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The 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 edi

The 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 9d ago
LLMs 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 9d ago
  I 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 9d 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.
  - rayiner 9d ago
    I think "email" and "westlaw" fairly count as "the Internet." LLMs might be bigger than either of those.
    - samtp 9d ago
      The internet came well before both of those. And none of the example I gave have lead to lawyers regularly being fined in court because of "hallucinations"
  - alansaber 8d ago
    But emphasising "tech" advancements, that really only covers OCR.
- qarl 9d ago
  You should know - for coding they make terrible mistakes as well. But programmers have this concept of a "code review" where another person looks at the code to look for problems. We use this same technique with our LLMs. Most mistakes are caught by having a second LLM look at it. Doesn't even need to be a different model - just make sure it has a different context.
  - flyinglizard 9d ago
    Programming has a long standing culture of accepting the code to be somewhat wrong, so we have various tests, linters, reviews and error handling. Also in programming there are many ways to do something and it's the end result that matters most. Not so in other knowledge work. There's no test harness for a contract and error is non-recoverable. Likewise in finance. There are specific ways of doing things and these ways are many times set in regulations. LLMs can assist all day, sure. But replacing the human, in highly regulated, zero tolerance for error environment?
    - qarl 9d ago
      I don't understand. I just provided advice about getting better output. Are you trying to reply to someone else?
      - flyinglizard 9d ago
        You made some points worthy of expansion: >> You should know - for coding they make terrible mistakes as well. >> But programmers have this concept of a "code review" where another person looks at the code to look for problems.
    - jll29 9d ago
      You could say the Salvatorian Clause in contracts is like exception handling: a "catch (all)": even if some clauses in this contract are illegal, the remaining contract stays in place. Logically, this actually doesn't make sense strictly speaking because the sentence creates a paradox: doesn't it make clear whether it includes itself or not, and each reading ends up in trouble. There is a "tradition" in law around the world to accept the only benign reading of such clauses, which I always found funny given that in all other ways lawyers adopt the most adversarial mindset imaginable.
- cannonpalms 8d ago
  Law is certainly a less verifiable domain
- shim__ 8d ago
  I reckon law and medicine are really premier use case for llms since those areas are all about having vast knowledge(knowing all about obsure cases in law or about an very rare disease the average doctor wouldn't have heard about)
  - alansaber 8d ago
    I've heard this argument (basically, you can just have good legal skills and adapt your practice to more areas of law) but we're still pretty far from a layperson confidently navigating court (you could say the same about code).
- alansaber 8d ago
  That's exactly it. You basically can't set up deterministic regression tests, which makes development of (legal capabilities) even more abstract and messy.
charcircuit 9d ago
What model did you use?
Razengan 9d ago
> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience. The outcome of a case shouldn't depend on someone's fallible ability to recall facts or convince other people or point their index finger* Law should generally be deterministic. One's CHA stat should have no bearing on justice. There should still be human judges, but the middleman between the judge and petitioner could easily be removed, and have generally been seen as leeches since forever anyway. Though, like how the USA opts to remain in the Stone Age with regard to tax filing because of lobbying by tax software companies, this faction of society will flail the hardest before they admit they're obsolete. ---- * What's a lawyer's favorite programming language? Objection C.
- deleted 9d ago
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- geodel 9d ago
  Yep, just yesterday, Nike removed one leach middlemen called retailers and sell directly through their app. Turns out working out very well for them too.
  - cannonpalms 8d ago
    If you have been following this story for the past couple of years, this has been disastrous for Nike.
- samtp 9d ago
  The law is much more interpretation and argument based than logic routing based than you seem to believe.
- autoexec 9d ago
  The ability to clearly and effectively communicate, and the ability to know and recall the facts of a case is always going to be important. It'd probably be a more fair system if judges and jurors couldn't see the attorneys or even the people they're representing. Now that many cases are handled over video calls it'd be pretty easy to make that change. A lot of communication is conveyed through more than the words themselves though and even though it's often misinterpreted people put a lot of value in that information. I suspect that even if we took away the ability to see the people involved judges and jurors would still find bias in the tone/quality of people's voices. Even if everything was reduced to text they'd find bias based on word choices, phrasing, spelling, and grammar.
janalsncm 9d ago
The typical pattern is called “deskilling”. It doesn’t usually mean a skilled profession will disappear overnight. Instead, the job might be done by less expensive folks like paralegals. An example is in the banking industry, where making a loan used to require deep analysis of a person’s credit worthiness. Now they use an algorithm (credit scores) which means someone with less experience can do it. If law follows the same pattern, a job done by someone making $500/hour might be done by someone making $50/hour.
