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Astra for Law
- jimmyjazz14 8d agoI really hope the bar associations continues to hold lawyers to high standards but I have feeling they may not be ready to handle fallout of AI slop-law.
- rocke_dong 8d agoyes, law decision depends on human
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- pletnes 8d agoJust like breaking crypto in the age of cloud is more about cost than time, this will lead to legal attacks based on the same principle. The biggest wallet wins.
- mcmcmc 8d agoThat’s how the legal system in the US has always worked though
- xmprt 8d ago> The biggest wallet wins This was already always the case. If anything, making this more accessible will reduce the barrier to entry for whether or not it's worth your time to take on a case. Instead of 50 lawyers spending 100s of hours on a case, you can have 1 or 2 lawyers + Astra working on it and if there's a case you can add more real lawyers.
- 3asgfq 8d agoThere are other possibilities: 1) Lawyers are not as naive as software engineers and will fight being replaces by new laws. 2) If they are replaced, OpenAI will take a cut commensurate with the amount in dispute (OAI, please credit me for the idea in the IPO brochure).
- xmprt 8d agoMany lawyers are owners/partners compared with software engineers who are more like cogs in the machine. They also bill hourly/contingency per case compared to engineers who are salaried. If a partner in a firm thinks they can take on more cases because of AI assistance then they will because that's just more money in their pockets.
- umeshunni 8d agoThat's already the case in law because you could just hire the best or most lawyers.
- drakythe 8d agoWith regard to certain legal questions this has always been the case. AT&T Fought the US Government for 20 years and eventually won because the government gave up. Without some kind of national anti-SLAPP law we're all one irritated oligarch away from having our lives financially ruined. I am curious what level of trust established law firms treat LLMs with.
- alansaber 8d agoYes, there's been a massive explosion in pro-se litigation. Courts will adjust accordingly, many already have.
- bezko 8d agoWill it be able to sue itself?
- kansface 8d agoThat’s a great question for Astra for Law.
- submeta 8d agoWill these models eventually replace all knowledge work, leaving lawyers, doctors, product managers, software developers, and others out of a job? If the benefits were shared across humanity, that could bring us closer to utopia. My worry is that we’ll instead end up with a handful of even wealthier billionaires and millions of people out of work.
- cjjuice 8d agoJust a few years ago people were paying 400k for pictures of apes. We always make up new stuff to spend money on.
- ceejayoz 8d agoYou know most of that was wash trading, right?
- cidd 8d agoTrue, unless you're a surgeon.
- rsoto2 8d agoI mean that's what all of these execs are openly telling everyone: they want you out of work, they want their ai to be the one to bring the world to it's knees, they want to surveille every second of your day, they want killer drones to use, they want to lay all of your cities to rubble and build "paradises" on top of them like in gaza. They also openly tell you what they are afraid of btw: collective worker power. something that is massively lacking in our industry, although i feel like it would be one of the easiest industries to unionize in terms of # of workers. Interesting interview I just watched about how powerful and dangerous these "wishes" or "prophecies" are especially in the hands of the ultra-wealthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7grHa1NR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7grHa1NR0
- rfgplk 8d ago> Will these models eventually replace all knowledge work, leaving lawyers, doctors, product managers, software developers, and others out of a job? Effectively yes, in the current forms. Those professions will likely evolve, but the traditional forms (ie writing code by hand, writing law filings by hand etc) are all dead.
- cbg0 8d agoNo word on model hallucinations in the blog post. https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-6-astra?omniscience=omniscience-hallucination-rate https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-6-astra?omniscience...
- heaney-555 8d agoThe benchmark you linked to shows GPT-6 Astra having the lowest hallucination rate of all tested models.
- jdiff 8d agoThe blog post makes no mention. If the rate isn't 0% it should be mentioned for a field like this.
- TomGarden 8d agoAgreed. Hallucinations and reliability are the main hurdles to anything being 'agi' in my book
- Tanjreeve 8d agoThe definition of AGI is whatever a frontier lab wrote a blog about doing in the last week.
- simianwords 8d agowhy this maximalism? There's nothing that has 0% hallucination including humans. lets use reasonable baselines.
- drakythe 8d agoHumans can be sanctioned and fined, and eventually disbarred if they continue to lie in court filings.
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- railgunmerlin 8d agoInteresting to see the callout to companies like harvey in the post itself as consumers rather than competitors? I guess openai isn't quite willing to step into those customer relations themselves?
- boredumb 8d agomemes and snark aside, can you use this to create legitimate terms and contracts for my products and if I do who is getting sued when it is wrong?
- hackmack10 8d agoI already use them for that, they are pretty excellent at it. Much better than the terms of use generator products that used to exist. That said, nobody cares to sue your business for the most part until you're big enough to be worth it. By that time, you'll have a team of legal analyst to assist you... or agents should I say. Then again, nobody will have money to buy anything at this rate, so in all liklihood, this is a total non-issue.
- dolebirchwood 8d ago> who is getting sued when it is wrong? You. Don't take legal advice from a word calculator.
- echelon 8d agoThe business value will be when platforms can underwrite their LLMs' legal products. That will be a decacorn product or more.
- mcmcmc 8d agoThat or a hydrogen balloon of financial engineering
- kingstnap 8d agoAs opposed to taking advice from the glucose wetware?
- notahacker 8d agoThe glucose wetware will actually fight your case...
