4 ms·

I think the major point is that if you fancy yourself a beginner businessperson, sooner or later you will have to find some professionals you can trust. Regardl

I think the major point is that if you fancy yourself a beginner businessperson, sooner or later you will have to find some professionals you can trust. Regardless whether that's a lawyer or an accountant. Doing business will have its costs, and you will not necessarily pay those costs in the way you can anticipate. Maybe you pay those costs before you sign a contract, and avoid a jurisdiction in a contract that you have no connection to (if you can). But you will definitely pay these costs when you have to litigate. If you think Claude or ChatGPT is the best answer to this, and all you need to know is using advanced voice and upload documents, I believe that's not that useful piece of advice. Please bear in mind that it's not just particular case law that these tools hallucinate. They give incorrect advice in very different ways how humans do. If you can find a lawyer you can trust in a jurisdiction you're interested in, and you got along with him/her quite well, you can trust them for as long as they're in business, even if you never pay them once again. And they might even give you referrals or point to other professionals, understanding your budget and situation. Of course, they can still give you bad advice, they can become gambling-addicted, and run away with your money. It happens, even if very rarely. But with LLMs, you won't know when they hallucinate, and what they get wrong. Even if you have the full statutes and case law uploaded and updated, it will give you wrong answers as well, but they're not working in the same way as humans do. All we know that it's more likely to give you incorrect advice in jurisdictions not being covered by their training data (like outside New York or Delaware), and it will draw incorrect inferences in other cases from materials it has seen. Usually only lazy lawyers not reading the output will face the problem of incorrect case law. But legal advice is not like coding where you can filter out most of the incorrect answers with tests and compilers. The author have happened to chose the wrong lawyers for the first time. I accept that not everybody has reliable lawyer friends qualified in Delaware, but in terms of advice, it would have been more practical to discuss the possible directories to use, beginner's methods to select lawyers, warning signs to look out for etc. It's sad that many lawyers act for trolls and do bad faith litigation. It's even worse that bars have no methods to exclude and disbar such guys. But you cannot avoid these problems by trusting a cheap AI tool instead, that's just wishful thinking.

frenchtoast8 1y ago
My reading of the article is that it has nothing to do with the author's trust or lack thereof for their lawyer. I think the author would agree that you have to find a lawyer you trust, just as you need a doctor you can trust. I trust my doctor, and if it's a minor issue like needing antibiotics for something I just accept whatever they prescribe. But if it was a life or death situation I am not going to blindly follow their advice without any questions. I ask my doctor for their recommendations but I make the final decision. They may disagree with that decision but ultimately it's my life at risk and I'm the one who suffers the consequences. As long as you are reasonable and not trying to cure cancer with fruit I hope that the majority of doctors are going to support this. When it comes to drafting contracts or other minor issues you should just trust your lawyer. But if the lawsuit has the ability to completely end your company I think it would be a mistake to do the same. But I'm not a founder so maybe my opinion isn't worth anything here. I've only hired a lawyer once for a landlord-tenant dispute, my lawyer gave their recommendations, I disagreed with it, and they said alright it's your money, but it ultimately worked out so we were both happy. I find it interesting that the author had trouble at first finding a lawyer who would agree to this arrangement because that wasn't my experience. If you're going to do this, you need to do your own research beforehand. In my case I read all the relevant tenant laws before I even met with the lawyer. Today I might use AI to help with that, but I would be wary of hallucinations. I think the majority of the article is about this: just using AI to help with research before meetings with your lawyer. At the end of the article the author says they are now using AI to draft legal documents and I don't agree with that but that's just me.
- treetalker 1y ago
  > drafting contracts or other minor issues This is (unintentionally) hilarious. The drafting of a contract is hardly minor in many, if not most, situations.
  - frenchtoast8 1y ago
    "Minor" was a poor word choice, I'm not sure what word would have been better. My intention was to say that I don't see how a non-lawyer could have any reasonable opinion on how a legal document is drafted. That is also why I don't agree with the author about replacing that with AI. They absolutely should weigh in on overall strategy because you need to consider factors such as your company's finances, risk tolerance, etc. In the same way that you might decide with your doctor that you want a surgery done but you have to trust them to do the surgery properly.

frenchtoast8 1y ago

My reading of the article is that it has nothing to do with the author's trust or lack thereof for their lawyer. I think the author would agree that you have to find a lawyer you trust, just as you need a doctor you can trust. I trust my doctor, and if it's a minor issue like needing antibiotics for something I just accept whatever they prescribe. But if it was a life or death situation I am not going to blindly follow their advice without any questions. I ask my doctor for their recommendations but I make the final decision. They may disagree with that decision but ultimately it's my life at risk and I'm the one who suffers the consequences. As long as you are reasonable and not trying to cure cancer with fruit I hope that the majority of doctors are going to support this. When it comes to drafting contracts or other minor issues you should just trust your lawyer. But if the lawsuit has the ability to completely end your company I think it would be a mistake to do the same. But I'm not a founder so maybe my opinion isn't worth anything here. I've only hired a lawyer once for a landlord-tenant dispute, my lawyer gave their recommendations, I disagreed with it, and they said alright it's your money, but it ultimately worked out so we were both happy. I find it interesting that the author had trouble at first finding a lawyer who would agree to this arrangement because that wasn't my experience. If you're going to do this, you need to do your own research beforehand. In my case I read all the relevant tenant laws before I even met with the lawyer. Today I might use AI to help with that, but I would be wary of hallucinations. I think the majority of the article is about this: just using AI to help with research before meetings with your lawyer. At the end of the article the author says they are now using AI to draft legal documents and I don't agree with that but that's just me.

treetalker 1y ago
> drafting contracts or other minor issues This is (unintentionally) hilarious. The drafting of a contract is hardly minor in many, if not most, situations.
- frenchtoast8 1y ago
  "Minor" was a poor word choice, I'm not sure what word would have been better. My intention was to say that I don't see how a non-lawyer could have any reasonable opinion on how a legal document is drafted. That is also why I don't agree with the author about replacing that with AI. They absolutely should weigh in on overall strategy because you need to consider factors such as your company's finances, risk tolerance, etc. In the same way that you might decide with your doctor that you want a surgery done but you have to trust them to do the surgery properly.