Tangentially related: DoNotPay's (probably illegal) plans to use LLMs in actual court sessions https://twitter.com/jbrowder1/status/1612312707398795264
The legal profession is not only self-regulating, but since they make up like 95% of legislators, they get to regulate everyone else too! Very masterful, even more so than the AMA
Anyways it probably should be illegal if someone is selling "legal services" but not doing it properly for the same reason that if a dr just did what chat-gpt said, that should also be illegal.
There is a lot of differentiation in terms of the level of skill and effort legal work takes. Some firms will specialize in automating away routine legal work, and have just enough lawyers to comply with unauthorized-practice-of-law laws.
High value legal work still contains a lot of grunt work, which will also become more automated. Already partners at big firms review the work of a pyramid of lawyers and non-lawyers. Many of those tasks can be done by an LLM instead. As long as the partner signs the result, it is the same. As these partners learn to trust the LLMs more than the humans, a lot of human jobs will fall by the wayside.
A lot of legal work is already copy-paste from form books or other prior art, with a lot of filling in the blanks, search-replace, and so on. What is the difference between that and using an LLM to draft the document? Was that integration clause from the form book carefully reviewed by a human lawyer to make sure it fit the situation? No.
Many law firms have a deep library of forms that are battle tested, and lawyers of long experience know what provisions are good and which may not survive a court challenge. That kind of contextual know-how is what you are paying for. Why not use the adversarial techniques from deep learning to analyze how various provisions have actually performed over time? Then generate the document based on that statistical knowledge, with highlighting to show what is risky in a document? Why pay for an expensive lawyer when a cheap one will do that work for you and can give you that explanation, plus alternative legal provisions?
I am out of the profession because I did not want to be on the automated-out side. If there is automating to be done, why not do the automating?
We've seen many instances of larger populations get sold down the river (many examples in outsourcing)
Steve Lehto put up a video[1] two days ago about this and explained a few problems with it.
The first hurdle they've got, is that in most (all?) courtrooms you can't have your phone on.