Comment by mrleiter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrleiter | Hacker News Reader

> "I strongly believe that law students and junior lawyers need to understand these AI tools, and other technologies, that will help make them better lawyers and shape future legal practice," Buell told Mashable in an email.

I am a law student and that is not what is going through my head. What I see is a tougher job market, justifiably. Understanding, and more importantly, developing legal tech will help me make to be a better lawyer; since I am not already on top of the food chain, we (as graduates) will be eaten away.

Also: it is important to keep in mind that this is strictly contract law. Criminal and maybe to some extent tort law will be in the hands of real people for some foreseeable time, at least in regards to representation. Representation must not be strictly seen in a legal manner. As a lawyer you are also a fellow human with emotions, who must weigh pros and cons specifically adapted to your client. And that, right now, is a human thing only.

Research and drafting documents - that I believe will also be dominated by AI. Simply because economies of scale and cost/effectiveness ratio.

Couple of thoughts.

My wife was a law firm junior associate in the banking law group of a major firm during the S&L crisis. She spent a lot of time on the due diligence work involved in merging sick S&L's into each other. I suspect that if faced with a similar Augean stable, having auto-summarization and auto-triage would be a hugely beneficial. True, need for fewer junior associates since they are looking only at exception documents and otherwise tuning the "queries", for lack of a better term. But I think it would help even out the work load and the net impact is a healthier organizational structure. (That experience made her rethink her career path, she ended up in corporate practice doing software licensing.)

In the area of patent law, claims have a very regular structure and I think their analysis would yield to analysis given the current state of machine learning. Given the stakes involved, it seems to me that automated claims checking and claims analysis would help everyone. Patent firms could produced better work product in less time. There is no great surplus of patent attorneys, and given the time and cost constraints, many companies pursuing patents tend to establish a budget and attack patents in priority order until the budget is gone. I don't think patent firms will end up billing any less in total, but simply bill the same for more patents each completed for less money. As a small-time inventor, this would be good, because if you only want one patent, you see your costs reduced.

And then you end up writing text in a way that fools auto summarizing AI. War against AI starts in law.

In a way, the way contracts and legal documents are written now are already an antagonistic optimization against humans natural language ability. A typical contract is pretty difficult for a human to parse without experience. Imagine how much more tricky and complex legalese can get if lawyers start battling machines!

This. So much this. One big problem with AI/ML as is currently eating the world is that it's just a really fancy averaging engine. It memorizes (incredibly, beautifully, superhumanly) but it doesn't really actually understand. There's a whole spate of "lets trick the AI" in image processing, I have to believe that there are easy ways to do the same with text.

That said, one counterargument could be that obfuscating an AI will lead to more confusing contracts which could actually end up making them harder to enforce. So perhaps in this case there's a counter-force.

>There's a whole spate of "lets trick the AI" in image processing

Check out this "let's trick the human" in image processing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion

"Let's trick the human" is already a large part of law.

I read a great, great paper about training systems against this. Obfuscation is currently easy against AI, but obfuscation that fools an AI and a human could still detect (Purposeful perturbations). This can be pre-trained against by incorporating such perturbations programmatically during training.

Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.06640.pdf

What I see is a tougher job market, justifiably

Yeah, as this kind of software progresses, fewer people will be required to do one of the main jobs that lawyers do well - reading through tons of legal documents.

Additionally, even mediocre attorneys and paralegals will be able to provide a good level of service by leveraging the software.

What will happen is that the industry will need to focus on higher-level tasks to find productive work.

Sorry to sound cynical, but unfortunately for the rest of us, idle lawyers usually do a great job of creating new work for other lawyers out of thin air.

Like I've always said: when a medical doctor runs out of patients, he can't just go around breaking peoples' legs to make more work. Lawyers, however, can cause a great deal of destruction when they want something to do. That destruction creates work for yet more lawyers. The ultimate display of that ability is when they go into politics. :)

The AI's effect is that some tasks get automated and require much less labor but in many cases a real human lawyer is still required to communicate with the client.

* Does that mean some lawyers or law firms which make good use of the technology might offer lower prices and gain market share?

* Is there latent demand that may be induced into the legal market once the costs are cheaper?

* Can lawyers retrain to specialize in other laws and thus increase supply and lower costs for less automatable areas over time?

I know little about the legal market. So I'm curious if the above analysis makes sense for it.

I'm thinking this effects paralegal services more than legal services.

- email/scan docs get a highlighted doc back to review with clients, possibly with citations to the legal justification etc.

Premise: I study in Austria, so this is the Austrian legal market.

> Does that mean some lawyers or law firms which make good use of the technology might offer lower prices and gain market share?

In law, lower prices do not necessarily reflect on getting bigger market share. A lot of clients come from hear-say or publicly defended or publicly known cases. When such companies make good use of such technology they will most definitely gain market share by being able to accept more clients/increase "output" so to speak.

> Is there latent demand that may be induced into the legal market once the costs are cheaper?

That I unfortunately cannot answer, but interesting question!

> Can lawyers retrain to specialize in other laws and thus increase supply and lower costs for less automatable areas over time?

In Austria, that is common practice for law firms. You generally do a broad service, usually only divided into criminal law and tort/contract law and maybe public law. But within those, you specialise (e.g. NDAs etc...). Lawyers tend not to retrain, rather hire someone who is trained in specified subject. So maybe yes, "AI-hostile" trained lawysers will tend to be more sought after. Whether that is in criminal law or somewhere else, I cannot say.

> Is there latent demand that may be induced into the legal market once the costs are cheaper?

If I could get legal documents reviewed cheap (10-20 bucks ?) and fast for problems (new job contracts for example), I'd happily pay for that !

I don't "have a lawyer", and always have had the (probably wrong admittedly) feeling I'll go bankrupt just saying hello to one...

> The AI's effect is that some tasks get automated and require much less labor but in many cases a real human lawyer is still required to communicate with the client.

For every 1 lawyer in front of a client or jury, there are dozens if not hundreds of lawyers doing grunt work. The vast majority of legal work is reading documents. That's what most lawyers do and it pays well. If that goes, it's going to put a significant pressure on profession and wages.

It's going to be great for the top lawyers at top firms as they can charge more, work more clients and their overhead drops significantly.

Should be interesting how things pan out.

As a lawyer I'm extremely skeptical about this contract reading software displacing any lawyers any time soon, like in the next 10 years. This isn't because I question the abilities of the tech (though I do), rather its for the simple reason that I see so much more low hanging fruit for automation that still exists in the industry compared to reading contracts. Also this situation hasn't changed much in my 6+ years so I guess lawyers are able to charge for a certain amount of inefficiency, though I believe there was a huge wave of eDiscovery and subsequent eDiscovery automation layoffs in the 2000s, and the jobs outlook is probably not positive, more like neutral at best.

I suspect that learning even the basic programming principles (e.g. if/then/else, loops, OR/XOR) may be more helpful to a lawyer than understanding "AI tools".

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