6 ms·

The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers

66 points by benbreen 5mo ago

d--b 4mo ago
I assume also that LLMs are not very good at chronology. Since law evolves, I wouldn’t be suprised that LLMs would spit out arguments that are out of date.
- throwaway667555 4mo ago
  The good thing is new law usually references old law and explains why it has evolved so I wonder if arranging the law in chronological order will help the LLM follow the thread.
taariqlewis 4mo ago
It would seem these structural barriers are increasingly become either more porus or more malleable as AI has brought more OSS legal initiatives to empower both attorneys and regular users. The Law and lawyers are being dragged kicking and screaming into e/acc.
cess11 4mo ago
This does not mention either interpretation or hermeneutics. For a computer to function as a lawyer it would have to be able to perform interpretation. I would expect such an article to start there, or at least make some argument that concludes that a computer actually could perform professional legal tasks. Which I don't think they can, just as they can't do philosophy.
- moostee 4mo ago
  AI can't do novel research either right?
  - cess11 4mo ago
    It depends. If you're asking whether one could set up databases and generate new information from them that helps researchers, yeah, sure, you could do that. We've been doing it for a long time by now.
- plastic-enjoyer 4mo ago
  > This does not mention either interpretation or hermeneutics. For a computer to function as a lawyer it would have to be able to perform interpretation. Don't overwhelm engineers with hermeneutics
jorisw 4mo ago
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 — that it’s predictable. > [...] it’s actually ambiguity that’s at the very heart of our legal system. It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side, and it’s always possible to find the gray area in the law. That’s why prosecutors end up working as defense attorneys and why our regulators tend to end up working for big corporations. https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba... IMO, as with most domains, AI _tools_ will save a huge amount of time, but it's the human specialist making judgment calls based on real world context.
- crimsoneer 4mo ago
  This isn't really true though. This is how the law used to work, until people did the research and discovered it let to absolutely loads of mad variation in outcomes, with people with similar offences getting totally different sentences based on random luck. Hence most countries not have pretty strict sentencing guidelines, with a bit of space for judgement on top (despite a lot of protesting from judges). https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/what-we-do/our-brand/nobel-perspectives/latest-economic-questions/success/articles/reducing-noise-in-decision-making.html https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/what-we-do/our-brand/... You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.
  - fontain 4mo ago
    “most countries now have pretty strict sentencing guidelines” That’s a vast, vast overstatement. “You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.” Too much of a simplification. The role of a jury is to interpret the evidence, every jury is unique. Evidence is not an absolute, there are no “facts”. A judge can include/exclude evidence that would sway a jury one way or the other. Sentencing, even without guidelines, is the least variable part of the criminal justice system in the western world.
halamadrid 4mo ago
I suppose one way is that the Lawyers and Legal Assistants use Legal AI as a replacement for standard search. Instead of parsing content and creating new notes, let AI search and create but humans spend the same amount time instead for verifying what was created. That way the billable hours can match, but like the article says, who does this benefit? Ultimately the transfer of time to another task will keep law just as expensive. Perhaps there is room to save time on verification vs creation. Is it worth all the investment though?
oersted 4mo ago
> Only three entities in the United States have anything approaching complete coverage > They sell the editorial infrastructure built on top: headnote taxonomies that organize millions of opinions into searchable categories, practice guides written by specialists over decades, and treatises that synthesize primary law into usable guidance. > The Free Law Project’s CourtListener provides free access to millions of federal and state court opinions, oral arguments, and PACER documents. I think issue of a data-moat is somewhat overstated, or at least it is not argued very well here. If secondary organization and interpretation of open data is their moat, and if it is mostly focused on guiding humans through the complex web of knowledge, then AI should make short-order of that. But, as usual, the issue of structural and organizational barriers is definitely convincing. Sometimes existing players are too entrenched to change. A new kind of AI-oriented law-firm might need to emerge and show itself to be competitive to either make mainstream firms truly change or push them out of the market.
- throwaway667555 4mo ago
  Precedent in law is like discovery in science. It advances the boundary of human understanding so a probabilistic regurgitator will have trouble applying it without treatise roadmaps.
- lauritz 4mo ago
  There may also be a Bitter Lesson element here. Ultimately, if law is like other domains, we may be able to solve legal applications with more compute on the limited freely-available data. That's a load-bearing "if", though, given the incohesiveness of legal systems compared to typical Bitter Lesson examples.
simiones 4mo ago
> As AI becomes capable of producing entire work products, the profession that has spent decades treating “I reviewed it myself” as the standard of care has no framework for what happens when that review becomes economically irrational. The ethical rules assume a human at the center. The technology is moving humans to the periphery. What horrendous morals behind this article. Why would anyone advocate for prioritizing economics and technology before ethics, especially in something as important as law? The "won't someone think of the all the poor people with no access to legal counsel" part sounds a lot worse once you realize they actually mean "won't someone think of the money we're leaving on the table by not getting some revenue from selling cheaper AI slop, uh I mean AI legal representation, to those who can't afford anything else".
throwaway27448 4mo ago
