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Mike: open-source legal AI

mikeoss.com

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Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#91

Post by dspillett »

jbstack wrote: post #76

Legal professional here. This is NOT a replacement for proper legal AI assistants (e.g. Westlaw, in my jurisdiction). As far as I can tell, this is just a wrapper around regular LLMs i.e. nothing that you couldn't achieve yourself with the right prompting. What legal professionals actually pay for, and that is virtually impossible to replicate unfortunately, is to give the AI access to a legal database of case law. W…

> Legal professional here. This is NOT a replacement for proper legal AI assistants (e.g. Westlaw, in my jurisdiction). As far as I can tell, this is just a wrapper around regular LLMs i.e. nothing that you couldn't achieve yourself with the right prompting.

I'd not use generative AI for anything but a cursory check anyway⁰. Even if it is trained on clean up-to-date data rather than all the wrong information that is out there, it could still give a wrong answer and I have no leg to stand on if I rely upon it. At least if I pay a human and they trust the LLM too much, I'll hopefully have some call to pursue them for giving bad advice when it bites me.

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[0] Or at all… But even if I wasn't someone actively avoiding LLMs, the point would still stand

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#92

Post by htrp »

jbstack wrote: post #76

Legal professional here. This is NOT a replacement for proper legal AI assistants (e.g. Westlaw, in my jurisdiction). As far as I can tell, this is just a wrapper around regular LLMs i.e. nothing that you couldn't achieve yourself with the right prompting. What legal professionals actually pay for, and that is virtually impossible to replicate unfortunately, is to give the AI access to a legal database of case law. W…

What does legora, harvey, or crosby add here other than the default westlaw/TR/lexis integrations?

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#93

Post by yeehawtypebeat »

xrd wrote: post #65

IANAL, obviously! One question I have about legal AI startups/products, is how do they maintain or improve upon billing practices of law firms? Having worked with a bunch of lawyers, I know that I'm often paying $500/hr to that firm. That work is actually done by a paralegal who is being paid $40/hr, and then I'm being billed through the partner for an extra $460/hr. This is a gross oversimplification, but you get th…

It really depends on the firm and what work they do. The firm I work for, we do not bill hours. We take a percentage of the recovered funds. It's high volume and many tasks are repetitive.

We don't have paralegals/attorneys handle cases from beginning to end. We have different positions handle different tasks. One person may only do scheduling, another does discovery, another handles reviewing releases.

For us, adopting tech to make us more efficient is a priority. Our setup is a bit unique, but I can see PI and collection firms adopting tech similar to this.

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#94

Post by jonners00 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #83
jbstack wrote: post #76

Legal professional here. This is NOT a replacement for proper legal AI assistants (e.g. Westlaw, in my jurisdiction). As far as I can tell, this is just a wrapper around regular LLMs i.e. nothing that you couldn't achieve yourself with the right prompting. What legal professionals actually pay for, and that is virtually impossible to replicate unfortunately, is to give the AI access to a legal database of case law. W…

> There's a reason why companies like Thomson Reuters have an oligopoly on these types of products, and can get away with charging thousands a year. They are the only ones with access to a comprehensive set of case law, and they've entrenched their position by having exclusive contracts with the law reporting companies. I'm not in the legal field, but can someone explain that further? I would have expected that all c…

This is great on this topic: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/gatekeepers-of-law-inside...

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#96

Post by saidAkh »

jbstack wrote: post #77
voidUpdate wrote: post #52

Because using LLMs for legal work has never gone wrong, and LLMs have never cited completely hallucinated cases

Humans make mistakes too. In many cases, more often than LLMs. Humans are still useful for doing work. I use AI extensively in my legal work. But I check every citation myself, manually. That means that I read the entirety of every case that I plan to cite in my output, and I check on Westlaw that it hasn't been overridden by a later decision. If you're just producing the AI's output verbatim, then you have only your…

[flagged]

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#97

Post by ericmcer »

jbstack wrote: post #88
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason why companies like Thomson Reuters have an oligopoly on these types of products, and can get away with charging thousands a year. They are the only ones with access to a comprehensive set of case law, and they've entrenched their position by having exclusive contracts with the law reporting companies. I'm not in the legal field, but can someone explain that further? I would have expected that all c…

Yes, it sounds crazy and against the principle of open justice, but unfortunately this is the reality. Certainly in the UK which is my jurisdiction - and I believe in the US too although I don't know for sure. In theory, any member of the public can obtain a judgment by applying for one at the court and paying a fee. That's fine if you just need a one-off judgment, don't mind paying the fee, and you're not in a hurry…

those steps are what a RAG LLM agent setup excels at.

If tech companies invested 10% of what they have in AI assisted coding tools into AI assisted legal tools, they would be able to do those steps easily.

It is definitely coming.

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#99

Post by [deleted] »

jbstack wrote: post #76

Legal professional here. This is NOT a replacement for proper legal AI assistants (e.g. Westlaw, in my jurisdiction). As far as I can tell, this is just a wrapper around regular LLMs i.e. nothing that you couldn't achieve yourself with the right prompting. What legal professionals actually pay for, and that is virtually impossible to replicate unfortunately, is to give the AI access to a legal database of case law. W…

[deleted]

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#100

Post by david_shi »

htrp wrote: post #92
jbstack wrote: post #76

Legal professional here. This is NOT a replacement for proper legal AI assistants (e.g. Westlaw, in my jurisdiction). As far as I can tell, this is just a wrapper around regular LLMs i.e. nothing that you couldn't achieve yourself with the right prompting. What legal professionals actually pay for, and that is virtually impossible to replicate unfortunately, is to give the AI access to a legal database of case law. W…

What does legora, harvey, or crosby add here other than the default westlaw/TR/lexis integrations?

I'd imagine it's like using Cursor/Claude Code vs. a Jetbrains IDE plugin.
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