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Rethinking legal education in the AI era

law.uchicago.edu

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Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#61

Post by rayiner »

dgellow wrote: post #55
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #3

This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided. Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree. But this is “just another an AI cycle” and if you’re a practitioner it does look different than the previous ones. However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were…

> This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided. A bubble doesn’t say anything about how useful the underlying technology is. We are in an AI bubble, in the sense that the allocated resources is completely out of line with the underlying businesses. AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level o…

> AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble

That’s not true. Apple alone is valued higher than the largest three AI companies combined.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#62

Post by ElProlactin »

anon373839 wrote: post #35
ElProlactin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would you know? Unless you have expertise in this area, you can't really know if you have a good contract until you have to litigate it. I ran multiple businesses for over 20 years, and during that time had to deal with countless contracts involving commercial transactions, leases, funding events and employment. I worked closely with outside counsel, and had to deal with numerous disputes and lawsuits. Many con…

Good points. For contracts, I was thinking of the more complex deals where a battle-tested template is unavailable. Though even where one appears to fit, it doesn't always. One of the difficulties in professional/client relations is that there are often details that one party sees as minor or completely unremarkable, and the other party sees as changing the whole frame of analysis. I haven't been too impressed with L…

> For contracts, I was thinking of the more complex deals where a battle-tested template is unavailable

But this is the exception, not the rule because most people are not engaging in "complex" deals that require completely bespoke contracts. The average individual or company needs roughly the same things almost every other individual or company needs and a LegalZoom template is going to be perfectly usable for the 99%, ideally with a final pass by an experienced attorney.

What you're paying for when you do have a "complex" deal is the negotiation and structuring, and that's where the experience of the attorney is all the value.

> The issue about halting the training pipeline is an interesting one. In law firms, a lot of "training" of young lawyers is really glorified bates-stamping charged out at professional rates. I think we could find that the work just gets more substantive and interesting.

You can't run before you know how to walk. I don't know how a new associate becomes the next Clarence Darrow, Johnnie Cochran, or David Boies without thorough exposure to the often-boring basics: legal research, document drafting, document review, organizing and sorting documents, sitting in on calls and depositions, etc.

If clients aren't willing to subsidize these types of activities and firms have to look to automate more to maintain their profitability in the face of cost pressures, the development model breaks down long-term.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#63

Post by voakbasda »

matwood wrote: post #42
kozzion wrote: post #25

As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week and most of them have 10-20 serious drafting errors on them. The most common ones are of the order of defining the same concept like 'a working day' in various conflicting ways without every specifying when which of the conflicting definitions should be used. Lawyers still h…

> As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible This is many people at many jobs. We continue to see this weird thing when AI comes into an industry that suddenly the product being produced by the people was perfect/amazing/whatever. Maybe that's true for the majority of HN who are lucky enough to work with experts in every field, but in the general population th…

Remember the bell curve in grading? Yeah, most of the graduates from every school everywhere did NOT get straight A’s in their classes. On average, they are B students… at best. And half of them are worse than average.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#64

Post by nkrisc »

mag7269 wrote: post #21
wxw wrote: post #2

I think this plan is really quite well-balanced and sane. Also kudos to UChicago Law School for including an actual implementation plan here, not just vague thoughts. Some bits I found interesting: [For required courses in year 1] > Across all 1L sections, we will prohibit the use of electronic devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones in the classroom. > Additionally, examinations will be in-class without access…

All nice and all, but their grads will be wrecked by a street-wise guy with AI glasses (and eventually an implanted chip). There’s no competition in a machines vs humans match. It’s over. Of course these elite centers of knowledge want to keep the status quo, they base their entire existence on gate-keeping useful shit from the riff-raff. Well, fuck them.

Why would anyone hire an implanted chip that requires life support instead of just using the AI without the human middleman?

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#66

Post by dgellow »

rayiner wrote: post #61
dgellow wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided. A bubble doesn’t say anything about how useful the underlying technology is. We are in an AI bubble, in the sense that the allocated resources is completely out of line with the underlying businesses. AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level o…

> AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble That’s not true. Apple alone is valued higher than the largest three AI companies combined.

I don't see how that's related. Apple has high margin on the hardware they sell, extremely optimized logistics, they offer a whole ecosystem of hardware and services. They are in a completely different line of business than AI vendors

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#67

Post by perfectra1n »

dgellow wrote: post #53
matwood wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible This is many people at many jobs. We continue to see this weird thing when AI comes into an industry that suddenly the product being produced by the people was perfect/amazing/whatever. Maybe that's true for the majority of HN who are lucky enough to work with experts in every field, but in the general population th…

The problem is that a layman has no way to know if what the llm told them is better than experts around them, or even just remotely correct. A wrong response and a correct, informative, helpful response look exactly the same, the LLM will express the same level of confidence and will defend them in both cases. So, on one hand you can get an expert take that might be wrong, but is linked to an actual person, with a re…

This argument can be applied to anything LLM generated, and doesn’t pan out. An LLM can quickly respond with cases, interpretations, and standards in minutes as a defense to its claims. You can then independently research online if you believe those claims to be correct. With a lawyer you’re lucky to get a response back in less than a week and to have your name spelled correctly on the documents they return to you.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#68

Post by neffy »

nkrisc wrote: post #64
mag7269 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All nice and all, but their grads will be wrecked by a street-wise guy with AI glasses (and eventually an implanted chip). There’s no competition in a machines vs humans match. It’s over. Of course these elite centers of knowledge want to keep the status quo, they base their entire existence on gate-keeping useful shit from the riff-raff. Well, fuck them.

Why would anyone hire an implanted chip that requires life support instead of just using the AI without the human middleman?

Because if you can just use AI, Law becomes accessible to both the rich and the poor.

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#69

Post by dgellow »

perfectra1n wrote: post #67
dgellow wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that a layman has no way to know if what the llm told them is better than experts around them, or even just remotely correct. A wrong response and a correct, informative, helpful response look exactly the same, the LLM will express the same level of confidence and will defend them in both cases. So, on one hand you can get an expert take that might be wrong, but is linked to an actual person, with a re…

This argument can be applied to anything LLM generated, and doesn’t pan out. An LLM can quickly respond with cases, interpretations, and standards in minutes as a defense to its claims. You can then independently research online if you believe those claims to be correct. With a lawyer you’re lucky to get a response back in less than a week and to have your name spelled correctly on the documents they return to you.

> This argument can be applied to anything LLM generated

That's the whole point, yes. LLMs are inherently unreliable. Both human experts and LLMs are unreliable in their own ways. The human expert has a reputation and some level of responsibility, the LLM doesn't

Re: Rethinking legal education in the AI era

#70

Post by hmokiguess »

kozzion wrote: post #25

As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week and most of them have 10-20 serious drafting errors on them. The most common ones are of the order of defining the same concept like 'a working day' in various conflicting ways without every specifying when which of the conflicting definitions should be used. Lawyers still h…

Wonderful, I'm tired of lawyers. Happy to see that evolve and figure out how to provide actual value for its cost.
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