Lawyers, especially appealing to juries, require appealing to humanity. I'm sure the state will force software defense on us but it will fuck our neighbors over. I do not understand why we do not abandon english common law and find common sense.
- oblio 4mo ago
  > I do not understand why we do not abandon english common law and find common sense. What's common sense?
  - Yokohiii 4mo ago
    > What's common sense? An intuition of the right thing that is easily overthrown when facing reality.
  - throwaway27448 4mo ago
    Democratic legislation
    - oblio 4mo ago
      The judicial branch is one branch of a democratic government system.
      - throwaway27448 4mo ago
        It is the notably the not-democratic branch of an allegedly democratic system
        oblio 4mo ago
        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.
ulfw 4mo ago
AI Lawyers paid by crypto coins with robots as executioners. The moment to off oneself...
yread 4mo ago
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
- jedberg 4mo ago
  I found the opposite to be true. Did you use a legal specific plugin?
  - yread 4mo ago
    No, just Cline with Qwen 3.5 35B A3B. I was thinking it's highly confidential (contract!) but thinking about it again I'll just publish the T&Cs so it didn't make sense to protect it.
  - yread 4mo ago
    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.
AIOperator2026 4mo ago
[flagged]
pj_mukh 4mo ago
I think the most likely situation with AI lawyers is simply Jevon's paradox. We'll simply ask for lawyer support in 1000's of more situations where we didn't before. It's so counter-intuitive that even seasoned AI researchers get it wrong. It happened to radiologists, it's about to happen to Lawyers too [1]. [1]:https://fortune.com/2026/05/04/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hinton-radiologists-future-of-work-tech-ai-job-anxiety/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/04/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hint...
- brikym 4mo ago
  Maybe you are right but I don't think the comparison holds that well. I can't take a scan of myself and send it to some AI because I don't have the hardware. I have to go to some highly consolidated business. But the last time I did something legal with AI there was no such choke point. It walked me through filing a trade mark and I didn't have to leave my desk. The difference in capital deployed is huge. A common laptop on my desk vs big bucks for a real estate full of medical imaging equipment. If radiology becomes less profitable the industry won't deploy as many imaging machines. Legal doesn't have that moat.
  - pj_mukh 4mo ago
    "I can't take a scan of myself" Radiologists don't do this, that's just rad techs. There's specifically been an explosion in the need for AI review of real radiology analysis and handling complex patient situations.
    - logicchains 4mo ago
      There'll never be "scan at home" because hypochondriacs would keep scanning themselves hundreds of times per week and giving themselves cancer.
- subjectivationx 4mo ago
  Jevon's paradox is a 19th century economic observation about coal that has turned into a meme that people are using to support the most profound bullshit that they already believe to be true a priori. Lawyers are exactly the counter example and how stupid this meme is. If I was convicted of a crime and had access to Claude in jail, of course I would use profoundly more "law research". You wouldn't hire more lawyers though, you would do the law research yourself because you would be empowered to do law research in ways you wouldn't have been able to do previously and an order of magnitude cheaper than a human lawyer. Food/farming is really the best example of the stupidity of this meme though. As if the increase in farming automation leads to more farmers as opposed to an increase in the consumption/quality/diversity/output of food. The meme is a category error as it relates to the output vs the paid for human activity.
jedberg 4mo ago
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 complimented my "lawyer" on how thorough it was. Only when a final contract was agreed on did I engage my human lawyer for final review (and usually they didn't find anything of concern). For standard contracts, AI is pretty good.
- piker 4mo ago
  These are probably contracts where a lawyer would struggle to add value anyway, or you wouldn’t have hired them in the first place. Seems more likely a Jevon’s paradox example to me than anything.
  - jedberg 4mo ago
    Most certainly not. These were enterprise licensing agreements where the other party was a large corporation who had a lot of lawyers and time. I was using the human lawyer for these before switching to Claude legal. Both produced roughly the same output (redlines to fix the things that were disadvantageous to us).
    - piker 4mo ago
      Yes, that sounds like the former case. The fact that you were so satisfied with the switch supports the point. It's boring work that is routine and expensive. It's right to automate the first turn.
- jstanley 4mo ago
  > 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.
Popeyes 4mo ago
A massive firm in the UK has reported itself to the regulator for using AI not once, but twice in a submission to a court. https://www.ft.com/content/5ba4690b-8b98-43b3-ba0b-f2ec5591a572?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/5ba4690b-8b98-43b3-ba0b-f2ec5591a...
irdc 4mo ago
I’m thinking the structural barrier is always going to be AI confabulations and misalignment.
mentalgear 4mo ago
Courts are already overflowing with years of backlogs. I would argue if everyone had a legal bot to represent their interests against others according to the law, and they could come to an automatic traceable agreement, that would be an overall benefit. However there are highly (self) regulated industries like lawyering that will try to protect their business model with tooth & nails before yielding to what's good for the population.
KnuthIsGod 4mo ago
I know someone who is with a leading firm. He is involved in a new multibillion USD matter every month. The clients simply do not care about the multimillion dollar legal bills, since it is just a rounding error at that scale. I find it hard to see AI being integrated at that end of the market.
moostee 4mo ago
There's just a whole bunch of the wrong people involved. AI will replace a majority of lawyers. It is inevitable. It won't be an LLM alone that does it though.
Hard_Space 4mo ago
But these figures measure exposure, not integration. Ach, it's probably a mostly human-generated piece, but any time I see the 'Not [x] but [y]' formulation, I tune out.