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- hackmack10 8d agoPeople that are saying OpenAI is screwed because a lack of profit, I'm not of that opinion. They are encroaching on every industry they can. They have name brand recognition, a huge user base and are showing they can be a valuable tool to all types of businesses. As much as I hate to see it. They are now threatening industries like Engineers, Game Developers, Accountants, 3D modelers, 3D animators, Video Production, Audio Production, Therapist, Tax Auditors, Journalists, Authors, Artists, Mathematicians, Product managers, Every type of analyst and pretty much any other job that can be done behind a computer screen. We have big problems for humanity.
- swed420 8d ago> We have big problems for humanity. The biggest problem is that we're conditioned by a paradigm that frames these as problems.
- superxpro12 8d agoI'd kill for an AI that can tell me how to fix shit on my own, with proper permitting and building codes factored in.
- hackmack10 8d agoI used ChatGPT the other day to resink a CPU with termal paste, replace a PSU in my PC and snake my kitchen sink from the wall. I didn't exactly need it's help but wanted someone looking over my shoulder so to speak. It can help you repair all types of stuff, but as far as county / building codes and such, that probably isn't far off. It seems to understand things quite well.
- mawadev 8d agoI think the future is going to look pretty boring, we are all going to review and put our signature below LLM generated output...
- WarmWash 8d agoBy that point money ceases to have value, because the value of money comes from the motivation it gives people to work. If AI does everything, then money is useless (unless AI like money for some reason).
- jumploops 8d agoThe courts are about to overrun with AI-generated lawsuits (even more so than they have been[0]). [0]https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-coping-ai-lawsuits/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-c...
- pampas 8d agoThey seem unaccountable. Every other profession has increased their productivity.
- diegolas 8d agojustice doesn't have to be productive it has to be fair
- MiSeRyDeee 8d agohow so? delayed justice is denied justice
- RugnirViking 8d agoIt's completely failing at that too. Public trust in the courts is lower than it's ever been, and it was never all that high to begin with
- pampas 8d agoYou've never heard the phrase "justice delayed is justice denied"?
- officeplant 8d ago>Every other profession has increased their productivity. You dropped this /s
- kart23 8d agoconstruction productivity is actually down since the 60s!
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- piker 8d agoSecond paragraph: > API customers including Harvey and Legora will be able to build on Astra for Law, bringing this intelligence into their own products and workflows. In other words: "no, no, we're not eating our children to prep for the IPO. Don't worry."
- forrestthewoods 8d agoIf there is any cartel that deserves to be broken its legal search. May they die a miserable death.
- elpakal 8d ago> By using the legal search index, Astra for Law can search U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, and administrative decisions across a corpus of more than 230 million URLs, with sources added daily. Our work with Free Law Project, the nonprofit behind CourtListener, brings its case-law collection covering more than 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law (opens in a new window) into this research experience. Found that to be very interesting
- rayiner 8d agoCourtListener already has an MCP interface and Grok is quite good at pulling from it. In my experience, Grok 4.6 is quite good at analyzing legal cases and human-written documents. Better than Opus 5. I'm not sure if it's better than Fable 5.1 on that task, b/c I'm not willing to spend my precious Fable tokens on case law searches lol.
- ericd 8d agoYeah, it should be freely available, you have to be able to know the rules you're supposed to obey in order to obey them well. I've been making a free API for US law search, you can point whatever model you want at it: https://law.agentlookups.ai/ https://law.agentlookups.ai/ Very much a work in progress, only federal and state so far, no municipal codes yet, and no case law yet. Big hole, I know. Also working on making the search ranking work better.
- dzonga 8d agoopen-ai have proven they can make good / decent models but business strategy is just spray and pray. they need to pick a lane and optimize for it. coz at their size they can't serve the application layer (a.i startups who can fine-tune models will eat their lunch) if they gonna do a consumer play - then go ham on that. otherwise they're gonna get caught in the dreaded middle valley.
- estetlinus 8d agoDo they still do Atlas, the web browser? They are indeed throwing shit at the wall, seeing what stick.
- scrollop 8d agoa la Google.
- noir_lord 8d agoGoogle went to that model after they had a massive cash cow though. You can afford to play silly buggers when you have dumpster trucks of money backing up to your door every day see also: Meta.
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- Tanjreeve 8d agoI think the comparison is unfair. Google had/have a product that was 10X better than anything else at the point of release (search then chrome). And they have several money making products like YouTube and android that are either singular or in a duopoly. OpenAI doesn't have any of these things. They have products that they're paying for customers when the market they're in is rapidly converging on fighting for API reasoning as part of enterprise systems and fighting a race to the bottom for fickle consumer solutions that will be eaten by open source once they have to make money. Maybe they had a brief window for dominance of information search (or maybe it was only ever going to last as long as Google releasing all their internal research) and maybe they had a brief moment of monopoly till Anthropic got going but theyre not in the same dominance position as Google.
- freejazz 8d agoWent from AI replacing my job as an attorney, to them begging me to use their tools
- WarmWash 8d agoCool, now you can pay an attorney $500/hr for them to prompt Astra for 30 minutes, and bill you like they spent the normal 8 hours on the case.
- hahajk 8d agoPerhaps, but then someone would do the same but bill you for 7 hours, someone else would undercut them again, until the price reaches a lower equilibrium.
- stockresearcher 8d agoThat is an ethics violation. Even in the pre-AI era, getting caught billing for hours not worked was seriously punished.
