AI-powered lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court

[0] https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-questio...

Given the Option A (letting DoJ prosecutors only have to carry around Title 18) versus Option B (letting lay people looking up a topic by subject matter see what crimes and penalties pertain to that subject matter in the title for that subject matter), which one is friendlier to lawyers? Which one is friendlier to lay people?

Yeah, a DoJ official in 1982 probably found it inconvenient that 17 U.S.C. § 506 and 18 U.S.C. § 2319 aren't in the same deadtree volume for them to lug around. But if I'm a lay person, I'm glad that the criminal penalties for copyright infringement aren't invisible from within the chapter on copyright infringement in the title on copyright.

If I were to perform a code review for a junior engineer, and they had structured their source files so that all the constructors and destructors for all of their classes were in one independent file, rather than co-located with the classes to which they pertain, they would not pass code review. The argument that it's difficult to even know how many constructors and destructors they have, and therefore memory management is too complex, would be distinctly unpersuasive. It baffles and frustrates me that HN seems to come to the exact opposite conclusion with regard to the law.

The defendant is the person on trial.

Public defenders would be more effective if they didn't have to talk to their clients?

The Constitution is already pushed beyond all reason for poor people anyway. You might have a "right" to a public defender, but good luck getting them to spend much more than 10 minutes on your case. (https://www.mprnews.org/story/2010/11/29/public-defenders) They're so overworked that it can be impossible for them to spend more than a tiny fraction of the time they actually need to do their job (https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article237036919...).

In the same way you have a "right" to speedy trial, but unless you're rich you can spend years (or even a decade) waiting behind bars (https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/8/17/23310771/why-some-spend-ye...).

It seems like we've already decided that if you can't pay the court fees you aren't entitled to access to our "justice" system (https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/sulr/vol44/iss3/11/)

I don't think it's too far fetched to imagine the courts telling poor people they have to settle for an AI to represent them unless they can fork over the money to hire one themselves.

If an AI is just as capable (if not more capable) than a real lawyer, we'll be seeing rich people and corporations using them instead of humans. Until we see that, I'll assume that if poor people are forced (by law or finances) to use them they'll be getting the short end of the stick.

Come to think about it. This part can be valuable, even as a startup. You get mock juries, you act out legal cases in front of them. You collect every single thing the actor lawyers say, and how they say it, and you also collect full transcript of their deliberations.

You model the data, and then you sell the services to lawyers. They can practice in front of your model jury initialised with what can be known about the real jurors and can see traces of their deliberations. Not just one run of the model, but many runs if they want to.

This is itself a normative statement.

I’m of the opinion that incentives aren’t the only thing worth considering — there’s something to be said for enshrining ethics into law (if only because it can adjust incentives).

Another thing worth considering is our mediocre track record of identifying incentives ahead of time.

Either way the government is not purely incentivized to increase funds. Standard fines for traffic violations are changed up or down all the time. Sometimes cities decide their current traffic enforcement is too burdensome and they cut back on tickets. There could be political actors which have incentives to improve it. Whether or not it will ever happen is not clear but I dont think its impossible by any means.

They basically always offer some bullshit non-moving violation to make me go away. Saves me thousands on insurance premiums and has also saved me from a criminal record for my more serious tickets (like allegedly driving gasp 36 mph by a school, which apparently comes with jail time in Ohio).

Bring on the hate. Y'all know I speak truth.

But courts are very likely (in my view) to take a very very dim view of the introduction of some kind of barrack-room "AI lawyer". It will slow things down by introducing potentially spurious arguments which wouldn't have been made by either a represented party, or unrepresented party.

Given the courts are a public service, this isn't necessarily zero sum - unrepresented parties do take longer in court, but I very strongly suspect in the life of a whole case, parties with an aspiring barrack-room AI lawyer will take up more court time. Especially if their argument loses coherency or starts to contradict itself.

I agree the defendant is likely to be on their own, and I'm wondering whether the individual concerned is aware of this. The company seems to be willing to backstop their ticket if they lose.

I'm not sure that will help much if they are sent to jail for a few days for wasting court time for relatedly lying under oath or talking themselves into a generative AI's web of inaccurate statements. Such a follow-up suit would be both hilarious and interesting to follow indeed.

The ironic thing is we see this more with government than business. Social programs almost always NEVER solve the social problem they just manage it.

This is to ensure a voting base is dependent on the government and gives the political class levers to pull to ensure their control and domination.

Government does not want to fix problems, they want to manage them

From the perspectives of both sides (defense counsel and prosecution), I believe this is undesired as it primes potential jury members' opinions outside of court evidence.