- samtp 9d ago
  If you think paralegals + AI can do the job of good lawyers you don't understand the profession at all.
  - notatoad 9d ago
    i don't think that's the point anybody is making. "good lawyers" is not the profession at risk here. a top tier courtroom lawyer won't be replaced by AI. but how much of the revenue of the average law firm comes from that, vs the day-to-day "we need this relatively routine contract reviewed" sort of work?
    - rayiner 9d ago
      Yes. And it would be the continuation of a trend that’s already been going on for two decades. When I started out as an associate at a fancy Wall Street firm, we had 30 people working on reviewing documents for this matter even that level of firm today would not be able to justify doing that anymore. We’re going to move from a pyramid model to more of a diamond shaped model with many fewer associated attorneys doing the legal research and information marshaling.
    - samtp 9d ago
      > Instead, the job might be done by less expensive folks like paralegals. So who is going to define your strategy, represent you in court, adapt the strategy to changing circumstances, negotiate with counter-parties on a mutually accepted settlement? A paralegal? An AI model? Please
CTDOCodebases 9d ago
Human professionals put their reputation and finances at risk when performing their work. This risk functions as a guarantee.
- moralestapia 9d ago
  Do they? Not being snarky here but I've encountered some really crappy lawyers and they seem to be doing great ($$$). It really sucks one cannot publish something like "this guy charged me $5k, wrote my name wrong and forgot important paperwork the day we showed up to court" as that could make you liable for damages. There should be a safe harbor for that.
  - YawningAngel 9d ago
    Assuming you are in the US, there is a safe harbour called "opinion based on disclosed facts" for that. You could also fairly argue that the conduct of a lawyer is a matter of public concern
  - bethekidyouwant 9d ago
    Even if there were it would just be another court case
  - TZubiri 9d ago
    > It really sucks one cannot publish something like "this guy charged me $5k, wrote my name wrong and forgot important paperwork the day we showed up to court" as that could make you liable for damages. That's pretty much what bar associations are for, filing a complaint against an attorney at the bar seems like a pretty standard procedure. >There should be a safe harbor for that. A safe harbor would be the opposite, it would be immunity for the lawyer.
  - CTDOCodebases 8d ago
    If you don't have the resources to defend yourself then it's probably not wise to publish things like this but you can tell others of your experience. Also for those things you could sue for damages or lodge a complaint for malpractice.
jcfrei 9d ago
Not trying to be dismissive here but a lawyer will always edit your proposal. I do think lawyers will persist but not as many. And they will work very differently, much like we already use claude / codex to code - a big part of the contract probably won't be read by the lawyer.
- cromka 9d ago
  I would rather argue they SPECIFICALLY will read everything. However, they'll likely often just be like "I'd phrase this differently but that works, too".
  - skeptic_ai 8d ago
    Have you watched Nathan for you? There is a lawyer that didn’t read on tv. And almost got in trouble.
- alansaber 8d ago
  I think the argument goes, even if 90% of a lawyers markups aren't useful, the 10% that are, are basically what you're paying them for.
ww520 9d ago
The best writer I know of was an associate attorney. He didn't have the technical background nor the in depth computer related knowledge, and relying on the information I fed him. But man the briefs he filed to the court were amazingly good. Reading them I would have been convinced his side was right if I were in the jury. Law LLM will surely help competent lawyers in their fields with greater sources of knowledge not in their core area of expertise.
- samtp 9d ago
  Sure as long as they stop making things up.
- cannonpalms 8d ago
  I don't want to imagine a world where juries were responsible for reading briefs and making decisions.
matheusmoreira 9d ago
> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think But will their glamorous salaries persist? That is the question that matters. AI doesn't need to wipe out lawyers. If they just depress salaries enough, virtually nobody is going to want to be a lawyer anymore.
- NoboruWataya 9d ago
  The salaries are a result of the insane hours they have to do. Biglaw needs to pay those salaries to keep getting young associates in the door because burnout is a real problem in the industry. If salaries were lower and hours/stresses were lower, you would probably still find people wanting to be lawyers. A different kind of person, maybe. (Not that I think AI will necessarily have that effect. We just don't know yet)
  - matheusmoreira 8d ago
    Salaries are about scarcity and leverage, they have little to do with working hours. Nurses pull insane hours and they still don't get paid as much as doctors. Very few people, if any, are going to bust ass in law school or medical school if they're not going to get rich off it. Better to do literally anything else.
    - NoboruWataya 8d ago
      In Biglaw, the scarcity is driven by the hours and stress. If it was a chilled 9-5 job you would certainly have more people willing to do it, even if it paid less.
- bethekidyouwant 9d ago
  It’s a professional organization that only allows so many people to pass the bar per year so I don’t see that changing anytime soon… if anything if they need fewer lawyers they will just pass fewer people to keep their wages high
  - deleted 9d ago
darth_avocado 9d ago
> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience This doesn’t replace lawyers, but paralegals surely will be affected. A good enough model could shrink the number of paralegals needed in a firm.