u1hcw9nx 4mo ago
I think legal search and intelligent document search tools are where the money is. Not "AI lawyer" stuff. Legal document templates and generating them with given constraints existed before the LLM boom. They are accurate and predictable. Many easy and clear cases are already automated. You get a basic case, you take a template, and if the case has something specific, you add it. I can see LLMs helping with: some paralegal work, legal searches when humans are there to judge the results, spotting and reporting errors in writing. Small modifications for templates. The problem with the "AI lawyer" idea is that after things are written down, most of the thinking is already done. The text is the output of a hard-to-automate process involving: * "Asking questions," being curious, and spotting things visually or by listening. * figuring out the angle (formulating a case theory), * identifying what is special in the case (the core anomaly), * what the client wants (the true client objective). That's almost never what they say unless it's another corporate lawyer. You need to figure out emotional drivers, risk tolerance, and what constitutes a "win." * what the opponent wants (adversarial motives), * identifying ambiguities. Society is always shifting, and new ambiguities are created steadily. A lawyer does all this and writes down their thinking. Lawyers think in writing. The legal profession has a really amazing blogosphere.
pu_pe 4mo ago
The problem with measuring AI productivity is that the people doing the actual job (paralegals, developers, etc.) are doing it for someone else (judges, managers, etc.). More work, or even a speedup does not actually benefit them. So when you give professionals a tool that speeds them up, they increase their slack and/or focus on other, less productive activities rather than work more. The article captures this too, mentioning a couple of examples of startups where presumably this feedback loop is tighter.
zuzululu 4mo ago
I've successfully sued my neighbor over land disputes. I've won small claims against companies. I've used AI to do it. I'm no longer afraid. Obviously I'm not going to be taking on huge law firms but AI has opened up a whole new vector for me in that I am able to sue people at will without paying for any legal fees and I think that is the most powerful outcome of all. My days are spent now not asking what mobile apps or SaaS I need to make but who I can apply pressure to. The fact is most companies do not like to go to court as it costs them a lot of money. For me I spent about $1000/month on various LLMs for software mostly but I am amused the amount of sway I can have on companies now. So far I've gotten free internet after suing my ISP for overcharging me, won injunctions against a neighbor over encroaching fences and trees, and now pursuing legal actions against my ex coworkers and employers in an attempt to garnish their wages. It truly is incredible how much value one can extract from frontier models and what was out of reach due to exorbitant legal fees AI allows me to do. My days are spent looking for ways to sue companies, employers, people to the same vigor a security vulnerability researcher would. Please note that I've had some legal education and that its probably not for everyone and I understand if some are upset my choices.
- District5524 4mo ago
  Before suing all your coworkers for garnishing their wages, I suggest you first consider how much fun you will have when you have to pay for the legal costs of the other party. But you will find that out for yourself. Anyways, I don't think it's your choice whether you want to take on huge law firms - that's usually the other party's choice. (I do hope most security researchers have a bit more training than "some education".)
  - zuzululu 4mo ago
    are you not aware of the american rule and small claims? im not trying to take down coca cola here or doing frivolous lawsuits. if you catch your employer and coworker stealing your laptop, refuse to give it back eventually coming back with a rootkit then I'm absolutely willing to take this all the way and obviously real experts will be brought on board. companies are rational actors they arent going to spend $800/hr on some partner to defend a $5000 billing dispute or a garnishment hearing for an ex coworker when my cost basis to generate the 20 page complaint and discovery requests using the API is literally under a hundred bucks. my point isn't that people pursue this pipeline its that frontier models provide a great equalizer. you can bet that patent trolls and saul goodman type of lawyers are using the same tools. what is scary isnt that these models will hallucinate or whatever (those are harness issues) its the amount of formality and complexity navigating processes with rigid schedules and verbosity that can cause context drift. so this isn't just some "press a button let muh agents lawyer" its far more involved and frankly extremely tedious.
another-dave 4mo ago
What I always wonder is why we don't have more standardisation around end-user contracts. E.g. something equivalent to YC's SAFE (https://www.ycombinator.com/documents https://www.ycombinator.com/documents) but for employment agreements, leaseholds etc. We understand what we can & can't do with software licences and creative commons because we know "this is MIT" or "that is CC, no commercial, with attribution" and we don't need to delve further. If we had similar for employment terms - ACME Ltd want to hire me for £x at Y location using the standard "UK employee contract" - it feels like you could sidestep a lot of the need for AI parsing individual documents that are all subtly different. Lawyers are _already_ using templates, but they're all using bespoke templates and it means that you've got ambiguity by virtue of the fact that the sentence in my contract has never been tested in court.
- NoboruWataya 4mo ago
  Interestingly this already does happen a lot, but usually in more complex and high-value B2B contexts. ISDA Master Agreements, (G)MRAs, GMSLAs, LMA documentation, EFET General Agreements, Incoterms, etc. The fact that it is more common in B2B contexts than B2C is IMO a reflection of the power imbalance in the latter as it benefits a large corporation to have consumers contract on its terms. Where there is standardisation in consumer contracts it is usually driven by law or regulation as the market isn't otherwise incentivised do it. For example some countries do have template tenancy agreements published by the government or a regulatory body.
aussieguy1234 4mo ago
