alt Hacker NewsI'm a lawyer myself.
I see problems in LLMs doing research, making drafts, etc.
I see 3 kinds of potential users.
1. Non legal background people trying to avoid going to a lawyer. They should definitely NOT use an LLMs.
2. Fresh out of law school graduates.
They think they can do fast work, draft quick replies, do fast case research, enh. They should go the traditional route of interning, learning the "art", they probably won't need it because they will learn "how the law works"
3. Established attorneys. They usually have templates made for most things, over their career, they have established routines of making things fast, maybe it can help them but to say replacing good chunk of work or offloading to LLMs isn't probably going to go well.
There is a reason why interns are made to do grunt work. The "chain of command" is built so they learn on basic stuff, learn to make decisions, etc. Without these basic decisions under their belt, an intern can't take bigger decisions later on. They just won't know....
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> Non legal background people trying to avoid going to a lawyer. They should definitely NOT use an LLMs.
In my experience, it is incredibly hard, practically impossible, to find a lawyer who will even talk to you. I think this is a valid use case to get at least some understanding what the next steps might be and if it even makes sense to seek legal representation.
Might be true today, but I still feel pareto principle applies. These points also sound like gatekeeping a bit and I hope future AI versions prove that law is also essentially something that can be made as programmable as possible for most common answers if the underlying principles and constitution are organised such.
If there is no precedence for X happening when Y , Z, P, Q, R are special combinations , the judge decides and sets precedence. But if another judge interprets it differently with similar set of circumstances it is not considered incorrect I presume especially if in different jurisdiction unless overridden by a higher court. This is my layman understanding but I think this design is wrong and essentially where human subjectivity controls the system.
Subjectivity is not totally avoidable in law but the goal of the legal system should be reduce it as much as possible along with ambiguity.
You sound much like software engineers sounded when the first coding agents dropped.
"You can't trust the output, it doesn't understand bigger systems"
"Its an art, you need to learn the ropes of it to truly write good code"
Its a very dangerous line of thinking. Software engineering will never be the same, as writing code has basically vanished from the daily workflow. Not for every specialized usecase, but for many.
I do think non legal background folks can use LLMs today to sense check legal ideas, like for instance, "what are my legal rights in this situation?"
These situations usually are not ones that an individual can justify the time or money to contact an actual lawyer, but then if they do decide to contact one they will come in with better questions and more of a sense of what they are expecting.
This is similar to medical. Should you use LLM to diagnose yourself, treat yourself with prescription drugs you buy from shady gray market online sellers? No. But you can use it very well to know when it's time to go to the doctor and what to ask.
> There is a reason why interns are made to do grunt work. The "chain of command" is built so they learn on basic stuff, learn to make decisions, etc. Without these basic decisions under their belt, an intern can't take bigger decisions later on. They just won't know....
That might be true, but that doesn't mean you benefit from training up juniors.
You can replace "laywer" with "software engineer" in your post and it holds equally true. I think this also applies to other factions.
>I see 3 kinds of potential users.
3 kinds of users that don't scare the shit out of you.
My buddy works with lots of folks that have gone all in on Harvey. There are other kids of users.
There are 3x as many lawyers per capita in the US as we had in the 1970s. Credit agreements that used to be 50 pages are now 500. This increase in volume has not lead to any increase in actual value. The legal profession is a metastatic cancer on our society. Un-fuck this situation and maybe I'll think about taking your advice of not using a LLM.
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>Non legal background people trying to avoid going to a lawyer. They should definitely NOT use an LLMs.
I used LLMs to replace a lawyer this year to great effect. I successfully advised myself as to the right strategy and drafted an immigration petition in the correct language. Granted it wasn't 100% LLMs (I also supplemented it with "traditional" online research and wrote the letter myself using the LLM version as rough guidance), but still, I certainly would've gone to a real lawyer in 2024 for this stuff but didn't.
Professional advisory work can be divided into two types:
1. Once you know the rules of the game, the next move is immediately obvious.
2. Knowing the rules is not enough to know the next move -- that requires judgement and experience.
LLMs in the hands of someone smart and savvy can easily replace the first type of work.