- adzm 8d ago"7.5 hours - reviewing output"
- stockresearcher 8d agoSure, if they actually spent 7.5 hours, and it was a reasonable amount of time. If not, perhaps it would be seen as evidence of incompetence. In the real world, lawyers submit detailed bills and their clients examine them. If you don’t, that’s on you.
- epolanski 8d agoHow could that be enforced/checked?
- program_whiz 8d agothe same way every legal rule is enforced / checked: people look and if it seems iffy they examine/complain, and if a problem is found people get fined/jail.
- gabhuzk 8d agoLaw is a solved problem.
- elpakal 8d agowhere are the benchmarks
- slowhadoken 8d agoWouldn’t this and similar efforts to centralize bureaucracy make AI the new gatekeeper? Without reliable transparent models we’re just trusting OpenAI instead of a hundred top legal firms.
- Ecstatify 8d agoSeems like another “product” that will be killed in 6 months, but is good for the IPO so they can say they solved law.
- alansaber 8d agoEven with absolutely minimal dev effort, this product will break even/become profitable.
- Ecstatify 6d agoUnless it materially moves the needle, it’s a waste of the company’s resources. On paper, Atlas Browser and Sora seemed to have greater potential than this and yet, they’ve been discontinued.
- TomGarden 8d agoI wonder if Lawslop is gonna become a mainstream expression. Anyone got a better term?
- keeda 8d agoSlawp?
- john_strinlai 8d agoi hope that someone can come up with something catchier than "thing-slop" or "slop-thing". the word has become basically meaningless from overuse.
- epolanski 8d agoI love the slop word, to me it means effortless, average. People confuse slop with "bad", but slop isn't bad per se, it only becomes bad when real effort was required.
- trollbridge 8d agoRight. Pigs enjoy eating their slop. It’s not bad from their point of view.
- samtp 8d agoPig would much rather not eat slop. They are very intelligent animals.
- cmcclellan 8d agoI imagine the point here is to separate out the APIs by different professions and charge accordingly.
- 6thbit 8d agoSo there's a strategy shift here. They launched financial services specific tools and now law? Is the play here a set of specialized harnesses using their best general model?
- aaimnr 8d agoSo much for caring about the spirit of the law. Now we'll start an arms race for abusing every possible letter of the law. It's analogous to crypto. Started from some noble anti-authoritarian ideas and morphed into machine that removes any friction for capital - whoever has the most money will keep gaining the most.
- jatora 8d agoDo you really think the law isn't already horribly abused? Democratization of law has been needed for a thousand years.
- xwkd 8d agoMaybe I’m misunderstanding, but isn’t that what legislators do?
- aaimnr 8d agoNow there will be even less friction to horribly abuse the law. To democratize the law we would need to move in the opposite direction - to always keep it simple and aligned with our intuitions. The more intricate and complex legal arguments become, the more abstracted they are from their original purpose and spirit. Hence the crypto analogy - it was also supposed to "democratize", but the opposite happaned - it only further empowered the most powerful. Imagine legal case so purposefully complex that only those with access to best models have chances to participate and win the dispute.
- wartywhoa23 8d agoHow does AI solve that alreadism?
- charcircuit 8d agoWhy do you think LLM's language abilities are unable to understand the spirit of the law?
- wartywhoa23 8d agoIt's shoved down the world's throat from some central think-tank, despite the carefully constructed illusion of "deglobalization". Someone is very hell-bent on making the whole humankind plunge into this dystopia. A headline from Russia to consider: The Supreme Court approves the plan to deploy AI in Russian courts: the document states that by 2030, more than 95% of judges will have to use AI regularly. The risk matrix cites AI hallucinations and opposition from the judicial community. https://www.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/15/09/2026/6aa8e03421f80289f2f2a8ab https://www.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/15/09/2026/6aa8e0342...
- keeda 8d agoAny lawyers here who have used AI agents heavily for their work? From what I've heard, they're currently very good at searching, analyzing and drafting documents like contracts and patents, but some say they suck at interpreting the law.
- amelius 8d agoProbably because the AI was also trained on HN comments.
- john_strinlai 8d agoworse, it was trained on reddit law comments
- alansaber 8d agoCould be worse, you should see the facebook law comments
- qingcharles 8d agoThey are excellent, especially the latest models. That said, (a) I wouldn't feel safe filing something without a real lawyer looking at it; (b) it can't (easily? legally?) do oral arguments for you; and (c) a lot can happen in the hallways outside the courtroom to move a case forward that the AI can't easily do.
- shicholas 8d agoWe do and it saves so much time. Of course human judgment is needed but it’s like cooking with someone else doing the mise en place.
- droidjj 8d agoI’m sure there are a wide variety of experiences out there, but here’s my perspective as a former biglaw associate and current solo litigator: I have had some success using frontier models from the last 6ish months, but only when I can break up my work into discrete and verifiable tasks. For example, I had ~15k pages of discovery I needed to dig through for a summary judgment motion. Instead of just asking Claude to find the best evidence, I asked it first to run a clean, high quality OCR pass (it was almost entirely PDFs). Then I had it generate embeddings and write some reusable python scripts to make keyword and semantic searching easy for agents. While I was writing the brief, I would routinely ask my agent (Claude Code) to use both keyword and semantic searching to find the best evidence supporting whatever assertion I was trying to make. I trusted it because there were traces I could follow. In other cases/situations, I’ve tried just giving a model access to all the docs and saying “write a brief arguing X,” but it’s always terrible at this. It writes briefs with lots of evocative jargon and rhetorical flourish, but a low signal-to-noise ratio. Again, I’m sure others’ experiences differ based on workflow, legal area, etc.
