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The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

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Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#81

Post by blueone »

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.

The legal market is competitive, but it is not a normal open market. Model Rule 5.4 is a good example. In a lot of jurisdictions, law firms generally can’t have nonlawyer owners, share legal fees with non-lawyers, or let outside businesses control lawyer judgment, “the fastest lawyer just gets all the customers” is too simple. So if even law, one of the most protected professional labor markets through its own institutional self-protection, voluntarily hollows itself out through AI, that should worry everyone because we would all be screwed. Everyday workers would have no defense against AI aggressive corporations.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#82

Post by oblio »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #72
oblio wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is the notably the not-democratic branch of an allegedly democratic system

Because absolute democracy doesn't work.

For the same reason public administrations aren't fully staffed with elected officials. An accountant needs to be a professional judged by peers, not a reality show actor that played an accountant on TV.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#83

Post by jshaqaw »

Data as an obstacle to legal AI is a human rights violation.

As citizens we are subject to federal, state, and local law. This consists of statutes, regulations, and common law. It is insane that the content of this law is locked away behind private paywalls.

How can one comply with laws when you aren't told what those laws are?

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#84

Post by rayiner »

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 —…

It’s not just that law is ambiguous. That’s something that can be worked around. It’s that lawyering deals with human disputes and everything that comes with that. Imagine asking a couple that’s getting divorced “why are you getting divorced?” You’ll get two completely different stories with different recollections of the facts. Business disputes aren’t really any different. People have selective recollection, they don’t remember things, they shade the truth or hide things or just lie.

Oftentimes, the law is reasonably clear. The hard part is getting the facts out of the witnesses to figure out what really happened, so you have facts to apply to the law.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#85

Post by throwaway27448 »

oblio wrote: post #82
throwaway27448 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the notably the not-democratic branch of an allegedly democratic system

Because absolute democracy doesn't work. For the same reason public administrations aren't fully staffed with elected officials. An accountant needs to be a professional judged by peers, not a reality show actor that played an accountant on TV.

ok, but the English/anglophone style of democracy is why anglo countries have so many homeless people. It clearly doesn't work either

Let's stop arguing about aesthetics and start caring about reality

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#86

Post by roenxi »

jedberg wrote: post #58
roenxi wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because they have ethics rules to only bill for hours actually worked. If they did that, they would only get paid for 20 minutes of work.

Huh? Obviously. The example was that they do 20 minutes of work. Of course they bill for 20 minutes.

It'd be a line item: "I worked for 20 minutes. Pay me lots of money". Similar principle to locksmiths when they walk over, do a few seconds of work and charge a hundred bucks. If a lawyer uses the same principle and works for 20 minutes they could target $10k/day.

That isn't a plan that'd work, but if "their interests" were the thing controlling how many hours they worked then that'd be what they would do. They're going to be forced to use AI by the same influences that make them work for full days.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#87

Post by srigbok157 »

rayiner wrote: post #80

> When AltFee won the ABA TECHSHOW 2024 Startup Alley competition, company representative Scott Leigh offered a simple proposition: our product will help you divorce from the billable hour. This has been the promise of legal tech for more than a decade, and I have yet to see it deliver. Many lawyers got divorced from the billable hour long ago. For plaintiff's lawyers, for example, attorney hours are a cost center. E…

[flagged]

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#88

Post by gamblor956 »

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…

Your future legal counterparties will thank you for using AI to draft your contracts. It's going to make lawsuits so much easier...for them.

AI is great at extremely simple contracts for which most lawyers just use standardized templates. Incidentally the same templates used to train the AI you used.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#89

Post by gamblor956 »

jedberg wrote: post #54
District5524 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you involve a lawyer only for the final review, they will understand you don't want them to rethink your approach nor to advise a different strategy. So, they will just bill you for the time, which seems to be fine for both parties of the trade. And, where it's mandatory to have a law firm draft a deed or a contract (like for mortgage or real estate transactions, depending on the state you're in), your Claude-made…

> If you involve a lawyer only for the final review, they will understand you don't want them to rethink your approach nor to advise a different strategy These were enterprise contracts where the other company made the contract. It was basically negotiating specific points of the contract. Claude legal called out a few areas that were disadvantageous to us, and then prepared redlines to send back. The same thing my l…

There weren't any legal trained AI contact review products available last year outside of the Westlaw and Lexus products only available to lawyers.

Re: The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

#90

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?

Woah just tried Sonnet with Legal plugin and it's scary! It did a decent job of putting the stuff I wanted in place but it made subtle corrections all over the place (deleting "but not limited to", "reasonable effort", "and all related interests", "(including any termination and refund rights)" all of which may be unnecessary or crucial but I don't trust Sonnet over the lawyer who put them in place in the first place!). Removing these had nothing to do with the task I've asked Sonnet to do.
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