An AI lawyer was set to argue in court – real lawyers shut it down

Yes, in this case, it would just be a parking ticket, but the legal system runs on precedent and it's safer to hold a strict line than to create a fuzzy "well, it depends on how much is at stake" line. If we know that ChatGPT is not equipped to give legal advice in the general case, there's no reason to allow a company to sell it as a stand-in for a lawyer.

(I would feel differently about a defendant deciding to use the free ChatGPT in this way, because they would be deliberately ignoring the warnings ChatGPT gives. It's the fact that someone decided to make selling AI legal advice into a business model that makes it troubling.)

Rule 1 of traffic court: If the state's witness (the ticketing officer) doesn't show, defendant gets off. You do not subpoena that witness, thereby ensuring they show up.

If the AI or its handlers cannot be trusted to pregame the court appearance even remotely well then no way in hell should it be trusted with the actual trial.

You want to run this experiment? Great, lets setup a mock court with a real judge and observing lawyers and run through it. But don't waste a real court's time or some poor bastard's money by trying it in the real world first.

A reminder that "Move fast and break things" should never apply where user's life or liberty is at stake.

Like the kid, the experiment is not to add knowledge to the world. Every adult knows touching a hot pan results in a burn. Just like everyone who understands how current LLMs work knows that it will fail at being a lawyer.

Instead the point of such an experiment is to train the experimenter. The kid learns not to touch pans on the stove.

In this case it’s not fair to metaphorically burn desperate legal defendants so that the leaders and investors in an LLM lawyer company learn their lesson. It’s the same reason we don’t let companies “experiment” with using random substances to treat cancer.

I'm not at all opposed to using LLMs in the research and discovery phase. But having a naive defendant with no legal experience parroting an LLM in court is deeply problematic, even if the stakes are low in this particular category of law.

What makes you think that? What they are doing is illegal. It's the unlicensed practice of law.

And even when they lose the win. Look at the publicity they are getting.

There is no hallucination on the part of the humans involved, only intellectual dishonesty.

I'm not saying this is good but come on. Humans do that all the time, why aren't we so harsh on humans?

> I am not now, nor have I ever been afraid that AI is coming after my job

I am. This thing amazed me, and even if it won't be able to 100% replace humans (which I doubt), it can make juniors orders of magnitude more productive for example. This will be a complete disruption of the industry and doesn't bode well for salaries.

I wonder if that is because of the training set, us humans are often wrong or different. If given a room of programmers and asked to implement a Fibonacci algorithm would they all get it right, would they all do it via iteration, recursion, dynamic programming. Co-pilot might not replace you, but it just needs to replace some of those programmers. Then add tools like automated AI reviews or integration tests for example and now you removed another population of tech workers.

I am not sure if that is cause for alarm or the fact that such improvements could be rather beneficial. Some tools will replace people, some will be assistive, and as they improve and other layers are added they will reduce the need for people in areas, improving efficiency and productivity. Robots in manufacturing for example, improve productivity and reduce human labor.

And this leads on to this, these tools are narrow to general and have achieved this in a very short period of time. The cost factors have also massively reduced, if you could pay OpenAI $10 a month to make 1000 mistakes and still deliver code, or a human $120k a year to do the same then which one would you target. AI might not be coming for your job soon but it will be taking away your options to get a job. This is not unique to AI it is the basis for any technological improvement vs labor, yes new ideas and opportunities may come out of this but I don't think they will be equal in volume.

There are other kinds of failures that will be much harder to detect: arguments that sound right but are logically flawed, lost context due to inability to read body language and tone of voice, and lack of a coherent strategy, to name a few.

All of these things could theoretically be solved individually, but each would require new systems to be added which have their own new failure modes. At our current technological level the problem is intractable, even for seemingly simple cases like this one. A defendant is better off defending themselves with their own preparation than they are relying on modern AI in the heat of the moment.

We can't even make live fact checking work with humans at the wheel. Legacy code bases are so prolific and terrible we're staring down the barrel of a second major industry crises for parsing dates past 2037, but sure LLM's are totally going to get implemented securely and updated regularly unlike all the other software in the world.