I've booked an appointment with a real lawyer, not going to rely on AI for anything important legal wise. I am, however, going to be extensively using AI to prepare for the appointment. A list of questions to ask, what to bring etc. I've also used AI to research in advance what the likely answers will be, so I'll have an idea of follow up questions to ask. That should hopefully save additional appointments (and billable hours).
netcan 4mo ago
A lot of the applications of Ai are going to have to go through "normal" innovation routes. Eg low-end disruption. I have already seen "Ai lawyer" at play here. A colleague of mine is involved in a long class action against a builder. The group chats have gone absolutely chaotic this year... as members consult heavily with LLMs and the (real) lawyer can't deal with the volume of action. Another friend is a wholesaler and does a lot of small-scale commercial deals. Contracts have gotten bigger and negotiation has gotten more involved as "Ai lawyers" read and write these contracts. Employment contracts are much more likely to be negotiated, referenced, etc. So... These are all routes to "classic" disruptive innovation. It's not replacing billable hours at law firms. It is replacing non-consumption. Law is adversarial. A formal legal letter requires a form of legal letter in response. Law generates its own demand. I would be watching a lot more for ground up innovation, rather than adoption at firms.
NoboruWataya 4mo ago
Law is a very large and varied field. I have met other lawyers in the past and thought to myself, it's crazy that people would consider us to have the same job. In terms of the kind of work involved, the expected output, the training materials required and the economics of the business, law is in reality more like several distinct fields with varying degrees of overlap. Usually when people talk about the legal field online they focus on the act of advocating in court, appealing to juries etc. But that is a relatively small fraction of the actual work that lawyers do. Drafting, negotiating and advising is the bread and butter of legal work. A lot of the value added by lawyers isn't just in knowing how a particular clause would be interpreted by a court or whether it is in compliance with statute, but also knowing what terms are "market", what would likely be acceptable to counterparties or regulators, etc. LLMs could learn that stuff but it isn't enough that they are trained on case law and statute (which in itself is not a particularly difficult problem IMO). They would also need to be trained, at the very least, on actual contracts, and ideally also on deal correspondence and notes of advice (all of which are going to be much more difficult to come by). Otherwise, expecting an LLM to output quality legal product is like expecting it to produce quality C code when it has only been trained on the spec and no actual code. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of legal work that could be automated relatively easily. But probably a lot of that is at the low end of the market, where there just isn't that much money to be made by doing so. Your local small town lawyer who will draft your will or work on the sale of your home is not in the same bracket as the New York or London lawyer who advises on blockbuster private equity deals or IPOs. The latter is probably what will interest firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. Within those high value fields, I do think AI will make significant inroads but it will be through the firms themselves adopting AI rather than human lawyers being replaced en masse by AI lawyers.
danielrhodes 4mo ago
Once again there seems to be this deep misunderstanding by engineers that all lawyers do is draft docs like an engineer writes code. And if you can automate the doc creation process, you have automated the attorney. But this not true. It greatly depends on what type if lawyer it is. They can operate very differently. When it comes to docs, lawyers try not to reinvent the wheel on every doc. It’s very risky. They want to use language that has stood up to the test of time. So they have templates and old contracts and they will piece together a contract from that - it takes no time at all. AI writing new stuff every time using new language doesn’t save much time and puts a client at risk because nobody knows how that language holds up in court. Many attorneys have paralegals who do the actual work. Those paralegals are much cheaper. Efficiency arguments don’t often take them into account. Most legal tech companies don’t think about paralegals. But they are often the real workhorse in a legal firm. But automating them doesn’t really speed anything up: they do a lot of varied things and are not just mindlessly following some process like a factory worker. So what do lawyers do? They advise clients, they project manage, they research, they talk with other lawyers, sometimes they go to court, they review work, they work on getting new clients, and yes sometimes they write legal docs. Then at the high end of things, they come up with legal strategies and solutions that AI has never seen before. In corporate law, legal is often budgeted in. It’s expensive but it is often ROI positive. Legal mistakes are incredibly costly. Having said this, are lawyers pretty slow to adopt new tech? 100%. Word processors replacing typewriters was seen with a lot of suspicion. Email too. The cloud too. I think AI will have a big impact on law - but it won’t be as simplistic as a little doc generator an engineer cooks up one night in his bedroom having never even met a lawyer. The law is quite gray and so even if you have found something impactful, attorneys manage risk by looking to see what others are doing. If there is social proof, they are more likely to accept it.
rayiner 4mo ago
> 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. Every hour a lawyer sinks into a contingency case is money out of the partners' pockets. They have every incentive to use legal tech to reduce their capital investment into these cases. But plaintiff's firms litigate cases more or less the same way defense-side firms that bill hourly do. That's a telling indicator of the shortcomings of legal tech. AI might be different. I'm cautiously optimistic that agentic AI could do for lawyers the same thing it does for programers: act as a force multiplier that allows doing more work with fewer bodies. I'd love to be able to point an agent to years' of emails and prepare me a deposition outline for a witness. But the barriers to that are technological, not structural.
- srigbok157 4mo ago
  [flagged]
jshaqaw 4mo ago
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?