- snoman 9d ago
  As costs for legal work drop we might expect demand for that work to increase. For example, it may be the case that legal help becomes accessible to entire segments of the population that had no access previously.
- alansaber 8d ago
  A lot of paralegal work has already been eliminated by intake automation. OCR and text-to-speech kicked things off.
QuiEgo 9d ago
Lawyers sure. Paralegals and assistants are cooked in the way typist and secretaries were back in the day.
- moralestapia 9d ago
  Nope. Paralegals and assistants do the type of thing GP hired a lawyer for (and lawyers do, as well). Lawyers can practice, can represent you in court, etc. that's not going away soon.
  - dd8601fn 9d ago
    Lawyers have that lovely regulatory wall, for better or worse.
sick_of_slop 9d ago
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psadri 9d ago
I was in a similar situation and tried a different approach. I had start with asking for a contact with some details I provided. But then I ask the model to be an experienced corporate lawyer and ask me a series of questions to gather the details it needed and then write the contract. The result covered a lot of details that were highly relevant but were absent from the original attempt. The key insight is that you can lean on the model to cover your unknown unknowns.
- dghlsakjg 9d ago
  Did you validate the output with a lawyer?
  - psadri 9d ago
    No admittedly not. I can try it and report back.
- samtp 9d ago
  Your comment is a great example of the phenomenon where people think AI is an expert in areas that are not because they have no way to determine if the seemingly good looking result is genius, gibberish, or somewhere in between.
  - psadri 9d ago
    The point was that you can go further than "write me a contact that says x,y and z". I actually believe the process I went through with the AI was a more custom, tailored experience than any interaction I have had with actual lawyers, who'd usually apply a template. The AI asked me a bunch of questions, many of which were relevant, and led to follow up questions. I could ask my own questions, make corrections, etc. and all along, they made sense to me. This part of the experience was great. There could still be more unknowns that I did not encounter and by definition don't know about. And the final output could be wrong, wording, exact legal terminology etc. Can we say working with an actual lawyer is guaranteed to be better, more correct? Lawyers are people and they also make mistakes, wake up on the wrong side of the bed, hate their job etc, just like the rest of us.
Buttons840 9d ago
I want to take a step back and observe that you're saying expensive specialists will continue to be required if two parties want to make an agreement. That seems like something worth fixing rather than just accepting.
- jonplackett 9d ago
  The problem is those two people are in conflict not collaboration. If the expensive person is still better at getting what _you_ want from a contract then it’s always worth doing that. There’s a reason lawyers are so expensive to begin with - they do very complicated stuff with very expensive consequences if done badly.
  - SchemaLoad 9d ago
    It's probably somewhat of a zero sum game. Both sides lawyers have AI tools which probably just keeps them on a level playing field rather than actually making anything cheaper or faster.
    - jonplackett 9d ago
      I spoke to a very very high up corporate lawyer specialising in tech - so knows Ai is real. And they said AI contracts are the bane of their existence. They’d rather you arrive with no idea what you want than a contract partially written by AI. They said it usually takes longer with an AI starting point than starting from scratch.
- mcculley 9d ago
  In my experience, those expensive specialists help me protect against things me and the counterparty cannot even imagine when making an agreement. Do you mean that this would be fixed by AI or by making simpler agreements?
  - 1attice 8d ago
    It can imagine what yourself report that you cannot :)
drschwabe 9d ago
And to add to your last point yes it should also be like code: where the costs of development are coming down. Legal costs should trend down if law firms are effectively leveraging LLMs to accellerate their procedures (though I won't hold my breath)
andriy_koval 9d ago
He just gad better prompt
DesaiAshu 9d ago
In my recent experience, it seems like LLMs may even increase need/demand for actual lawyers (more ideas + more words = more lawyer time). I expect lawyers will generally adopt the technologies that will benefit them, rather than the technologies that would increase standardization and trust The same has happened with modern finance. Despite more technology that has power to drive more transparent/efficient markets, we have less perfect information sharing and a larger group of middlemen capturing a growing share of profits of the economy
- alansaber 8d ago
  I think you're onto something, but it'll be more of a reshaping of practitioner distribution to match the mode of work (perhaps fewer employment lawyers, many more litigators/ip litigators, etc...)
TZubiri 9d ago
>The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience At the very least because the attorney monopoly assigns a 5ish year of training as PoW and natural personhood as Identity as protection for Sybil Attacks. If anything, the exclusive right of attorneys to represent clients in court, file motions, and enjoy professional secret, is more valuable, as it's not something AI can ever compete at. (Barring a wild recognition of machines as humans, or an overturn of the impossibility of companies to appear in court.)
cheema33 9d ago
> The need for actual lawyers will persist.. I agree. But, we will need a lot fewer of them. My small company called our lawyer a lot more before the advent of AI. Mostly to clarify a few things or review simpler contracts. Now, for simple things, we do not call them at all.