Give it an inane prompt to better see the difference, like "write me an essay about camels and their value in cybersecurity" which gives us the answer

"The camel is a valuable animal in the cybersecurity field due to its ability to store large amounts of data in its hump. Camels are able to cross vast distances with little water, which makes them ideal for carrying large amounts of data across networks. They are also very sturdy animals, able to withstand harsh conditions and even attacks from cyber criminals. In addition, their long eyelashes protect their eyes from sand and dust, making them perfect for working in dusty environments such as data centers."

Having internet access wouldn’t fix this.

So it can enhance skills just as much as it can atrophy them.

And I'm okay with some skills atrophying... I hate writing regular expressions, but they're so useful for some situations. It's a shame chatGPT fails so hard at them, otherwise I would be content to never use a regex again.

(Your hypothetical includes a fine, so it isn't clear whether the offense in your hypothetical is one with, shall we say, enhanced sixth amendment protections under Gideon and progeny, or even one involving a criminal offense rather than a simple civil infraction, but...) in many cases lack of a competent attorney is considered structural error, meaning automatic reversal.

In practice, that means that judges (who are trying to prevent their decisions from being overturned) will gently correct defense counsel and guide them toward competence, something that frustrated me when I was a prosecutor but which the system relies upon.

No, this is a common misunderstanding about the way these things work. A LLM is not really pulling from any sources specifically. It has no concept of a source. It has a bunch of weights that were trained to predict the next likely word, and those weights were tuned by feeding in a large amount of text from the internet.

Improving the quality of the sources used to train the weights would likely help, but would not solve the fundamental problem that this isn't actually a lossless knowledge compression algorithm. It's a statistical machine designed to guess the next word. That makes it fundamentally non-deterministic and unsuitable for any task where factual correctness matters (and there's no knowledgeable human in the loop to issue corrections).

It doesn't really matter if it'd work well or poorly. Lawyers don't want to be replaced, and being a lawyer entails a great ability to be annoying to delay/prevent things you don't want to happen.

One of those is that the lawyer arguing a case is properly credentialed and has been admitted to the bar, and is a professional subject to malpractice standards, who can be held responsible for their performance. An AI spitting out statistically likely responses can't be considered an actual party to the proceedings in that sense.

If a lawyer cites a non-existent precedent, they can make their apologies to the court or be sanctioned. If the AI cites a non-existent precedent, there's literally no way to incorporate that error back into the AI because there's no factual underlying model against which to check the AI's output--unless you had an actual lawyer checking it, in which case, what's the point of the AI?

Someone standing in court, repeating what they hear through an earpiece, is literally committing a fraud on the court by presenting themselves as a credentialled attorney. The stunt of "haha, it was really just chatGPT!" would have had severe legal consequences for everyone involved. The harsh response saved DoNotPay from itself.

I have some past experience working in the courts in my state, and I know there are many judges who are perfectly fine with dismissing minor traffic infractions for no reason other than that they feel like it. If you've got an otherwise clean traffic abstract and sent in a reasonable sounding letter contesting the infraction, these judges probably aren't going to thoroughly read through every word of it and contrast it with what was alleged in the citation. They don't really care about the city making an extra $173 off your parking ticket -- they just want to get through their citation reviews before lunch. Case dismissed.

So I am not surprised at all by the success of DoNotPay for minor traffic infractions. Most traffic courts are heavily strained by heavy case loads. If you give them a reason to throw your case out so they can go home on time, by all means, they will take it.

I can't speak for lawyers in general or what everyone's motivations would be, but my initial reaction was that it seemed like a somewhat unethical experiment. I assume the client would have agreed or represented themselves, but even there -- legal advice is tricky because it's advice -- it feels unethical to tell a person to rely on something that is very likely going to give them sub-par legal representation.

Sneaking it into a courtroom without the judge's knowledge feels a lot like a PR stunt, and one that might encourage further legal malpractice in the future.