66 points by benbreen 5mo ago

d--b 4mo ago

I assume also that LLMs are not very good at chronology. Since law evolves, I wouldn’t be suprised that LLMs would spit out arguments that are out of date.

throwaway667555 4mo ago
The good thing is new law usually references old law and explains why it has evolved so I wonder if arranging the law in chronological order will help the LLM follow the thread.

taariqlewis 4mo ago

It would seem these structural barriers are increasingly become either more porus or more malleable as AI has brought more OSS legal initiatives to empower both attorneys and regular users. The Law and lawyers are being dragged kicking and screaming into e/acc.

cess11 4mo ago

This does not mention either interpretation or hermeneutics. For a computer to function as a lawyer it would have to be able to perform interpretation. I would expect such an article to start there, or at least make some argument that concludes that a computer actually could perform professional legal tasks. Which I don't think they can, just as they can't do philosophy.

moostee 4mo ago
AI can't do novel research either right?
- cess11 4mo ago
  It depends. If you're asking whether one could set up databases and generate new information from them that helps researchers, yeah, sure, you could do that. We've been doing it for a long time by now.
plastic-enjoyer 4mo ago
> This does not mention either interpretation or hermeneutics. For a computer to function as a lawyer it would have to be able to perform interpretation. Don't overwhelm engineers with hermeneutics

jorisw 4mo ago

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 — that it’s predictable. > [...] it’s actually ambiguity that’s at the very heart of our legal system. It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side, and it’s always possible to find the gray area in the law. That’s why prosecutors end up working as defense attorneys and why our regulators tend to end up working for big corporations. https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba... IMO, as with most domains, AI _tools_ will save a huge amount of time, but it's the human specialist making judgment calls based on real world context.

crimsoneer 4mo ago
This isn't really true though. This is how the law used to work, until people did the research and discovered it let to absolutely loads of mad variation in outcomes, with people with similar offences getting totally different sentences based on random luck. Hence most countries not have pretty strict sentencing guidelines, with a bit of space for judgement on top (despite a lot of protesting from judges). https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/what-we-do/our-brand/nobel-perspectives/latest-economic-questions/success/articles/reducing-noise-in-decision-making.html https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/what-we-do/our-brand/... You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.
- fontain 4mo ago
  “most countries now have pretty strict sentencing guidelines” That’s a vast, vast overstatement. “You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.” Too much of a simplification. The role of a jury is to interpret the evidence, every jury is unique. Evidence is not an absolute, there are no “facts”. A judge can include/exclude evidence that would sway a jury one way or the other. Sentencing, even without guidelines, is the least variable part of the criminal justice system in the western world.

halamadrid 4mo ago

I suppose one way is that the Lawyers and Legal Assistants use Legal AI as a replacement for standard search. Instead of parsing content and creating new notes, let AI search and create but humans spend the same amount time instead for verifying what was created. That way the billable hours can match, but like the article says, who does this benefit? Ultimately the transfer of time to another task will keep law just as expensive. Perhaps there is room to save time on verification vs creation. Is it worth all the investment though?

oersted 4mo ago

> Only three entities in the United States have anything approaching complete coverage > They sell the editorial infrastructure built on top: headnote taxonomies that organize millions of opinions into searchable categories, practice guides written by specialists over decades, and treatises that synthesize primary law into usable guidance. > The Free Law Project’s CourtListener provides free access to millions of federal and state court opinions, oral arguments, and PACER documents. I think issue of a data-moat is somewhat overstated, or at least it is not argued very well here. If secondary organization and interpretation of open data is their moat, and if it is mostly focused on guiding humans through the complex web of knowledge, then AI should make short-order of that. But, as usual, the issue of structural and organizational barriers is definitely convincing. Sometimes existing players are too entrenched to change. A new kind of AI-oriented law-firm might need to emerge and show itself to be competitive to either make mainstream firms truly change or push them out of the market.

throwaway667555 4mo ago
Precedent in law is like discovery in science. It advances the boundary of human understanding so a probabilistic regurgitator will have trouble applying it without treatise roadmaps.
lauritz 4mo ago
There may also be a Bitter Lesson element here. Ultimately, if law is like other domains, we may be able to solve legal applications with more compute on the limited freely-available data. That's a load-bearing "if", though, given the incohesiveness of legal systems compared to typical Bitter Lesson examples.

simiones 4mo ago

> As AI becomes capable of producing entire work products, the profession that has spent decades treating “I reviewed it myself” as the standard of care has no framework for what happens when that review becomes economically irrational. The ethical rules assume a human at the center. The technology is moving humans to the periphery. What horrendous morals behind this article. Why would anyone advocate for prioritizing economics and technology before ethics, especially in something as important as law? The "won't someone think of the all the poor people with no access to legal counsel" part sounds a lot worse once you realize they actually mean "won't someone think of the money we're leaving on the table by not getting some revenue from selling cheaper AI slop, uh I mean AI legal representation, to those who can't afford anything else".

throwaway27448 4mo ago

Lawyers, especially appealing to juries, require appealing to humanity. I'm sure the state will force software defense on us but it will fuck our neighbors over. I do not understand why we do not abandon english common law and find common sense.

