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- Hacker News
- A related question for me is to ask when will lawmakers begin using AI to better integrate new law into the existing framework?by lebuffon
- The posted article is about law school, but the comments are focusing on practice. These overlap but are not the same.
“Lawyer” is one of many possible career paths. Law graduates are uniquely qualified as premium law-aware generalists. In my opinion, there is no better education to prepare for future business uncertainty.
by Kaibeezy - This is a more reasoned take than most reactions to AI. But nobody wants to consider the possibility that maybe we won't actually need what was traditionally called lawyers in the mid/near term future; certainly before the new grad's careers are up.
I would never expect Harvard Law school to admit this, their hands are tied by many interests, but IMO they still aren't being pragmatic enough to evolve.
I would make the courses 50% AI based immediately, the other 50% being based on validating and applying the AI's work with traditional rigorous work. Anyone who rejects this should drop out, because they won't have a career anyway. And if Harvard Law disagrees then they can find out how meaningful their degrees are going to be in 10 years.
by avaer - Problem is. The law isn't actually what is written. Lawyers aren't truthful or honest. Being a lawyer is just getting a licence to lie in court, and for some reason the judge takes it seriously.
Lawyers are going to use ai, because it's easy. The only time they won't is when the AI won't come up with a plausible enough excuse. The lawyer will always have a job, because a non lawyer using the same arguments will be ignored.
So these are rules to maintain the appearance that the system has integrity.
And that's the annoying thing. They know what integrity and justice and fairness look like, just as the rest of the justice system does, but they ignore it all.
At this point, it would be preferable for both sides to put their argument to an AI and let the AI decide what is fair. Wouldn't be any worse than judges who were themselves lawyers looking after their own.
Sorry for the rant, I've had experience of the 'justice' system.
by benj111 - This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided.
Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree. But this is “just another an AI cycle” and if you’re a practitioner it does look different than the previous ones.
However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were massively impactful technologies.
What you are actively seeing happening now are institutions saying “we have to change the way that we practice” “the way that we did business before is no longer as applicable as it’s going to be changing very rapidly in the future and we’re going to have to deal with that.”
That is not coming from investors or technology companies. That is coming from people who are utilizing this stuff and being impacted by it
So it is absolutely the case that there’s going to be some kind of financial changes but just like every other AI cycle we are left with a aggressively more capable technology that is more pervasive.
Everybody needs to be taking that seriously.
- > Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree.
This is what people mean when they say it's a bubble.
by Ampersander - > This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided.
A bubble doesn’t say anything about how useful the underlying technology is. We are in an AI bubble, in the sense that the allocated resources is completely out of line with the underlying businesses. AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble
by dgellow - The bubble is about the market you wally not about whether statistical models are useful.
I wish people would stop being so dense.
by hatefulheart - > However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet.
Yes they were. Educators have been talking about how access to the internet has affected their students learning since forever. We were cautioned and had dedicated classes to teach us to be critical of different sources, teaching us what Wikipedia could and could not be used for. The internet was deliberately turned off for our exams.
Crypto too was seen as culturally important, papers were written by otherwise well respected authors. We were expected to read some whitepapers about crypto. Interestingly, reading those papers only made us more sure it was a scam.
You're rewriting history to make this moment seem different, it is not.
by delusional - > However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were massively impactful technologies.
How has crypto been massively impactful?
by KPGv2 - I am at a company that currently has a whole bunch of lawyers, because we are dealing with multi-year >100s million infra projects.
One of the things that AI has helped with is automatic breech notifications. They are largely proforma, but depending on which generation of contract they are notifying from, subtle changes are needed.
Law is mostly highly structured text, and you know what loves highly structured and documented text? LLMs.
Legal LLMs do share the same issue with coding LLMs, they tend to default to lazy/insecure. Its not the case where you as a non-lawyer can prompt it to make a "water tight" contract from scratch.
by KaiserPro - AI is a real thing and it's the most significant development in the legal sector since the Internet. Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery, which before would've taken me the whole day. Even if it never gets any better it's a huge step forward. It's not only going to change legal education, it's going to change what the pipeline looks like in law firms. Similarly to the changes I expect to see in any kind of white collar job where AI replaces a lot of the data analysis/data transformation work, leaving people to do more human interaction.by rayiner
- > our graduates will be expected to be prepared to use them in legal practice.
But then why do I need a lawyer?
I do watch Travis's videos. Ever since he integrated AI, the video quality dropped immensely and it became really stupid, compared to his older videos. AI degraded the quality and discussions he used to have with law enforcement too, it's quite sad actually.
by shevy-java - It’s interesting to think that the “public speaking skills” aspect of some legal jobs will probably continue to be AI-proof for the indefinite future. No one is going to present ChatGPT on an iPad as their defense attorney.
On the other hand, the paperwork-first side of law is probably in for a tough future. Especially if your clients are not big corporations or rich celebrities.
In general I think my advice to young people is: focus on social skills, public speaking, etc. These are not going to be replaced by robots in your lifetime.
by keiferski - > No one is going to present ChatGPT on an iPad as their defense attorney.