I assume there are other factors at play, I assume many lawyers felt insulted or threatened, but ignoring that, it's not an experiment I personally would have lauded even as a non-lawyer who wishes the legal industry was, well... less of an industry. The goal of automating parts of the legal industry and improving access to representation is a good goal that I agree with. And maybe there are ways where AI can help with that, sure. I'm optimistic, I guess. But this feels to me like a startup company taking advantage of someone who's in legal trouble for a publicity stunt, not like an ethically run experiment with controls and with efforts made to mitigate harm.

Details have been scarce, so maybe there were other safety measures put in place; I could be wrong. But my understanding was that this was planned to be secret representation where the judge didn't know. And I can't think of any faster way to get into trouble with a judge then pulling something like that. Even if the AI was brilliant, it apparently wasn't brilliant enough to counsel its own developers that running experiments on judges is a bad legal strategy.

Someone using it in an actual courtroom would make a boneheadedly dumb argument or refer to a nonexistent precedent or something. Then maybe the judge gets upset and gives them the harshest punishment or contempt of court or they just lose the case. They may or may not ever get a chance to fix it.

A failure mode of jail time and/or massive fines for your customers doesn't sound all that elegant to me. This isn't a thing to show people cat pictures, I don't think move fast and break things is a good strategy.

Not to say that there aren't some entrenched possibly corrupt and self-serving interests here. But that doesn't mean they don't have a point.

If something that's providing input to a formal legal process (which, let's not forget, means false or inaccurate statements have real and potentially prejudicial repercussions), "makes facts up and exaggerates", then there seems to be no reason they should be talking about taking this anywhere near a courthouse.

This feels a lot like "move fast and break things" being applied - where the people silly enough to use this tool and say whatever it came up with would end up with more serious legal issues. It seems like that only stopped when the founder himself was the one facing the serious legal issues - 'good enough for thee, but not for me'...

I think what many are overlooking is that bad inputs to the legal system can jeopardise someone's position in future irretrievably, with little or no recourse (due to his class action/arbitration waiver). Once someone starts down the road of legal action, there's real consequences if you get it wrong - not only through exposure, but also through prejudicing your own position and making it impossible to take a different route, having previously argued something.

[0] https://twitter.com/SemaforComms/status/1618306993902743555

To avoid the catastrophy that makes it a catastrophically bad idea.

> I assume the real reason it was shot down was out of fear that it would work well. Does anyone else have a better explanation for why there was such a visceral response?

It had already worked badly (subpoenaeing the key adverse witness, who would provide a basically automatic defense win, and one of the most common wins for this kind of case, if they failed to show up.)

We are so close from a new disruptive revolution where a lot of jobs (not just lawyers) will be made obsolete. Possibly similar to inventions like assembly lines, or cars. Such an exciting time to be alive!

The title of the article seems misleading.

A techbro who doesn't appear to be a lawyer or has any understanding of the law wants to use AI so people can defend themselves. It doesn't seem like any of this was done with input from any bar associations. Without seeing the emails and "threats", and ignoring the emotional language it sounds like these people were helping him out:

>"In particular, Browder said one state bar official noted that the unauthorized practice of law is a misdemeanor in some states punishable up to six months in county jail."

Were these emails "angry" or just stating very plainly and with forceful language, that if you do this without the AI having the appropriate qualifications, you are most probably going to jail?

It even sounds like Browder didn't really widely publicise the fact that a case defended by an AI was about to happen.

>As word got out, an uneasy buzz began to swirl among various state bar officials, according to Browder. He says angry letters began to pour in.

Really sounds like these letter writers did him a favour.

1) The legal profession tries to instill a sense of ethics into the lawyers they train, and what DoNotPay was proposing violated that ethics. I don't want to overyhype the legal profession, but many (maybe even most) lawyers really do want to do the right thing, which by their lights means clients get the best representation possible. Which an LLM currently is not, so you get a visceral reaction from people at what they see as discussion of/advocacy of unethical conduct.