oblio 4mo ago
> I do not understand why we do not abandon english common law and find common sense. What's common sense?
- Yokohiii 4mo ago
  > What's common sense? An intuition of the right thing that is easily overthrown when facing reality.
- throwaway27448 4mo ago
  Democratic legislation
  - oblio 4mo ago
    The judicial branch is one branch of a democratic government system.
    - throwaway27448 4mo ago
      It is the notably the not-democratic branch of an allegedly democratic system
      - oblio 4mo ago
        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.

ulfw 4mo ago

AI Lawyers paid by crypto coins with robots as executioners. The moment to off oneself...

yread 4mo ago

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

jedberg 4mo ago
I found the opposite to be true. Did you use a legal specific plugin?
- yread 4mo ago
  No, just Cline with Qwen 3.5 35B A3B. I was thinking it's highly confidential (contract!) but thinking about it again I'll just publish the T&Cs so it didn't make sense to protect it.
- yread 4mo ago
  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.

AIOperator2026 4mo ago

[flagged]

pj_mukh 4mo ago

I think the most likely situation with AI lawyers is simply Jevon's paradox. We'll simply ask for lawyer support in 1000's of more situations where we didn't before. It's so counter-intuitive that even seasoned AI researchers get it wrong. It happened to radiologists, it's about to happen to Lawyers too [1]. [1]:https://fortune.com/2026/05/04/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hinton-radiologists-future-of-work-tech-ai-job-anxiety/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/04/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hint...

brikym 4mo ago
Maybe you are right but I don't think the comparison holds that well. I can't take a scan of myself and send it to some AI because I don't have the hardware. I have to go to some highly consolidated business. But the last time I did something legal with AI there was no such choke point. It walked me through filing a trade mark and I didn't have to leave my desk. The difference in capital deployed is huge. A common laptop on my desk vs big bucks for a real estate full of medical imaging equipment. If radiology becomes less profitable the industry won't deploy as many imaging machines. Legal doesn't have that moat.
- pj_mukh 4mo ago
  "I can't take a scan of myself" Radiologists don't do this, that's just rad techs. There's specifically been an explosion in the need for AI review of real radiology analysis and handling complex patient situations.
  - logicchains 4mo ago
    There'll never be "scan at home" because hypochondriacs would keep scanning themselves hundreds of times per week and giving themselves cancer.
subjectivationx 4mo ago
Jevon's paradox is a 19th century economic observation about coal that has turned into a meme that people are using to support the most profound bullshit that they already believe to be true a priori. Lawyers are exactly the counter example and how stupid this meme is. If I was convicted of a crime and had access to Claude in jail, of course I would use profoundly more "law research". You wouldn't hire more lawyers though, you would do the law research yourself because you would be empowered to do law research in ways you wouldn't have been able to do previously and an order of magnitude cheaper than a human lawyer. Food/farming is really the best example of the stupidity of this meme though. As if the increase in farming automation leads to more farmers as opposed to an increase in the consumption/quality/diversity/output of food. The meme is a category error as it relates to the output vs the paid for human activity.

jedberg 4mo ago

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 complimented my "lawyer" on how thorough it was. Only when a final contract was agreed on did I engage my human lawyer for final review (and usually they didn't find anything of concern). For standard contracts, AI is pretty good.

piker 4mo ago
These are probably contracts where a lawyer would struggle to add value anyway, or you wouldn’t have hired them in the first place. Seems more likely a Jevon’s paradox example to me than anything.
- jedberg 4mo ago
  Most certainly not. These were enterprise licensing agreements where the other party was a large corporation who had a lot of lawyers and time. I was using the human lawyer for these before switching to Claude legal. Both produced roughly the same output (redlines to fix the things that were disadvantageous to us).
  - piker 4mo ago
    Yes, that sounds like the former case. The fact that you were so satisfied with the switch supports the point. It's boring work that is routine and expensive. It's right to automate the first turn.
jstanley 4mo ago
> 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.

Popeyes 4mo ago

A massive firm in the UK has reported itself to the regulator for using AI not once, but twice in a submission to a court. https://www.ft.com/content/5ba4690b-8b98-43b3-ba0b-f2ec5591a572?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/5ba4690b-8b98-43b3-ba0b-f2ec5591a...

irdc 4mo ago

I’m thinking the structural barrier is always going to be AI confabulations and misalignment.

mentalgear 4mo ago

Courts are already overflowing with years of backlogs. I would argue if everyone had a legal bot to represent their interests against others according to the law, and they could come to an automatic traceable agreement, that would be an overall benefit. However there are highly (self) regulated industries like lawyering that will try to protect their business model with tooth & nails before yielding to what's good for the population.

KnuthIsGod 4mo ago

I know someone who is with a leading firm. He is involved in a new multibillion USD matter every month. The clients simply do not care about the multimillion dollar legal bills, since it is just a rounding error at that scale. I find it hard to see AI being integrated at that end of the market.

moostee 4mo ago

There's just a whole bunch of the wrong people involved. AI will replace a majority of lawyers. It is inevitable. It won't be an LLM alone that does it though.

