4 ms·

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

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.
District5524 1y ago
It's not a problem that you try multiple sources at all. That's a smart move as long as you do realize what you are doing and give these extra sources appropriate weight. But that's very difficult to do with LLMs due to a) pointy-haired bosses and the capital very much wanting to believe they can do away without third-party expertise and the unpleasent dependency on humans in general, and b) the market hype around technical tools that technical people are much more prone to (excellent, it works well in my field, it should also work in other fields, we're smarter then the others etc.). The difficult part is that if many people go with bad contracts and bad legal advice, that will be visible only after many years of litigation, and in general, by rising legal costs in courts. And that also means a lot more people will have to swallow agressive counterparty propositions from the better financed side, bad default judgements, and in general, a lot more third-party financed litigation (which will not benefit lawyers in the end, but most lawyers do not care). That will also be seen just as a further rise in legal costs... Which will probably be promised to be solved by less human judges and more LLMs, run by people interested courts spending more on LLMs. LLMs do not work in the way that humans do, benchmarks are very primitive and unreliable, even the best tools marketed for lawyers are unreliable on real life scenarios, while evaluations costs a lot, so very few people do them.

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.

District5524 1y ago

It's not a problem that you try multiple sources at all. That's a smart move as long as you do realize what you are doing and give these extra sources appropriate weight. But that's very difficult to do with LLMs due to a) pointy-haired bosses and the capital very much wanting to believe they can do away without third-party expertise and the unpleasent dependency on humans in general, and b) the market hype around technical tools that technical people are much more prone to (excellent, it works well in my field, it should also work in other fields, we're smarter then the others etc.). The difficult part is that if many people go with bad contracts and bad legal advice, that will be visible only after many years of litigation, and in general, by rising legal costs in courts. And that also means a lot more people will have to swallow agressive counterparty propositions from the better financed side, bad default judgements, and in general, a lot more third-party financed litigation (which will not benefit lawyers in the end, but most lawyers do not care). That will also be seen just as a further rise in legal costs... Which will probably be promised to be solved by less human judges and more LLMs, run by people interested courts spending more on LLMs. LLMs do not work in the way that humans do, benchmarks are very primitive and unreliable, even the best tools marketed for lawyers are unreliable on real life scenarios, while evaluations costs a lot, so very few people do them.