- mullingitover 8d agoI've always said this will be when we get the real Butlerian Jihad, when the AI firms start trying to liquidate the legal profession. If you automate lawyers out of a job, you can absolutely automate lawmakers out of jobs next. (Not that this would be a bad thing? Maybe pervasive agents for everyone can be the gateway drug to a "this time it's different!" workable direct democracy)
- halamadrid 8d agoThe need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience. I attempted drafting a contract with some points myself using AI, but after several edits I wasn't sure if it was correct. Sending it to an actual lawyer ended up in so many corrections I couldn't imagine the first time. One big thing was the overly excessive protective clauses which didn't make sense for reality or conflicted with another. Its just like code I suppose, if you can read and understand and validate, you can use it to scale and otherwise it could end up being a vibe effort.
- rayiner 8d agoLLMs are the first genuinely useful legal tech since the Internet. I'm pretty shocked, though, at the delta between how competent Claude is on code versus legal work. It's good for research and data organization, but terrible for drafting. I wonder if this is a structural problem with the lack of feedback loops. In law, there's no compiler to check for logical or continuity errors in your brief, and there's no unit tests to check for correctness or performance. Even without that, I think it'll be extremely valuable to clients to allow them to answer simple questions without a lawyer, figure out the lay of the land so they can supervise their counsel, etc.
- throwaway20222 8d agoI have found that it’s useful generally speaking to get the intent of contracts and red lines, but actual drafting I agree is where I lose all confidence. My guess is that the significance of the difference between using a word like “and“ or “or“ can be so meaningful that that level of nuance can often be lost. But I know nothing I’m not in the space, I just pay too much money for lawyers.
- samtp 8d ago> LLMs are the first genuinely useful legal tech since the Internet That is an incredible statement that could not be further from the truth. Large scale adoption of email, searchable document databases like Westlaw, LexisNexis, PACER, etc.. , OCR Software, electronic signatures, and tons more have had a much more defineably positive impact on the legal profession since the internet came about.
- syntaxing 8d agoI said this before but I wonder if Dan Kan will reboot Atrium. Rally up some old partners and hope Anthropic buys them out for a couple billion.
- jayzalowitz 8d agoThis is really cool.
- jonahx 8d agoWe need a term for the dark pattern of zooming into just that part of the y-axis where the two closely competing benchmarks sit, to make the top one appear maximally better.
- trollbridge 8d agoTruncating the Y axis or cropping the Y axis
- jonahx 8d agocrop-maxxing
- underlipton 8d agocrop-topping
- kappi 8d agothis essay details how law firms became sweatshops from 80s. They charge hundreds of dollars to do make busy work by the junior most staff. LLM will kill the goldengoose of the law industry. https://aeon.co/essays/what-made-law-into-a-white-collar-sweatshop-in-the-1980s https://aeon.co/essays/what-made-law-into-a-white-collar-swe...
- smusamashah 8d agoAstra isn't doing well on bullshit Benchmark https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.next.html?domain=legal&q=Ast&access=closed https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.n... and is even worse in Legal department. Qwen 3.8 Max and Opus 4.8 score highest.
- toephu2 8d agoThis is the first blog post I saw OpenAI call out Claude directly like that.
- nerevarthelame 8d agoI'm not familiar with the Vals AI Legal Research Benchmark. But their website has other frontier models' scores, and the scores OpenAI is now revealing for "Astra for Law" are slightly less than Claude and Muse: > The top is a three-way tie: Muse Spark 1.3 Max, Claude Opus 5, and Claude Fable 5.1 all reach 55.29% all-pass accuracy, a clear ~6-point step ahead of the next model. [Astra for Law reached 54.0%] > Under partial-credit scoring, Claude Opus 5 reaches 90.58% weighted pass rate but 55.29% under strict all-pass grading, where every rubric check must pass. The gap shows models often get most of an answer right but fail on one or two required elements. [Astra for law reached 90.0%] https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/legal_research https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/legal_research
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- jackb4040 8d ago"Rogue OpenAI agent swarm accidentally overturns the Civil Rights Act" followed a month later by "Anthropic's Claude inadvertently repeals the 19th amendment"
- wartywhoa23 8d agoMuch more likely than "Due to a spontaneous loss of alignment, JustitAI 2.3 pleads the government guilty of war crimes, launches ballistic missiles at several bunkers and tropical islands"
- hansonkd 8d agoI've had top SV lawfirms whos partner charged our company $2000/hr and still couldn't get the right docs in the signature packet. and another getting share counts wrong during raise. frustrating that law firms have no liability for these mistakes I welcome ai law
- d0odk 8d agothe partner shouldn't be doing sig packets
- hansonkd 8d agono, but they are responsible for all work being done under them. What is the point of paying a partner $2000/hr if the work of their subordinates is wrong? Most interactions with big tech firms involve 4-5 people so a basic phone call is $5k-10k. It shouldn't be unreasonable to expect after paying $80k for a financing round that they issue the right docs to the right people.
- alexnewman 8d agoAs a user of ai hooked up to my Gmail I assume I’ve lost all privilege
- nsoseka 8d agoSince the cost of building software is now cheap, there is nothing stopping them from building everything imaginable. They'll soon have an app store with every app built by them and they'll say its for security reasons. Nothing is stopping this coming monopoly
- alasano 8d agoAt a certain point why would they sell anything other than services and products their eventual (actual) AGI/ASI builds in literally every market. When opportunity cost isn't a thing anymore because it reaches every corner of the planet simultaneously faster and builds better than any human can. There's no reason to let others build on top of AI, except if the AI determines that it needs capitalism to continue because it's paperclip goal is to maximize shareholder value.
