Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare • Hacker News Board

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#71

Post by hedora » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #17

If suing became an ultra-easy one-click activity, I can see two things coming: 1. maybe that would force us to shape up our tort laws a little so that not everything under the sun was actionable and 2. maybe people and companies would stop misbehaving so much because they knew there was no longer a burden to suing them. A combination of 1 and 2 sound like a great outcome.

I’ve been unlucky enough to have good reason to sue a few times in the last few years.

The courts are essentially inaccessible to 99% of the population. You can go to small claims court where the limit for damages is $12,500 in California (less than a half year’s rent around here), or you can hire a lawyer and pay $50-100K minimum before the trial even starts (on both sides).

The upshot is that I’m out around $100K (spread across a few different incidents) with absolutely no legal recourse.

Anyway, more access to the courts (and faster/more painful rejection of nuisance suits) would go a long way to fixing our legal system.

It would also be good if private individuals could directly press criminal charges.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#72

Post by klodolph » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

farceSpherule wrote: post #70

If we had something similar to the "English rule", litigation in this country would decrease drastically. The English rule provides that the party that loses in court pays the other party's legal costs.

Right, and if we put everybody in work camps, unemployment would drop. It’s easy to improve a single metric (like “amount of litigation”) if you don’t care about any of the other effects it would have.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#73

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 5:55 PM UTC

exegete wrote: post #62

intended wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It will be the exact opposite - the hard part is always a human looking at this, unless we want verdicts done by machines as well. This is most like going to gum up the courts.

I do think it’s an arms race where in many instances legal filing will be aided by AI and then the other party will also use AI to synthesize and summarize the filings or do similar analysis. The filings themselves will not actually be written or read by real human beings

[deleted]

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#74

Post by acdha » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 5:58 PM UTC

farceSpherule wrote: post #70

If we had something similar to the "English rule", litigation in this country would decrease drastically. The English rule provides that the party that loses in court pays the other party's legal costs.

That would be a godsend for large companies who can let the likelihood of being bankrupted by legal fees deter most lawsuits.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#75

Post by bloopernova » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 5:59 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #71

ryandrake wrote: post #17

If suing became an ultra-easy one-click activity, I can see two things coming: 1. maybe that would force us to shape up our tort laws a little so that not everything under the sun was actionable and 2. maybe people and companies would stop misbehaving so much because they knew there was no longer a burden to suing them. A combination of 1 and 2 sound like a great outcome.

I’ve been unlucky enough to have good reason to sue a few times in the last few years. The courts are essentially inaccessible to 99% of the population. You can go to small claims court where the limit for damages is $12,500 in California (less than a half year’s rent around here), or you can hire a lawyer and pay $50-100K minimum before the trial even starts (on both sides). The upshot is that I’m out around $100K (…

> It would also be good if private individuals could directly press criminal charges.

That seems at first glance like a bad idea. Can you explain your thinking as to how and why it might work?

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#76

Post by tzs » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:03 PM UTC

wongarsu wrote: post #41

pylua wrote: post #27

This is actually insane. 120,000 comments! To a certain extent if our law is already so complicated that you need to hire a lawyer to understand it that is already a fundamental problem. Simplify the rules, make it easier to understand and reason about. The computers should be able to determine if someone is breaking a law, not trying to check if it is a bad law. We should be using computing power where someone can a…

This kind of comes back to the common law vs civil law system. Most English-speaking countries operate under a common law system where the laws as written down provide the ground work, but precedent set by previous court cases is also legally binding. In contrast most of Europe and South America operates under a civil law system (yes, terrible name, not the opposite of criminal law) where the written law reigns supre…

How do they achieve consistency in civil laws systems?

In the US if say a district court in California and a district court in Oregon adopt incompatible interpretations of a federal law, someone will appeal to the appeals court that covers both California and Oregon, that court will interpret that law and then that is binding in all that states under that appeals court (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington).

If some other appeals court in some other region goes a different way, it can go to the Supreme Court which makes an interpretation for the whole country.

We eventually reach consistency even if Congress is unwilling or unable to revisit the law.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#77

Post by objclxt » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:07 PM UTC

bloopernova wrote: post #75

hedora wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been unlucky enough to have good reason to sue a few times in the last few years. The courts are essentially inaccessible to 99% of the population. You can go to small claims court where the limit for damages is $12,500 in California (less than a half year’s rent around here), or you can hire a lawyer and pay $50-100K minimum before the trial even starts (on both sides). The upshot is that I’m out around $100K (…

> It would also be good if private individuals could directly press criminal charges. That seems at first glance like a bad idea. Can you explain your thinking as to how and why it might work?

> Can you explain your thinking as to how and why it might work?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution

...has a good summary of how it works in a number of countries.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#78

Post by gamblor956 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:09 PM UTC

pylua wrote: post #27

This is actually insane. 120,000 comments! To a certain extent if our law is already so complicated that you need to hire a lawyer to understand it that is already a fundamental problem. Simplify the rules, make it easier to understand and reason about. The computers should be able to determine if someone is breaking a law, not trying to check if it is a bad law. We should be using computing power where someone can a…

Simplify the rules, make it easier to understand and reason about

This happens every few decades...A legislature wipes the slate clean and starts fresh with a new, simpler set of laws.

Then spend the next few years discovering why the old set of laws was so complicated, as they gradually reintroduce laws to deal with the edge cases, loopholes, etc. that the new laws created. And then you end up with a complicated set of laws again.

The people who get hurt when you "simplify" the legal code aren't the corporations; they have the money to get good legal advice, nor the criminals since they don't particularly care about following the law in the first place. It's the common people who get hurt when the law is simplified, because most people are fundamentally law-abiding, and the law is complicated to deal with all the people who are not.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#79

Post by thordenmark » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:10 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #17

If suing became an ultra-easy one-click activity, I can see two things coming: 1. maybe that would force us to shape up our tort laws a little so that not everything under the sun was actionable and 2. maybe people and companies would stop misbehaving so much because they knew there was no longer a burden to suing them. A combination of 1 and 2 sound like a great outcome.

Any attempt to craft legislation to deal with this that could be construed as helping large corporations would be immediately shot down in our current political environment. But this is going to be a huge problem that costs jobs and harms the economy if something isn't done about it.

Re: Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare

#80

Post by gamblor956 » Sat, Oct 05, 2024, 6:12 PM UTC

mrangle wrote: post #4

I don't know a lot, but I do know that the legal profession will change itself as required to protect itself. Which includes protecting itself from being completely intolerable to the wider populace. This is a law of the Universe on par with the "death and taxes" adage. What this may look like is measures that will make legal action, and even public action on par with "comments", far less accessible. At least to robo…

Generative AI can't even handle complex programming tasks, and those have discrete and measurable outcomes.

Generative AI won't be able to handle the law. That will require actual AI (meaning, a system that is capable of understanding, not just one that predicts which word should follow another as Gen AI does now).