3 ms·

Second paragraph: > API customers including Harvey and Legora will be able to build on Astra for Law, bringing this intelligence into their own products and wo

by piker 9d ago

Second 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 9d ago
If there is any cartel that deserves to be broken its legal search. May they die a miserable death.
- elpakal 9d 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 9d ago
    CourtListener 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 9d ago
  Yeah, 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.
  - manyatoms 9d ago
    is there a dataset/torrent with all the underlying laws?
    - ericd 9d ago
      Right now it's just a bunch of crawlers for the individual states. If there's interest, I could periodically stand up snapshot torrents or something. That something you'd be interested in? Alternatively, if someone else knows an all-in-one option that exists, I wouldn't mind retiring those crawlers...
      - timschmidt 9d ago
        Not op, but that's a very interesting proposition. While the law and legal code are technically property of the people, I'm not aware of any single point of download for it all.
        rayiner 9d ago
        There’s no single point of download for it all because there’s thousands of autonomous entities that issue law and adjudicate cases, at least 51 of them distinct sovereign entities.
        datsci_est_2015 9d ago
        We could enforce (suggest?) a common format / api at the federal level. Especially if it’s incentivized with funding that more than justifies the cost of maintenance. Similar to how federal interstate funding is only available to states with a 21+ drinking age.
        Something1234 8d ago
        Govinfo.gov is neat because you see the different attempts at common formats that have been attempted in the past.
- teiferer 9d ago
  Let's swap it out for the AI cartel!
- alansaber 8d ago
  Legal search needs its own Arxiv. Nothing comes close.
jmkd 9d ago
Max Junestrand has consistently said Legora treats the model layer as swappable, selecting across frontier providers rather than building the product around one. OpenAI didn't need to name Legora and Harvey in the second paragraph of the launch post. They are pre-empting the obvious interpretation of Astra for Law: that moving this far up the legal stack puts them in direct competition with their biggest legal AI customers. “Don't worry, they can build on us” is a pretty conspicuous message to include on launch day. They have clearly thought about some pessimistic outcomes.
- TZubiri 8d ago
  >Max Junestrand has consistently said Legora treats the model layer as swappable, selecting across frontier providers rather than building the product around one. Vendor-neutrality for LLMs is such a weak thesis all around, whether for providers or consumers. It weakens the product by being promiscuous and gains no material benefit at all. LLMs are magic byte(byte) functions, it doesn't make sense to say "we have different providers for magic".
  - datadrivenangel 8d ago
    Different flavors of magic require different ritual components and in the name of all that is stable and production worthy, please don't get a necromancer to do your civil construction magic. Vendor-neutrality helps reduce lock-in, and OpenAI and Anthropic are big enough that the reduction is valuable.
  - noisy_boy 8d ago
    Really? Even when the magic is differently priced across magicians?
    - alansaber 8d ago
      This is exactly how I would explain inference to a medieval peasant.
- timpera 8d ago
JumpCrisscross 9d ago
"We are also expanding our work on privacy and governance to give law firms specific controls for confidential client work" This is everything OpenAI have to say about privacy in this announcement. No guarantees. No promises. Just a pinky-swear promise. Anyone trusting them–or a lawyer who relies on them–for legal work deserves what they get.
- dathinab 8d ago
  the thing is a lot of the legal work which will go through this is drafting 100 and 1 variations of draft versions of standard contracts not containing any trade secrets where the contract can be drafted with "replacement/place holder names" the kind of work mostly done by juniors not yet through their final exam and other "non" lawyers etc. so it's a slippery slope of "lets just use it for <this> things where it doesn't matter" and then out of laziness and convenience it creeps into all the other places (at least for drafts).
- dd8601fn 8d ago
  Lawyers are already llm’ing their work and getting slapped around in court for making shit up. There’s another case making headlines every week. I get the feeling a lot of them won’t care about this stuff.
  - byzantinegene 8d ago
    they could potentially lose their license, I think that's worth caring about.

by piker 9d ago

forrestthewoods 9d ago

If there is any cartel that deserves to be broken its legal search. May they die a miserable death.

elpakal 9d 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 9d ago
  CourtListener 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 9d ago
Yeah, 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.
- manyatoms 9d ago
  is there a dataset/torrent with all the underlying laws?
  - ericd 9d ago
    Right now it's just a bunch of crawlers for the individual states. If there's interest, I could periodically stand up snapshot torrents or something. That something you'd be interested in? Alternatively, if someone else knows an all-in-one option that exists, I wouldn't mind retiring those crawlers...
    - timschmidt 9d ago
      Not op, but that's a very interesting proposition. While the law and legal code are technically property of the people, I'm not aware of any single point of download for it all.
      - rayiner 9d ago
        There’s no single point of download for it all because there’s thousands of autonomous entities that issue law and adjudicate cases, at least 51 of them distinct sovereign entities.
        datsci_est_2015 9d ago
        We could enforce (suggest?) a common format / api at the federal level. Especially if it’s incentivized with funding that more than justifies the cost of maintenance. Similar to how federal interstate funding is only available to states with a 21+ drinking age.
        Something1234 8d ago
        Govinfo.gov is neat because you see the different attempts at common formats that have been attempted in the past.
teiferer 9d ago
Let's swap it out for the AI cartel!
alansaber 8d ago
Legal search needs its own Arxiv. Nothing comes close.

jmkd 9d ago

Max Junestrand has consistently said Legora treats the model layer as swappable, selecting across frontier providers rather than building the product around one. OpenAI didn't need to name Legora and Harvey in the second paragraph of the launch post. They are pre-empting the obvious interpretation of Astra for Law: that moving this far up the legal stack puts them in direct competition with their biggest legal AI customers. “Don't worry, they can build on us” is a pretty conspicuous message to include on launch day. They have clearly thought about some pessimistic outcomes.

TZubiri 8d ago
>Max Junestrand has consistently said Legora treats the model layer as swappable, selecting across frontier providers rather than building the product around one. Vendor-neutrality for LLMs is such a weak thesis all around, whether for providers or consumers. It weakens the product by being promiscuous and gains no material benefit at all. LLMs are magic byte(byte) functions, it doesn't make sense to say "we have different providers for magic".
- datadrivenangel 8d ago
  Different flavors of magic require different ritual components and in the name of all that is stable and production worthy, please don't get a necromancer to do your civil construction magic. Vendor-neutrality helps reduce lock-in, and OpenAI and Anthropic are big enough that the reduction is valuable.
- noisy_boy 8d ago
  Really? Even when the magic is differently priced across magicians?
  - alansaber 8d ago
    This is exactly how I would explain inference to a medieval peasant.
timpera 8d ago

JumpCrisscross 9d ago

"We are also expanding our work on privacy and governance to give law firms specific controls for confidential client work" This is everything OpenAI have to say about privacy in this announcement. No guarantees. No promises. Just a pinky-swear promise. Anyone trusting them–or a lawyer who relies on them–for legal work deserves what they get.

dathinab 8d ago
the thing is a lot of the legal work which will go through this is drafting 100 and 1 variations of draft versions of standard contracts not containing any trade secrets where the contract can be drafted with "replacement/place holder names" the kind of work mostly done by juniors not yet through their final exam and other "non" lawyers etc. so it's a slippery slope of "lets just use it for <this> things where it doesn't matter" and then out of laziness and convenience it creeps into all the other places (at least for drafts).
dd8601fn 8d ago
Lawyers are already llm’ing their work and getting slapped around in court for making shit up. There’s another case making headlines every week. I get the feeling a lot of them won’t care about this stuff.
- byzantinegene 8d ago
  they could potentially lose their license, I think that's worth caring about.