- jansport123 8d agomost of the complexity in software isn't in the actual code
- wartywhoa23 8d ago> Nothing is stopping this coming monopoly A hefty asteroid will. The whole situation today is so Tower Of Babel 2.0...
- jackb4040 8d ago"Introducing Astra for Dog Walkers"
- margorczynski 8d agoThe end goal should be AI judges, I think China has implemented that to some degree.
- whazor 8d agoThe most interesting use case in my mind is skipping law suits. Obviously you need lawyers in court. But lawyers are people you are basically paying to fight for you. Instead, if you resolve your dispute outside of court, you don’t need a lawyer. If both parties use ChatGPT to find the relevant laws or read contracts, they could come to an agreement without expensive legal fees.
- reactordev 8d agoexcept for those pesky things called rights
- elpakal 8d agoI find the watermarking dynamic to be really interesting in the legal space, as more large model providers provide increasingly powerful legal capabilities, and adoption (presumably) also increases. Attorneys aren’t the same as developers as their work can be traced back to them, and there are personal bar licenses and reputations at stake. I wonder if knowing the likelihood that AI generated something helps or hurts in that respect. I also see a lot of watermark removal services popping up as a result.
- alansaber 8d agoWatermarking is just one step. We could easily see regulatory crackdown, and the requirement to provide IE a whitelisted email to use a legal product.
- throw03172019 8d agoFrom my experience LLMs seem to forget sometimes who they are representing when drafting clauses or editing / redlining. Our counsel made a few edits where it clearly drafted in favor of the customer instead of us.
- victor9000 8d agoI wonder if this is willful sabotage on the part of the model. In other words, if you ask the model to craft a defense for a morally questionable case, will the model execute the defense in good faith? Or will it apply a training or system prompt bias in subtle ways?
- akg_67 8d agoContext compaction? I noticed llm seem to forget partially or completely the original task when context compaction happens. The problem is more serious with local llm with low context size.
- alansaber 8d agoLLMs bleed context from the conversation/attachments into the output. This has always been a problem with no real solution other than some crafty iteration/loops.
- LandenLove 8d agoThere is a lot of stuff here that I don't understand, but the concept of law firms giving user reviews is quite funny to me. Those reviews are going to be the most non-legally binding reviews ever written lol. "Felt like a significant step toward legal-focused AI." "Showed strength across key aspects of legal research."
- Madmallard 8d agoThe grifts continue... imagine something as consequential as Law being advertised as being solved by a statistical word generation engine that regularly gets basic things wrong. Anyone who isn't a lawyer won't know any better but you draft a single document of any appreciable detail and send it to an actual lawyer and it's littered with problems.
- Vachyas 8d agoThe most interesting part about this to me was how they bench/compare it, like in the example with Fable: "Given the same prompt, Astra for Law returned two closely matching precedents; in the litigation example, Claude Fable 5.1 returned a holding that had been reversed on appeal, while in the transactional example it reported finding no such case." It made me wonder if a good deal of law is about finding a way to work in statements with clear precedents without your opposition noticing and then later drawing upon them in court (as settled precedents, in your favor) after the opposition (perhaps implicitly) accepted it. That would clarify a lot about why some lawyers need to spend so much time pouring over and memorizing past cases (even ones that are only tangentially related); because anything they miss could be used as a potential trojan horse by the opponent. If this is true that must mean there are a good deal of cases settled using precedent "gotchas" where both sides knew that without the "load-bearing" precedent the outcome would've definitely been the opposite. (i.e precedents almost always trump even valid arguments)
- alansaber 8d agoPrecedent is very heavily weighted so yes- flagging insertion points for the re-use of past clauses with AI is a thing.
- msy 8d agoSo OpenAI is partnering with Latham Watkins, Freshfields is partnering with Anthropic and Kleiner Perkins is building their own. It'll be interesting to see which wins out here, I don't see how those partnerships can end well for the law firms unless they're making an assumption they'll be sucked dry of USP but the revenue split from the AI labs will make up for it. Why would I pay a premium for Latham Watkins when every other firm can get their expertise and experience in a subscription, and add their own on top?
- alansaber 8d agoThey'll be operating under a ZDR. Labs will still get some data but I wouldn't go as far as sucked dry of USP. Firms are very aware of the value of their USP.
- ivraatiems 8d agoI know someone who works in law and deals particularly with an area of US benefits and healthcare law. One of their workflows for lower-level employees at their firm involves taking in documents from healthcare plans and organizations, analyzing them for certain kinds of data, and then importing that data into an internal system they use to analyze and provide guidance on plans. The internal system can contain hundreds of documents for an individual client. All of the documents have the same information (roughly) but in totally diverse formats and styles. Once it's in the system, it's easy to compare and analyze across documents and the research process is much faster. They recently bought a Claude subscription and began using Claude to do the initial read of the documents and output JSON they can import into their internal systems. The work still must be reviewed by an attorney - Claude is nowhere near making the kinds of judgments a lawyer would make about this content - but it has increased their throughput from 2-3 documents an hour to 8-10 documents an hour by killing the busy work. LLMs have great advantages for this kind of work - but not for decision-making. I just don't see OpenAI ever admitting that. (I've left some details intentionally vague because this is a very specific area of law and I don't want my friends to be identified without their consent.)
