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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

This looks great for clients, but I think you’re right about law clerks and the like, and the implications are a little sad.

Time was if you wanted to get into law you’d join a firm as a clerk, learn the ropes, study for the bar, then become a lawyer.

The professionalizarion of law has pretty much ended that pipeline, with an expensive and arduous undergrad->law school->lawyer route instead. The replacement of junior staff with AI could effectively kill that route permanently.

My only hope is that legal AI will help bring down cost and increase access to legal aid for poor people in urban and rural communities where there is far too little supply to meet demand when people need legal aid the most.

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>Time was if you wanted to get into law you’d join a firm as a clerk, learn the ropes, study for the bar, then become a lawyer....The replacement of junior staff with AI could effectively kill that route permanently.

That ship has sailed long long ago...like, 1890 long ago. There are states where you can read law and take the bar exam without a law degree (Virginia, California, Vermont, Washington), or with a partial law degree (New York and Maine), but the number of people who do that each year is minuscule compared to the number of lawyers who graduated from law school (60 to 84,000 in 2013).

>That ship has sailed long long ago...like, 1890 long ago.

In California, at least, that is still the only way become a lawyer without a law degree (called the "Law Office Study Program"). If you forgo law school, you are required to do an apprenticeship in a practicing attorney's office for 4 continuous years (18 hours/week, 48 weeks/year), along with taking various exams and reporting your study progress.

Details here: https://california.lawi.us/law-office-study-program/

California Bar (Section 4.29): https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/rules/Rules_Ti...

He's not saying it's impossible. He's saying the number of people doing it is so small as to be irrelevant to general arguments. While a much larger percentage (relatively) of people may have used this path ("reading into the law") a hundred years ago, it has largely faded from relevance in modern times.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_law

>The replacement of junior staff with AI could effectively kill that route permanently.

iirc only a handful of states still allow you to take the bar without a law degree (and in practice I have no idea how often that happens, but I bet not much.) It seems like the apprenticeship route was by and large killed off some time ago.

Wikipedia says that 1890 was when the American Bar Association really started pushing the for all lawyers to have a JD.

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