- barbazoo 9d ago
  Their work will get cheaper so it will become more accessible for people, increasing demand over all would be my guess to some degree at least.
  - jll29 9d ago
    I anticipate an effect on society that troubles me: (1) Rich people will use human expertise and "the rest of us" will use AI models to get by. This could happen in law, but also in medicine (in particular in societies that - like in the US - do not have universal healthcare). (2) A positive effect in both domains may be that access to knowledge will be broader and cheaper. I hope I will be wrong about (1) - I would not like to live in such a two-class society.
    - alansaber 8d ago
      (1) already exists. A more banal example is rich people get their kids private tutors. Poor kids lean more on public resources, wiki, the youtube and the internet. Economic forces will always dictate this kind of change.
TZubiri 9d ago
> 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 I share this, when I asked an attorney for a contract, they were much simpler when compared to self redacted or AI redacted contract, it was as if I were rediscovering lots of concepts and I HAD to put them in paper, even if they were defaults and were essentially no-ops. Comparable to: > Mkdir $PWD/path instead of > mkdir path or conditions so rare that they don't merit including. > x = 0 > if x!=0: > raise Exception("Bit flip by solar rays or otherwise")
yieldcrv 9d ago
Our entire world is about reducing the friction of conducting a transaction How to fix the lack of trust which is needed to conduct a transaction Contracts affix a moment of trust in time, so even when trust is lost between parties the contract has guardrails for behavior and consequences for acting outside those rails There are many transactions that are completely inaccessible to most people because the need for a contract or lawyer is too high LLM use allows for those inaccessible transactions to decrease, and get people further along to the point where a lawyer is accessible as well, and economically viable to use
TZubiri 9d ago
It's worth noting that the announcement seems to aim the product at lawyers or students rather than laymen.
chadash 9d ago
I'd correct this to "The need for actual GOOD lawyers will persist I think from my own experience." I have worked with many lawyers in my career. The bad ones will look at a contract and tell you fifty things that can be improved. Meanwhile, you take the same contract to a really great lawyer and they tell you that's it's not worth fighting over the changes and to just keep it as is. It's kind of like how a beginner or intermediate software engineer might tell you how you can build out a k8s or auto-scaling fargate cluster for your project and a really senior engineer might look at the same thing and explain that it's not worth worrying about scalability right now. I find that when I feed contracts to ChatGPT (which I do all the time) it will try to find 50 things wrong with it. For example, as a test, i fed chatgpt an employment offer from a US government agency. It came back with 1152 words and 14 recommended (some of them substantial) changes. Meanwhile, any half-decent employment attorney would probably laugh at me if I asked them to redline an employment offer from the State Department.
- k099 9d ago
  YAGNI isn't just for software.
- mbreese 9d ago
  I’ve found that good lawyers are about getting things done. You could nitpick the terms of a contract, but would you rather buy the house or have a perfect contract? Once I realized that, my view of lawyers changed (for the better).
  - morgoo 8d ago
    Isn't that also what good software engineers are about?
- shim__ 8d ago
  > Meanwhile, any half-decent employment attorney would probably laugh at me if I asked them to redline an employment offer from the State Department. That might not be due to the contents but rather due to the fact that they won't negotiate I'd presume
01100011 9d ago
Also, unlike SW engineers, lawyers control their industry and will quickly circle the wagons to protect themselves. Paralegals are probably screwed, but lawyers will do fine. I'm considering law as my post-ai-SWE-apocolypse career path.
- mekael 9d ago
  I’m thinking asking the same lines, but also looking into research / lab chemist so I can hang out with my best friend. If im going to change careers so drastically, I might as well enjoy the company.
calvinmorrison 9d ago
"law" and those who pratice "law" have managed to place itself largly in a monopoly. This is a huge drain on the economy. Law is expensive and irrational.
- deleted 9d ago
  [deleted]
airstrike 9d ago
> One big thing was the overly excessive protective clauses which didn't make sense for reality or conflicted with another. I'm currently negotiating with someone who I feel is clearly using AI and this is EXACTLY what has been happening
skeptic_ai 8d ago
I got the exact opposite. A contract from a lawyer passed through ai found so many flaws.
someothherguyy 8d ago
you can't in imagine the same way you couldn't imagine generating the text from your initial prompt. when will the hubris end? some variant of "oh i am capable of generating text i know nothing about, but it helps to have a human i can rely on to tell me more about the text i know nothing about." pick up a bachelors degree worth of books to humble yourself
alansaber 8d ago
Yes the probabilistic smudging machine does not make many redlines with confidence, unless A) directed or B) it's a painfully out-of-distribution argument.
varispeed 8d ago
You should never rely on just one model. Use Opus Max for review and Sol Pro for drafting, then Gemini, CoPilot for additional "junior" reviews. Once passes make no material difference, feed it again to Sol Pro for review. At the end still worth checking with actual lawyer, but this way you might get document as good as it can get. Depending on the domain of course. (Fable and Astra are crap at these tasks)