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- lemonlimetea 8d ago[dead]
- MiroslavPokorny 8d agoMy dog can review documents at an even faster rate. You havent given any proofs or even comments that the work is the same level of quality or accuracy.
- ivraatiems 8d agoThe proof would be that the attorney who did the work before, and who still reviews all ingested data, says it is.
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- johnnyApplePRNG 8d agowhat is going on here? this vertigoruntime is brand new and his submissions absolutely dominate the front page recently https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vertigoruntime https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=vertigoruntime the about link https://vertigo.kuber.studio https://vertigo.kuber.studio is obvious AI llm spam
- ncr100 8d agoEmail them...?
- weare138 8d agoEveryone involved is about to get a swift and thorough introduction to the world corporate contract lawyers. But don't worry, they're extremely sympathetic and understanding when you flub a multi-million dollar corporate contract and will happily refund that money.
- DannyBee 8d agoLawyer here (non practicing so to be clear none of this affects me): most comments I read here don't seem to realize that different areas of law have very very different economic models and don't even mention which one they think will be affected or why, they just sort of lump it all together. For example: It is highly unlikely llms will have any meaningful effect on high value personal injury law - I don't see a 5 million dollar case being handed to an LLM when the majority of the cost is in trial aids and not even lawyers. It may affect where and how they advertise. It may affect how they work. But it seems really unlikely to put any of them out of business any time soon by people doing it themselves. Will it affect other areas more? Maybe. Probably? But so far I haven't seen a ton of comments that make specific enough arguments that they could really be debated or responded to effectively with a useful opinion
- 3ddsaa 8d agoThere's a huge problem on here - many people stepping outside of their domains of expertise with surface level knowledge. Its teh same reason claude for finance hasn't turned the finance world upside down. This is getting tiresome seriously. Why wont these geeks learn some lessons?
- grosswait 8d agoYeah geeks just stop trying! Seriously? Yeah, we’re in a bubble and narratives are ahead of reality but if you really don’t think AI is and will continue to eat knowledge work, just keep making your buggy whips.
- dhanizael 8d agoi agree with this, maybe.
- consensus1 8d agoMany people stepping in their domains of expertise with surface level knowledge
- intrasight 8d ago> them out of business any time soon No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected. You wont want or need associate attorneys when you can hire a brilliant AI associate for 1/10th the price.
- Havoc 8d agoSurprised they published this without mention of jurisdiction. Each country has their own laws. Would have been prudent to highlight that this is for (presumably) US law
- delichon 8d agoHow long before we start building detailed models of each judge trained on all of their legal output, and then test various legal theories against those judge models in virtual moot court? Craft each pitch to the legal idiosyncrasies of the batter. I assume that real lawyers do this routinely and could use a simulator.
- unstatusthequo 8d agoThis is already a thing to some extent. I don’t recall the products that do it, but judge profiles def exist and are taken into account .
- xpct 8d agoI feel like this is on a different trajectory than what LLM-based tech does. This type of individualistic extrapolation is one of the things they're really bad at, in my experience.
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- avaer 8d agoWhat worries me is the step after this. If god forbid this proves successful and models accurately predict specific outcomes, people will start to ask whether the solution to AI slop lawsuits is to do the judging with AI too.
- redlimetea 8d ago[dead]
- lemonlimetea 8d ago[dead]
- guybedo 8d agoyes, most of the time i use Astra Low already.
- TheRealPomax 8d agohow about "just turn off your company if you're so worried about AI instead of immediately suggesting we use it to judge people's lives and livelihoods"?
- redwood 8d agoRevealing how they call Harvey and Legora customers instead of partners...
- aitoolcrux 8d ago[flagged]
- melonpan7 8d agoI do believe entry-level paralegals will be made obsolete. In the grand scheme, perhaps it reduces overall cost of legal assistance, which is a net benefit for society.
- alansaber 8d agoHonestly it looks like the biggest unlock at this point will be court reform, not improvements from individual practitioners.
- sanghyunp 8d agoIt's going to be hard for mediocre lawyers to survive now... I wonder what it takes to survive these days?
- bicepjai 8d agoPost AI era view on anything can be categorized as “What can go wrong ?”
- chr15m 8d ago"We have dangerous AGI that can destroy humanity." "Also, all of your sensitive legal documents will be totally safe with us." "Also, for some reason even though we have AGI and selling tokens is a fine business, we need to sell a new product specifically targeted at a very high margin and lucrative industry."
- alansaber 8d agoAt the end of the day they're a VC-backed company that has to cash in on their brand reputation. Legal is even higher margin than coding with less discerning buyers.
- Digory 8d agoThis seems like a very similar set of tools to Anthropic. But I’ve enjoyed using the various frontier models to criticize each other. Using recursive loops, the output has gone from a high school level intern to a 2nd year lawyer in about a year. It still doesn’t beat the experts, but so much legal work is (legally significant) pedantry, not legal philosophy. AI will not kill off lawyers, or reduce the amount of litigation. It will increase volume and velocity.
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- ayushiyerji 8d agoWhat we contributed to Reddit and Arxiv voluntarily before, what we contribute as traces right now are all being used to build business verticals by OpenAI and Anthropic. All these business verticals are being used for is more trace collection which would only strengthen these models and render most humans useless because the ceiling for 1000 swarms of Agents to learn is much higher than an average human. These companies clearly can identify the relevant traces for these business verticals which only strengthens the argument that NS was built on someone else's traces.