Hard_Space 4mo ago

But these figures measure exposure, not integration. Ach, it's probably a mostly human-generated piece, but any time I see the 'Not [x] but [y]' formulation, I tune out.

u1hcw9nx 4mo ago

I think legal search and intelligent document search tools are where the money is. Not "AI lawyer" stuff. Legal document templates and generating them with given constraints existed before the LLM boom. They are accurate and predictable. Many easy and clear cases are already automated. You get a basic case, you take a template, and if the case has something specific, you add it. I can see LLMs helping with: some paralegal work, legal searches when humans are there to judge the results, spotting and reporting errors in writing. Small modifications for templates. The problem with the "AI lawyer" idea is that after things are written down, most of the thinking is already done. The text is the output of a hard-to-automate process involving: * "Asking questions," being curious, and spotting things visually or by listening. * figuring out the angle (formulating a case theory), * identifying what is special in the case (the core anomaly), * what the client wants (the true client objective). That's almost never what they say unless it's another corporate lawyer. You need to figure out emotional drivers, risk tolerance, and what constitutes a "win." * what the opponent wants (adversarial motives), * identifying ambiguities. Society is always shifting, and new ambiguities are created steadily. A lawyer does all this and writes down their thinking. Lawyers think in writing. The legal profession has a really amazing blogosphere.

pu_pe 4mo ago

The problem with measuring AI productivity is that the people doing the actual job (paralegals, developers, etc.) are doing it for someone else (judges, managers, etc.). More work, or even a speedup does not actually benefit them. So when you give professionals a tool that speeds them up, they increase their slack and/or focus on other, less productive activities rather than work more. The article captures this too, mentioning a couple of examples of startups where presumably this feedback loop is tighter.

zuzululu 4mo ago

I've successfully sued my neighbor over land disputes. I've won small claims against companies. I've used AI to do it. I'm no longer afraid. Obviously I'm not going to be taking on huge law firms but AI has opened up a whole new vector for me in that I am able to sue people at will without paying for any legal fees and I think that is the most powerful outcome of all. My days are spent now not asking what mobile apps or SaaS I need to make but who I can apply pressure to. The fact is most companies do not like to go to court as it costs them a lot of money. For me I spent about $1000/month on various LLMs for software mostly but I am amused the amount of sway I can have on companies now. So far I've gotten free internet after suing my ISP for overcharging me, won injunctions against a neighbor over encroaching fences and trees, and now pursuing legal actions against my ex coworkers and employers in an attempt to garnish their wages. It truly is incredible how much value one can extract from frontier models and what was out of reach due to exorbitant legal fees AI allows me to do. My days are spent looking for ways to sue companies, employers, people to the same vigor a security vulnerability researcher would. Please note that I've had some legal education and that its probably not for everyone and I understand if some are upset my choices.

District5524 4mo ago
Before suing all your coworkers for garnishing their wages, I suggest you first consider how much fun you will have when you have to pay for the legal costs of the other party. But you will find that out for yourself. Anyways, I don't think it's your choice whether you want to take on huge law firms - that's usually the other party's choice. (I do hope most security researchers have a bit more training than "some education".)
- zuzululu 4mo ago
  are you not aware of the american rule and small claims? im not trying to take down coca cola here or doing frivolous lawsuits. if you catch your employer and coworker stealing your laptop, refuse to give it back eventually coming back with a rootkit then I'm absolutely willing to take this all the way and obviously real experts will be brought on board. companies are rational actors they arent going to spend $800/hr on some partner to defend a $5000 billing dispute or a garnishment hearing for an ex coworker when my cost basis to generate the 20 page complaint and discovery requests using the API is literally under a hundred bucks. my point isn't that people pursue this pipeline its that frontier models provide a great equalizer. you can bet that patent trolls and saul goodman type of lawyers are using the same tools. what is scary isnt that these models will hallucinate or whatever (those are harness issues) its the amount of formality and complexity navigating processes with rigid schedules and verbosity that can cause context drift. so this isn't just some "press a button let muh agents lawyer" its far more involved and frankly extremely tedious.

another-dave 4mo ago

What I always wonder is why we don't have more standardisation around end-user contracts. E.g. something equivalent to YC's SAFE (https://www.ycombinator.com/documents https://www.ycombinator.com/documents) but for employment agreements, leaseholds etc. We understand what we can & can't do with software licences and creative commons because we know "this is MIT" or "that is CC, no commercial, with attribution" and we don't need to delve further. If we had similar for employment terms - ACME Ltd want to hire me for £x at Y location using the standard "UK employee contract" - it feels like you could sidestep a lot of the need for AI parsing individual documents that are all subtly different. Lawyers are _already_ using templates, but they're all using bespoke templates and it means that you've got ambiguity by virtue of the fact that the sentence in my contract has never been tested in court.