rayiner 9d ago

LLMs 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 9d ago
I 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 9d 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.
- rayiner 9d ago
  I think "email" and "westlaw" fairly count as "the Internet." LLMs might be bigger than either of those.
  - samtp 9d ago
    The internet came well before both of those. And none of the example I gave have lead to lawyers regularly being fined in court because of "hallucinations"
- alansaber 8d ago
  But emphasising "tech" advancements, that really only covers OCR.
qarl 9d ago
You should know - for coding they make terrible mistakes as well. But programmers have this concept of a "code review" where another person looks at the code to look for problems. We use this same technique with our LLMs. Most mistakes are caught by having a second LLM look at it. Doesn't even need to be a different model - just make sure it has a different context.
- flyinglizard 9d ago
  Programming has a long standing culture of accepting the code to be somewhat wrong, so we have various tests, linters, reviews and error handling. Also in programming there are many ways to do something and it's the end result that matters most. Not so in other knowledge work. There's no test harness for a contract and error is non-recoverable. Likewise in finance. There are specific ways of doing things and these ways are many times set in regulations. LLMs can assist all day, sure. But replacing the human, in highly regulated, zero tolerance for error environment?
  - qarl 9d ago
    I don't understand. I just provided advice about getting better output. Are you trying to reply to someone else?
    - flyinglizard 9d ago
      You made some points worthy of expansion: >> You should know - for coding they make terrible mistakes as well. >> But programmers have this concept of a "code review" where another person looks at the code to look for problems.
  - jll29 9d ago
    You could say the Salvatorian Clause in contracts is like exception handling: a "catch (all)": even if some clauses in this contract are illegal, the remaining contract stays in place. Logically, this actually doesn't make sense strictly speaking because the sentence creates a paradox: doesn't it make clear whether it includes itself or not, and each reading ends up in trouble. There is a "tradition" in law around the world to accept the only benign reading of such clauses, which I always found funny given that in all other ways lawyers adopt the most adversarial mindset imaginable.
cannonpalms 8d ago
Law is certainly a less verifiable domain
shim__ 8d ago
I reckon law and medicine are really premier use case for llms since those areas are all about having vast knowledge(knowing all about obsure cases in law or about an very rare disease the average doctor wouldn't have heard about)
- alansaber 8d ago
  I've heard this argument (basically, you can just have good legal skills and adapt your practice to more areas of law) but we're still pretty far from a layperson confidently navigating court (you could say the same about code).
alansaber 8d ago
That's exactly it. You basically can't set up deterministic regression tests, which makes development of (legal capabilities) even more abstract and messy.

charcircuit 9d ago

What model did you use?

Razengan 9d ago

> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience. The outcome of a case shouldn't depend on someone's fallible ability to recall facts or convince other people or point their index finger* Law should generally be deterministic. One's CHA stat should have no bearing on justice. There should still be human judges, but the middleman between the judge and petitioner could easily be removed, and have generally been seen as leeches since forever anyway. Though, like how the USA opts to remain in the Stone Age with regard to tax filing because of lobbying by tax software companies, this faction of society will flail the hardest before they admit they're obsolete. ---- * What's a lawyer's favorite programming language? Objection C.

deleted 9d ago
[deleted]
geodel 9d ago
Yep, just yesterday, Nike removed one leach middlemen called retailers and sell directly through their app. Turns out working out very well for them too.
- cannonpalms 8d ago
  If you have been following this story for the past couple of years, this has been disastrous for Nike.
samtp 9d ago
The law is much more interpretation and argument based than logic routing based than you seem to believe.
autoexec 9d ago
The ability to clearly and effectively communicate, and the ability to know and recall the facts of a case is always going to be important. It'd probably be a more fair system if judges and jurors couldn't see the attorneys or even the people they're representing. Now that many cases are handled over video calls it'd be pretty easy to make that change. A lot of communication is conveyed through more than the words themselves though and even though it's often misinterpreted people put a lot of value in that information. I suspect that even if we took away the ability to see the people involved judges and jurors would still find bias in the tone/quality of people's voices. Even if everything was reduced to text they'd find bias based on word choices, phrasing, spelling, and grammar.

janalsncm 9d ago

The typical pattern is called “deskilling”. It doesn’t usually mean a skilled profession will disappear overnight. Instead, the job might be done by less expensive folks like paralegals. An example is in the banking industry, where making a loan used to require deep analysis of a person’s credit worthiness. Now they use an algorithm (credit scores) which means someone with less experience can do it. If law follows the same pattern, a job done by someone making $500/hour might be done by someone making $50/hour.

