch of a democratic government system.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#70

Post by pj_mukh »

subjectivationx wrote: post #61
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...

Jevon's paradox is a 19th century economic observation about coal that has turned into a meme that people are using to support the most profound bullshit that they already believe to be true a priori. Lawyers are exactly the counter example and how stupid this meme is. If I was convicted of a crime and had access to Claude in jail, of course I would use profoundly more "law research". You wouldn't hire more lawyers t…

Literally an example of Jevons paradox in the original comment with data happening within the last 3 years.

America is the most litigious country known to man, it seems hyper implausible that as the cost of lawyers comes down with increased AI driven productivity, people won’t be reaching for their lawyers in infinitely more situations. Most legal issues involve no jail time.

Whether you believe the paradox will apply widely is purely a function of your algorithmic feed bubbles and the amount of AI panic on them. And that’s it.

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