- kevinsundar 8d agoCan someone explain to me the economics of AI and how it intersects with billing by the hour? I think there would be a strong incentive not to use tools that speed up your work because you'd effectively be able to bill less time? I'm sure there are some firms out there with more work than people, but still wouldn't it be more effective to hire another human who can then bill at a high rate for many hours?
- alansaber 8d agoLawyers are client-facing. Client wants lawyers to use AI. There are justifiable reasons to use AI (in measured doses). Hence, firms will use AI. They already have all kinds of strategems to increase their billing which AI slots into.
- zombiwoof 8d ago[dead]
- Kuyawa 8d agoFor law, then medicine, mathematics, physics, etc. I believe LASSI Local Artificial Super Specialized Intelligence is the future, just before it becomes GODD General Omniscient Distributed Daemon
- capital_guy 8d agoI have always felt like LLMs are uniquely suitable for legal work. I really have trouble believing we will have hardly any legal assistants and paralegals going forward when these LLMs are so incredible at spotting issues with arguments, figuring out citations, and doing semantic search.
- chr15m 8d agoAn important take-away from this is the harness is really important. The graphs show that the same model with a better harness performs many percentage points better. OpenAI are getting into the "selling the harness" game in a big way. Why? What's interesting about that is while not everybody can train or run a model, anybody can build a harness. You and I can build harnesses. It seems strange that OpenAI would move into a field where any developer can compete with them. I think that tells us a lot about the economics of training and selling inference.
- margalabargala 8d agoI don't think it says what you imply. I think they're just trying to vertically integrate. Harnesses are going to be controlled at companies eventually, just like you might not have a choice of OS. They want to make sure they are the complete package.
- chr15m 8d agoYeah you're probably right, the purpose would be to lock in whole industry verticals.
- alansaber 8d agoBasically, they can't afford to not compete. They also don't have to compete so hard, because they have the brand recognition.
- gamblor956 8d agoEspn has an article about Lane Kiffin using this for his legal advice recently. He almost singlehandedly killed LSUs football program until people were able to convince him to talk to a real lawyer.
- sehw 8d ago[dead]
- popupeyecare 8d agoIn an utopian society, lawyers are an unnecessary profession. Laws should be clear and simple so the common person can be their own "lawyer". LLMs help with that goal.
- joedwin 8d agowhat profession you need in utopian society?
- palmotea 8d ago> In an utopian society, lawyers are an unnecessary profession. Laws should be clear and simple so the common person can be their own "lawyer". Not really. Modern society is complicated, and law is a technology that is a reflection of the complexity of society. To make an analogy: you wouldn't say that "in a utopian society, engineers are an unnecessary profession. Buildings should be clear and simple enough that a common person can be their own structural engineer," because that would mean that building technology would no longer handle a lot of the problems we expect it to handle. It wouldn't be utopia, it would be primitivism. > LLMs help with that goal. Not really. What they'd actually do is help them produce output they don't understand and lack the competence to evaluate.
- wartywhoa23 8d ago> Laws should be clear and simple so the common person can be their own "lawyer". LLMs help with that goal. As in translating the legalese nondeterminism into neuralese one? That does bring us closer to utopian society for sure.
- phyzix5761 8d agoThe biggest problem with this is billable hours. Faster work means less billable hours for attorneys.
- claaams 8d agoCan you imagine the sort of corruption that is possible here? Like if you have a lawsuit against someone or some entity that openai or their investors have business with...
- alansaber 8d agoOpenAI would never misbehave with user data, perish the thought.
- CobrastanJorji 8d ago> Astra for Law passed the evaluation’s overall correctness check on 54.0% of questions. How is this a product that you are selling?
- prodigycorp 8d agoHelp me understand your consternation.
- fragmede 8d ago54.0% isn't particularly high.
- prodigycorp 8d agoWhat I'm trying to say which doesnt seem obvious is that all models are x% correct at benchmarks until they get saturated, and then new benchmarks get made.
- jambalaya8 8d agowaiting for the actual Prodigy Corp. to show up and offer to buy your username out? <my own consternation, stated>
- calyhre 8d agoIt’s barely any better than a coin flip
- CobrastanJorji 6d agoWhat is a possible use case for a legal reasoning tool that is wrong 46% of the time?
- noisy_boy 8d agoOn the promise of potential cost savings by means of firing and/or not hiring as much.
- MisterMunchkin 8d agoIt’s a bad day to be a lawslop company. When you’re reliant on other companies to do all of the AI part of your AI product, they can just train on your traffic and eventually eat you.
- tesnorindian 8d agoWill the legal fees reduce after this? How about training AI models with laws of other countries especially the democratic ones? This is where sovereign AI models are required otherwise they will start hallucinating wrong laws of different countries. I remember OpenAI was talking about sovereign AI models (OpenAI for Countries), it is time to train Astra India with Indian Constitution.
- placebo 8d agoI guess the answer to the second question is "if there's a business case", and the answer to the first is the same, so probably no. Life has made me a tad cynical... :)
- medion 8d agoRecently was involved in legal matters requiring lawyers - I used OpenAI extensively for research, advice etc - I have to be honest, much of it was completely useless - the real world outcome with lawyers in the room was very different from what OpenAI was spitting out.
- hacker_88 8d agoMake em Grant Bail. Make no mistake.