samtp 9d ago
If you think paralegals + AI can do the job of good lawyers you don't understand the profession at all.
- notatoad 9d ago
  i don't think that's the point anybody is making. "good lawyers" is not the profession at risk here. a top tier courtroom lawyer won't be replaced by AI. but how much of the revenue of the average law firm comes from that, vs the day-to-day "we need this relatively routine contract reviewed" sort of work?
  - rayiner 9d ago
    Yes. And it would be the continuation of a trend that’s already been going on for two decades. When I started out as an associate at a fancy Wall Street firm, we had 30 people working on reviewing documents for this matter even that level of firm today would not be able to justify doing that anymore. We’re going to move from a pyramid model to more of a diamond shaped model with many fewer associated attorneys doing the legal research and information marshaling.
  - samtp 9d ago
    > Instead, the job might be done by less expensive folks like paralegals. So who is going to define your strategy, represent you in court, adapt the strategy to changing circumstances, negotiate with counter-parties on a mutually accepted settlement? A paralegal? An AI model? Please

CTDOCodebases 9d ago

Human professionals put their reputation and finances at risk when performing their work. This risk functions as a guarantee.

moralestapia 9d ago
Do they? Not being snarky here but I've encountered some really crappy lawyers and they seem to be doing great ($$$). It really sucks one cannot publish something like "this guy charged me $5k, wrote my name wrong and forgot important paperwork the day we showed up to court" as that could make you liable for damages. There should be a safe harbor for that.
- YawningAngel 9d ago
  Assuming you are in the US, there is a safe harbour called "opinion based on disclosed facts" for that. You could also fairly argue that the conduct of a lawyer is a matter of public concern
- bethekidyouwant 9d ago
  Even if there were it would just be another court case
- TZubiri 9d ago
  > It really sucks one cannot publish something like "this guy charged me $5k, wrote my name wrong and forgot important paperwork the day we showed up to court" as that could make you liable for damages. That's pretty much what bar associations are for, filing a complaint against an attorney at the bar seems like a pretty standard procedure. >There should be a safe harbor for that. A safe harbor would be the opposite, it would be immunity for the lawyer.
- CTDOCodebases 8d ago
  If you don't have the resources to defend yourself then it's probably not wise to publish things like this but you can tell others of your experience. Also for those things you could sue for damages or lodge a complaint for malpractice.

jcfrei 9d ago

Not trying to be dismissive here but a lawyer will always edit your proposal. I do think lawyers will persist but not as many. And they will work very differently, much like we already use claude / codex to code - a big part of the contract probably won't be read by the lawyer.

cromka 9d ago
I would rather argue they SPECIFICALLY will read everything. However, they'll likely often just be like "I'd phrase this differently but that works, too".
- skeptic_ai 8d ago
  Have you watched Nathan for you? There is a lawyer that didn’t read on tv. And almost got in trouble.
alansaber 8d ago
I think the argument goes, even if 90% of a lawyers markups aren't useful, the 10% that are, are basically what you're paying them for.

ww520 9d ago

The best writer I know of was an associate attorney. He didn't have the technical background nor the in depth computer related knowledge, and relying on the information I fed him. But man the briefs he filed to the court were amazingly good. Reading them I would have been convinced his side was right if I were in the jury. Law LLM will surely help competent lawyers in their fields with greater sources of knowledge not in their core area of expertise.

samtp 9d ago
Sure as long as they stop making things up.
cannonpalms 8d ago
I don't want to imagine a world where juries were responsible for reading briefs and making decisions.

matheusmoreira 9d ago

> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think But will their glamorous salaries persist? That is the question that matters. AI doesn't need to wipe out lawyers. If they just depress salaries enough, virtually nobody is going to want to be a lawyer anymore.

NoboruWataya 9d ago
The salaries are a result of the insane hours they have to do. Biglaw needs to pay those salaries to keep getting young associates in the door because burnout is a real problem in the industry. If salaries were lower and hours/stresses were lower, you would probably still find people wanting to be lawyers. A different kind of person, maybe. (Not that I think AI will necessarily have that effect. We just don't know yet)
- matheusmoreira 8d ago
  Salaries are about scarcity and leverage, they have little to do with working hours. Nurses pull insane hours and they still don't get paid as much as doctors. Very few people, if any, are going to bust ass in law school or medical school if they're not going to get rich off it. Better to do literally anything else.
  - NoboruWataya 8d ago
    In Biglaw, the scarcity is driven by the hours and stress. If it was a chilled 9-5 job you would certainly have more people willing to do it, even if it paid less.
bethekidyouwant 9d ago
It’s a professional organization that only allows so many people to pass the bar per year so I don’t see that changing anytime soon… if anything if they need fewer lawyers they will just pass fewer people to keep their wages high
- deleted 9d ago

darth_avocado 9d ago

> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience This doesn’t replace lawyers, but paralegals surely will be affected. A good enough model could shrink the number of paralegals needed in a firm.

snoman 9d ago
As costs for legal work drop we might expect demand for that work to increase. For example, it may be the case that legal help becomes accessible to entire segments of the population that had no access previously.
alansaber 8d ago
A lot of paralegal work has already been eliminated by intake automation. OCR and text-to-speech kicked things off.