NoboruWataya 4mo ago
Interestingly this already does happen a lot, but usually in more complex and high-value B2B contexts. ISDA Master Agreements, (G)MRAs, GMSLAs, LMA documentation, EFET General Agreements, Incoterms, etc. The fact that it is more common in B2B contexts than B2C is IMO a reflection of the power imbalance in the latter as it benefits a large corporation to have consumers contract on its terms. Where there is standardisation in consumer contracts it is usually driven by law or regulation as the market isn't otherwise incentivised do it. For example some countries do have template tenancy agreements published by the government or a regulatory body.

aussieguy1234 4mo ago

I've booked an appointment with a real lawyer, not going to rely on AI for anything important legal wise. I am, however, going to be extensively using AI to prepare for the appointment. A list of questions to ask, what to bring etc. I've also used AI to research in advance what the likely answers will be, so I'll have an idea of follow up questions to ask. That should hopefully save additional appointments (and billable hours).

netcan 4mo ago

A lot of the applications of Ai are going to have to go through "normal" innovation routes. Eg low-end disruption. I have already seen "Ai lawyer" at play here. A colleague of mine is involved in a long class action against a builder. The group chats have gone absolutely chaotic this year... as members consult heavily with LLMs and the (real) lawyer can't deal with the volume of action. Another friend is a wholesaler and does a lot of small-scale commercial deals. Contracts have gotten bigger and negotiation has gotten more involved as "Ai lawyers" read and write these contracts. Employment contracts are much more likely to be negotiated, referenced, etc. So... These are all routes to "classic" disruptive innovation. It's not replacing billable hours at law firms. It is replacing non-consumption. Law is adversarial. A formal legal letter requires a form of legal letter in response. Law generates its own demand. I would be watching a lot more for ground up innovation, rather than adoption at firms.

NoboruWataya 4mo ago

Law is a very large and varied field. I have met other lawyers in the past and thought to myself, it's crazy that people would consider us to have the same job. In terms of the kind of work involved, the expected output, the training materials required and the economics of the business, law is in reality more like several distinct fields with varying degrees of overlap. Usually when people talk about the legal field online they focus on the act of advocating in court, appealing to juries etc. But that is a relatively small fraction of the actual work that lawyers do. Drafting, negotiating and advising is the bread and butter of legal work. A lot of the value added by lawyers isn't just in knowing how a particular clause would be interpreted by a court or whether it is in compliance with statute, but also knowing what terms are "market", what would likely be acceptable to counterparties or regulators, etc. LLMs could learn that stuff but it isn't enough that they are trained on case law and statute (which in itself is not a particularly difficult problem IMO). They would also need to be trained, at the very least, on actual contracts, and ideally also on deal correspondence and notes of advice (all of which are going to be much more difficult to come by). Otherwise, expecting an LLM to output quality legal product is like expecting it to produce quality C code when it has only been trained on the spec and no actual code. Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of legal work that could be automated relatively easily. But probably a lot of that is at the low end of the market, where there just isn't that much money to be made by doing so. Your local small town lawyer who will draft your will or work on the sale of your home is not in the same bracket as the New York or London lawyer who advises on blockbuster private equity deals or IPOs. The latter is probably what will interest firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. Within those high value fields, I do think AI will make significant inroads but it will be through the firms themselves adopting AI rather than human lawyers being replaced en masse by AI lawyers.

danielrhodes 4mo ago

Once again there seems to be this deep misunderstanding by engineers that all lawyers do is draft docs like an engineer writes code. And if you can automate the doc creation process, you have automated the attorney. But this not true. It greatly depends on what type if lawyer it is. They can operate very differently. When it comes to docs, lawyers try not to reinvent the wheel on every doc. It’s very risky. They want to use language that has stood up to the test of time. So they have templates and old contracts and they will piece together a contract from that - it takes no time at all. AI writing new stuff every time using new language doesn’t save much time and puts a client at risk because nobody knows how that language holds up in court. Many attorneys have paralegals who do the actual work. Those paralegals are much cheaper. Efficiency arguments don’t often take them into account. Most legal tech companies don’t think about paralegals. But they are often the real workhorse in a legal firm. But automating them doesn’t really speed anything up: they do a lot of varied things and are not just mindlessly following some process like a factory worker. So what do lawyers do? They advise clients, they project manage, they research, they talk with other lawyers, sometimes they go to court, they review work, they work on getting new clients, and yes sometimes they write legal docs. Then at the high end of things, they come up with legal strategies and solutions that AI has never seen before. In corporate law, legal is often budgeted in. It’s expensive but it is often ROI positive. Legal mistakes are incredibly costly. Having said this, are lawyers pretty slow to adopt new tech? 100%. Word processors replacing typewriters was seen with a lot of suspicion. Email too. The cloud too. I think AI will have a big impact on law - but it won’t be as simplistic as a little doc generator an engineer cooks up one night in his bedroom having never even met a lawyer. The law is quite gray and so even if you have found something impactful, attorneys manage risk by looking to see what others are doing. If there is social proof, they are more likely to accept it.

rayiner 4mo ago

> 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. Every hour a lawyer sinks into a contingency case is money out of the partners' pockets. They have every incentive to use legal tech to reduce their capital investment into these cases. But plaintiff's firms litigate cases more or less the same way defense-side firms that bill hourly do. That's a telling indicator of the shortcomings of legal tech. AI might be different. I'm cautiously optimistic that agentic AI could do for lawyers the same thing it does for programers: act as a force multiplier that allows doing more work with fewer bodies. I'd love to be able to point an agent to years' of emails and prepare me a deposition outline for a witness. But the barriers to that are technological, not structural.

srigbok157 4mo ago
[flagged]

jshaqaw 4mo ago

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?