- ricksunny 8d agosurprised the word RAG hasn’t come ho in this thread (except for a likely-LLM-generated-and-therefore-downvoted comment). >with settings, tools, and context call me crazy, but I think that this kind of suite, which training-uber-alles people generally dismiss as trivially replicable ‘wrapper’ is actually the differentiating factor for LLM adoption today and moreso into the future. I’m not dismissing the near-all-out impact of training, but from a competitive busines or industry-structure lens, we’re looking at the three or four big players competing their utmost ultimately, if unintentionally, to turn foundation model access into commodity. To the capabilities-maximalist minded (typical among engineers - my former life so I’m familiar don’t lack guilt in committing that) folks who will say “Oh the foundation model megacorps will just build out any wrapper whenever one of their third party wrapper plays demonstrates enough adoption, my rejoinder: Apple did not rebuild an Uber-like app and cut Uber out. We’ll see how this OpenAI legal services industry wrapper plays out, but I suspect 1) the third party legal wrapper plays will run to other foundation models not doing a legal wrapper, and 2) 3rd party wrappers will do a better job of it since it’s their all-out focus, unlike OpenAI’s whose priorities are necessarily more generalist. Yes, we all remember the breakout startup failure-arguing quote “Google has entered your space.” That worked for several high profile applications. I believe more of those bets died on the vine than broke-out succeeded however, we only remember the biggest ones that persisted. If legal services AI turns into one of the Mail or Maps-scale applications of the AI industry, while that would be a fair strategic action counter to the thesis I’ve laid out, the thesis itself would still tolerate it. It’s a question of short-fat tail vs mid-to-long-tail application scope & attractiveness. For example, I think it’s clear that coding is one of these short-fat-tail applications, and the low-no code plays are absolutely having their lunch eaten to acqui-hire ‘death’. I just doubt that the same will persistently transpire facing all professional service wrapper plays.
- alansaber 8d agoAgreed. We've basically phased-out the phrase "RAG" for "harness" even though a lot of the discussion is still the data integration rather than agent behaviour (sometimes an MCP or some kind of graph). The argument boils down to "will big company win everything" and the thermodynamics of it tend towards no.
- 7d ago
- racetozero 8d agoLegal domain is a challenge for most firms, even ours. This is a true game changer even if it looks a bit slop style in the output, the immediate uplift is quite massive. The domain remains hard due to the lack of availability of high quality LLM-ready data providers in legal space.
- Muhammad523 8d agoReally, what could go wrong?
- sirnicolaz 8d ago> At the highest reasoning effort for both systems, Astra for Law passed the evaluation’s overall correctness check on 54.0% of questions isn't that kind of poor?
- alansaber 8d agoYes, it is. If they had built a specialised tool for a practice area, they could have improved it significantly- but they don't want to be THAT involved.
- wartywhoa23 8d agoEnter Neurolegalese.
- alansaber 8d agoYour honour, this 40 page flowchart (below the 8B LOC lean proof in addendum C) proves that my client had planning permission for his loft.
- meigwilym 8d agoFunny how they wait until the sixth paragraph to specify that this is for US law.
- alansaber 8d ago"Roman law? What other kind of law is there?"
- lmf4lol 8d agoCongratz to all the laywers that trained it and told OpenAI their business cases by using ChatGPT in their practice. You took the first step to make yourself obsolete. Snarky comment I know, but I believe that is some truth to it. We SOftware Engineers are equally "being used", especially the Open Source contributors. I personally only use open weights model for my business stuff. I just refuse to feed the machine with my secrets. However, I think there is no way back. My accountant happily told me that he is using Claude to organize his cases. To do so, Claude reads his emails, customer correspondance etc. So yeah. ANthropic might know now my financial details, even though i NEVER ever used Claude myself... It's just fucked. And the worst thing is that my accountant didn't mind. Time to find a new one I guess. Someone with a typewriter. P.S. I am not Anti-AI. Really not. I have an AI startup and I use AI everyday. Its a love-hate relationship. AI usage has serious risk, and one is that we all train the AIs to put ourselves out of a job.
- gaiagraphia 8d agoIf the laws are too complex for the layman to understand, the laws aren't made for the layman. AI is a blessing in law. I recently used it to win a dispute and didn't have to pay the legal moatbuilders thousands to exercise my rights in the process.
- attels33 8d agoJust yesterday AI took my backup to be an economist. Today Law. Is the priesthood tomorrow?
- shark1 8d agoIn a certain emergent country, government employees that work for the law courts, are ignorantly uploading private data (audio, WhatsApp messages, and personal documents) of citizens, at scale, to OpenAi using their free accounts, without checking the terms.
- dopbase 8d agoIm not sure this is superb or not but from my experience llm not that really good on PDF. is any one try this for law? and how is it
- varispeed 8d agoI wouldn't trust any output from Astra unless they have not nerfed instances ringfenced for that task. Tried again a simple coding task with Astra maxed out. I did it only partially, left memory leak and hanging pointer. Sol spotted are errors immediately. I put findings of Sol to Astra and it only done partial fix with the rest claiming will remain unresolved. Sol fixed it in a minute. I then tried Astra on farily long legal document to produce an excerpt. The excerpt had wrong conclusion and logical errors. When pointed out that the source text has the claims other way round, Astra agreed and then when asked to produce the excerpt again, it again made the same errors. Absolutely awful model.
- cowpig 8d agoI guess I have to ask every law firm I work with whether they use OpenAI and Claude products now
- amai 8d agoIf lawyers would understand what a versioning system like git could do for them, they wouldn't even talk about AI.
- sinan-faizal 7d agocan astra think for itself? to be used for law?