QuiEgo 9d ago

Lawyers sure. Paralegals and assistants are cooked in the way typist and secretaries were back in the day.

moralestapia 9d ago
Nope. Paralegals and assistants do the type of thing GP hired a lawyer for (and lawyers do, as well). Lawyers can practice, can represent you in court, etc. that's not going away soon.
- dd8601fn 9d ago
  Lawyers have that lovely regulatory wall, for better or worse.

sick_of_slop 9d ago

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psadri 9d ago

I was in a similar situation and tried a different approach. I had start with asking for a contact with some details I provided. But then I ask the model to be an experienced corporate lawyer and ask me a series of questions to gather the details it needed and then write the contract. The result covered a lot of details that were highly relevant but were absent from the original attempt. The key insight is that you can lean on the model to cover your unknown unknowns.

dghlsakjg 9d ago
Did you validate the output with a lawyer?
- psadri 9d ago
  No admittedly not. I can try it and report back.
samtp 9d ago
Your comment is a great example of the phenomenon where people think AI is an expert in areas that are not because they have no way to determine if the seemingly good looking result is genius, gibberish, or somewhere in between.
- psadri 9d ago
  The point was that you can go further than "write me a contact that says x,y and z". I actually believe the process I went through with the AI was a more custom, tailored experience than any interaction I have had with actual lawyers, who'd usually apply a template. The AI asked me a bunch of questions, many of which were relevant, and led to follow up questions. I could ask my own questions, make corrections, etc. and all along, they made sense to me. This part of the experience was great. There could still be more unknowns that I did not encounter and by definition don't know about. And the final output could be wrong, wording, exact legal terminology etc. Can we say working with an actual lawyer is guaranteed to be better, more correct? Lawyers are people and they also make mistakes, wake up on the wrong side of the bed, hate their job etc, just like the rest of us.

Buttons840 9d ago

I want to take a step back and observe that you're saying expensive specialists will continue to be required if two parties want to make an agreement. That seems like something worth fixing rather than just accepting.

jonplackett 9d ago
The problem is those two people are in conflict not collaboration. If the expensive person is still better at getting what _you_ want from a contract then it’s always worth doing that. There’s a reason lawyers are so expensive to begin with - they do very complicated stuff with very expensive consequences if done badly.
- SchemaLoad 9d ago
  It's probably somewhat of a zero sum game. Both sides lawyers have AI tools which probably just keeps them on a level playing field rather than actually making anything cheaper or faster.
  - jonplackett 9d ago
    I spoke to a very very high up corporate lawyer specialising in tech - so knows Ai is real. And they said AI contracts are the bane of their existence. They’d rather you arrive with no idea what you want than a contract partially written by AI. They said it usually takes longer with an AI starting point than starting from scratch.
mcculley 9d ago
In my experience, those expensive specialists help me protect against things me and the counterparty cannot even imagine when making an agreement. Do you mean that this would be fixed by AI or by making simpler agreements?
- 1attice 8d ago
  It can imagine what yourself report that you cannot :)

drschwabe 9d ago

And to add to your last point yes it should also be like code: where the costs of development are coming down. Legal costs should trend down if law firms are effectively leveraging LLMs to accellerate their procedures (though I won't hold my breath)

andriy_koval 9d ago

He just gad better prompt

DesaiAshu 9d ago

In my recent experience, it seems like LLMs may even increase need/demand for actual lawyers (more ideas + more words = more lawyer time). I expect lawyers will generally adopt the technologies that will benefit them, rather than the technologies that would increase standardization and trust The same has happened with modern finance. Despite more technology that has power to drive more transparent/efficient markets, we have less perfect information sharing and a larger group of middlemen capturing a growing share of profits of the economy

alansaber 8d ago
I think you're onto something, but it'll be more of a reshaping of practitioner distribution to match the mode of work (perhaps fewer employment lawyers, many more litigators/ip litigators, etc...)

TZubiri 9d ago

>The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience At the very least because the attorney monopoly assigns a 5ish year of training as PoW and natural personhood as Identity as protection for Sybil Attacks. If anything, the exclusive right of attorneys to represent clients in court, file motions, and enjoy professional secret, is more valuable, as it's not something AI can ever compete at. (Barring a wild recognition of machines as humans, or an overturn of the impossibility of companies to appear in court.)

cheema33 9d ago

> The need for actual lawyers will persist.. I agree. But, we will need a lot fewer of them. My small company called our lawyer a lot more before the advent of AI. Mostly to clarify a few things or review simpler contracts. Now, for simple things, we do not call them at all.

barbazoo 9d ago
Their work will get cheaper so it will become more accessible for people, increasing demand over all would be my guess to some degree at least.
- jll29 9d ago
  I anticipate an effect on society that troubles me: (1) Rich people will use human expertise and "the rest of us" will use AI models to get by. This could happen in law, but also in medicine (in particular in societies that - like in the US - do not have universal healthcare). (2) A positive effect in both domains may be that access to knowledge will be broader and cheaper. I hope I will be wrong about (1) - I would not like to live in such a two-class society.
  - alansaber 8d ago
    (1) already exists. A more banal example is rich people get their kids private tutors. Poor kids lean more on public resources, wiki, the youtube and the internet. Economic forces will always dictate this kind of change.