That already happened! https://youtu.be/MkmfZPt-gaw?si=gk1k3sGsFq9npp0X
by dgellow - Even small corporations have a huge need for paperwork in terms of contract negotiation and redlining agreements. Some of this can be partially automated but the real value an experienced attorney brings is in knowing how those issues fit into the larger business context, and deciding what to press on or concede.by nradov
- I think more universities will follow. Every prof I speak to has noticed shorter attention spans, low effort LLM writing, and inability to assess competence.by JSR_FDED
- I recent beat an actual lawyer as a pro se plaintiff in a civil suit. It was all codex and claude, using the cli agents to write the "import docx" scripts that wrote all the filings, and scripts to assemble exhibits. I don't know how long the bars will be able to hold onto their monopoly powers when confronted with LLMs that are measurably superior.by agentprose
- > I recent beat an actual lawyer as a pro se plaintiff in a civil suit.
So? I beat actual lawyers in trials and hearings five times between 2008 and 2019. That last one was actually a team of attorney + advocate (senior bar member).
You could always "beat" them just by reading and preparing. Now, you+AI beat a lawyer. Tomorrow, do you really think that you+AI will beat lawyer+AI?
And once we stop getting well-trained lawyers (because everyone is just a meatbag accessory to an AI), whether you win or not is likely to be a coin toss.
by lelanthran - That's cool, but bear in mind that courts in the United States are generally required to be a little more lax in their enforcement of procedural rules when a party is pro se. Not saying you did make mistakes, but if you did, you may have gotten a pass.
Additionally, you haven't given any of the details of your case, so I'm going to assume you were simply in a position where the facts of your case weighed heavily in your substantive favor, and no amount of legal maneuvers by the defendant would have made a difference.
There's nothing magical about lawyers. They are mostly just boring, studious people who excelled in non-STEM academics and were good at memorization and test taking. If you have a strong case, it won't matter very much who the lawyer is on the other side.
- Is it perhaps possible that you won your case because you didn't break the law, or conversely because the other party did break the law? Unless ChatGPT persuaded a judge to side in your favor even though you were legally in the wrong, this really doesn't tell us anything at all. (And even in that circumstance, it might speak more to the complete incompetence of the other party's legal representation.)
- I've seen lawyers lose to non-lawyers who didn't use all that, just because the lawyers didn't do their work, thinking, no doubt, "I'm a lawyer I will just win", at any rate there is a well known aphorism that a lawyer who represents themselves has a fool for a client.
finally, was this thing you beat the actual lawyer at in their specific specialty, since lawyers are often focused on particular aspects of the law?
- As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week and most of them have 10-20 serious drafting errors on them. The most common ones are of the order of defining the same concept like 'a working day' in various conflicting ways without every specifying when which of the conflicting definitions should be used. Lawyers still have something to add to process but for every time they catch AI out on them, the machine is usually already 10-1 ahead.by kozzion
- Most people are terrible at what they do, period, regardless of profession.by dozerly
- Wonderful, I'm tired of lawyers. Happy to see that evolve and figure out how to provide actual value for its cost.by hmokiguess
- I have the impression that most law firms consume and produce documentation by means of a cadre of paralegals who are minimally trained, minimally experienced, and maximally stressed by the pressure of deadlines and case loads. These paralegals are probably working to read hundreds of pages of legal filings and make sense out of them, and on the other end, they are working to produce as much documentation as possible and that's going to be by cut-and-paste assembly. So no, they are not going to understand stuff very well, and no, their output is not really going to be consistent or intelligible. But the managing attorneys depend on these paralegals to get anything done, just like Congresspeople rely on their staffers to actually read bills and draft legislation.
At the end of the day, I think these paralegals have been quite weak links, and nearly nobody will notice a difference in quality when it's all handed over to LLMs. But the paralegals will lose their jobs, and probably have nothing better to do than purchase angle grinders and cut down Flock camera poles, or crown the front hood of Waymos with a traffic pylon.
- But the real question is 1) whether other human lawyers would catch the error 2) in how much time 3) which of the errors introduced by AI vs. human would have bigger consequences. On 1 and 2 the answers are very likely to be "yes" and "it would take humans more time", but the question that really matters is 3.by bonzini
- > most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week
I hope the irony is lost on no one that "Attention Is All You Need" was the paper that kicked the LLM boom off.
Part of the distinction between a how good one lawyer will be vs another is exactly that: attention to detail. And, as a trade, a practice, it seems like a skill that they try to hammer into the people who pursue this career (to varying degrees of success clearly).
It makes the last 20 years of leet code hiring look downright wrong. Your ability to recall what sorting algo to use, or solve some brain teaser conveys nothing about your ability to read (massive amounts) of code, and think critically about it.
by zer00eyz - > most human lawyers are absolutely terrible.
I think this extends to the other areas that AI is also disrupting.
Software engineers are also absolutely terrible: In being sloppy with handling errors, doing coercions, etc. All because always engineering after best practice simply takes too much time and mental load.
The real disruption from AI is likely that it does not get mentally fatigue. It can keep on, launch adversarial audits, make sure that everything is up to all standards.
by tossandthrow - > As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible
This is many people at many jobs. We continue to see this weird thing when AI comes into an industry that suddenly the product being produced by the people was perfect/amazing/whatever. Maybe that's true for the majority of HN who are lucky enough to work with experts in every field, but in the general population that's simply not the case.
Many doctors, lawyers, and programmers are not very good at their jobs - I've seen it first hand. AI gives the general population a way to steer around these people a bit, and maybe ask the right questions. Is it perfect? Nope, but it's often better than the people someone has access to.
by matwood