TZubiri 9d ago

> 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 I share this, when I asked an attorney for a contract, they were much simpler when compared to self redacted or AI redacted contract, it was as if I were rediscovering lots of concepts and I HAD to put them in paper, even if they were defaults and were essentially no-ops. Comparable to: > Mkdir $PWD/path instead of > mkdir path or conditions so rare that they don't merit including. > x = 0 > if x!=0: > raise Exception("Bit flip by solar rays or otherwise")

yieldcrv 9d ago

Our entire world is about reducing the friction of conducting a transaction How to fix the lack of trust which is needed to conduct a transaction Contracts affix a moment of trust in time, so even when trust is lost between parties the contract has guardrails for behavior and consequences for acting outside those rails There are many transactions that are completely inaccessible to most people because the need for a contract or lawyer is too high LLM use allows for those inaccessible transactions to decrease, and get people further along to the point where a lawyer is accessible as well, and economically viable to use

TZubiri 9d ago

It's worth noting that the announcement seems to aim the product at lawyers or students rather than laymen.

chadash 9d ago

I'd correct this to "The need for actual GOOD lawyers will persist I think from my own experience." I have worked with many lawyers in my career. The bad ones will look at a contract and tell you fifty things that can be improved. Meanwhile, you take the same contract to a really great lawyer and they tell you that's it's not worth fighting over the changes and to just keep it as is. It's kind of like how a beginner or intermediate software engineer might tell you how you can build out a k8s or auto-scaling fargate cluster for your project and a really senior engineer might look at the same thing and explain that it's not worth worrying about scalability right now. I find that when I feed contracts to ChatGPT (which I do all the time) it will try to find 50 things wrong with it. For example, as a test, i fed chatgpt an employment offer from a US government agency. It came back with 1152 words and 14 recommended (some of them substantial) changes. Meanwhile, any half-decent employment attorney would probably laugh at me if I asked them to redline an employment offer from the State Department.

k099 9d ago
YAGNI isn't just for software.
mbreese 9d ago
I’ve found that good lawyers are about getting things done. You could nitpick the terms of a contract, but would you rather buy the house or have a perfect contract? Once I realized that, my view of lawyers changed (for the better).
- morgoo 8d ago
  Isn't that also what good software engineers are about?
shim__ 8d ago
> Meanwhile, any half-decent employment attorney would probably laugh at me if I asked them to redline an employment offer from the State Department. That might not be due to the contents but rather due to the fact that they won't negotiate I'd presume

01100011 9d ago

Also, unlike SW engineers, lawyers control their industry and will quickly circle the wagons to protect themselves. Paralegals are probably screwed, but lawyers will do fine. I'm considering law as my post-ai-SWE-apocolypse career path.

mekael 9d ago
I’m thinking asking the same lines, but also looking into research / lab chemist so I can hang out with my best friend. If im going to change careers so drastically, I might as well enjoy the company.

calvinmorrison 9d ago

"law" and those who pratice "law" have managed to place itself largly in a monopoly. This is a huge drain on the economy. Law is expensive and irrational.

deleted 9d ago
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airstrike 9d ago

> One big thing was the overly excessive protective clauses which didn't make sense for reality or conflicted with another. I'm currently negotiating with someone who I feel is clearly using AI and this is EXACTLY what has been happening

skeptic_ai 8d ago

I got the exact opposite. A contract from a lawyer passed through ai found so many flaws.

someothherguyy 8d ago

you can't in imagine the same way you couldn't imagine generating the text from your initial prompt. when will the hubris end? some variant of "oh i am capable of generating text i know nothing about, but it helps to have a human i can rely on to tell me more about the text i know nothing about." pick up a bachelors degree worth of books to humble yourself

alansaber 8d ago

Yes the probabilistic smudging machine does not make many redlines with confidence, unless A) directed or B) it's a painfully out-of-distribution argument.

varispeed 8d ago

You should never rely on just one model. Use Opus Max for review and Sol Pro for drafting, then Gemini, CoPilot for additional "junior" reviews. Once passes make no material difference, feed it again to Sol Pro for review. At the end still worth checking with actual lawyer, but this way you might get document as good as it can get. Depending on the domain of course. (Fable and Astra are crap at these tasks)