2) As a practical matter, it was likely to yield very bad outcomes for all concerned, including professional and legal consequences. Bluntly, DoNotPay was proposing to do something illegal, it really could have resulted in jail time, and possible disbarrment for any lawyers who were involved. For good or ill, judges have immense power to control what goes on in their courtrooms, and the risk of a judge taking offense to this is high. And the higher profile the case (and DoNotPay was offering $1m for a lawyer who would repeat whatever the chatbot said in a Supreme Court case) the higher the stakes. That really could be a career ending mistake for a junior lawyer (plus, almost by definition, anything that reaches the Supreme Court is important; bad representation could throw the result, with potentially terrible consequences for the country).

3) This is not, by any means, the first attempt to try and automate or streamline the provision of basic legal services. And it's a field ripe for such things; simple stuff like many rental agreements, employment contracts, sueing in small claims court, divorce agreements, etc., etc. all seem like they should be able to be generated by filling out a form and pressing a button, not hiring a high priced professional to craft a bespoke document. But over and over, such attempts have failed badly, and lawyers are getting reflexively defensive to anything that looks like that, not because they threaten their jobs, but because they keep being so terrible.

4) And DoNotPay looks a lot like these previous failures. See, eg, https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/24/the-worlds-first-robot-l... which makes them look less like some cutting edge AI lawyer that will put an army of paralegals out of work, and more like yet another shitty site trying to resell Mechanical Turk at an enormous markup. Now, maybe what they're showing to the public is entirely different than what they want to use in courtrooms, but...it doesn't build confidence.

In many ways I think this is analagous to self driving cars. There is scope for enormous gains here, it's probably inevitable eventually, and it will probably put a lot of delivery drivers, taxi drivers, and truck drivers out of a job when it finally arrives. But right now deciding to hook your new self driving AI up to an unmarked truck and do a secret test in an unnamed US city without warning anyone or getting any licenses or permits is unethical and illegal, and you'd expect a very negative reaction if you announce your plans on Twitter. Especially if your website offers some software that they claim can control an RC car, but when you try it, it keeps steering into walls.

> I assume the real reason it was shot down was out of fear that it would work well

The next lawyer (or AI expert!) I see who thinks it would work well will be the first. There's just an enormous mismatch between the requirements, what chatbots in general seem to be capable of right now, and what DoNotPay in specific seems to be capable of. (Again, see the the Tech Dirt link.)

And again, note that while there's a pretty strong argument that it should be faster, easier, and cheaper to create a rental agreement (or whatever), DoNotPay was making a big deal out of how they wanted to argue in front of the Supreme Court. DoNotPay doesn't seem like they're going to nail the "draft a rental agreement for cheap" any time soon, but maybe they (or someone else) can. But handing a Supreme Court case? Obviously not. Now you might argue (and one certainly hopes!) the whole Supreme Court thing was just an unserious PR stunt, but when a company is making undifferentiated claims that their tech can do something semi-plausible and something entirely impossible, it makes the entire thing look like a scam created by or aimed at people who just don't know any better. Not a good look!

In short: I think the negative reaction is very, very understandable.

What's so bad about this experiment isn't that they tried to use AI in law, it's that they tried to use AI without a knowledgeable human in the loop.

Still you won’t find a useful/sober lawyer who would argue a case in front of a judge based on a made up precedent which never existed in reality.

Making a mistake as you put it, in humans, is quite different than “hallucinations” of an LLM. The practical AI tool that is good for preventing such human mistakes (precisely) doesn’t exist _yet_.

For traffic court, perhaps, but these AI tools don’t seem guaranteed to not make this problem worse at broader scales.

These AIs will also be available to large firms, who are equally incentivized to use AI for augmenting argumentation through existing lawyers, but will also be incentivized to train their own walled garden powerful models in a way that poorer clients still would likely not have access to, and which individuals and smaller firms will not have the resources to train themselves.

These kinds of AI models could very easily serve to entrench and raise the cost of a defense by making it so you not only need a lawyer, you need a lawyer-backed-by-a-firm-with-a-LLM to be competitive at trial - making all existing problems even worse.

You're basically trying to cut the argument both ways. Administrative courts are not criminal courts, and an AI would never be allowed near a criminal defense trial for obvious reasons.

But the hype has been insane, totally untethered from reality. I think it's the instinct to assume that something which can mimic human speech quite well must also have some mechanism for comprehending the meaning of the words it's generating, when it really doesn't.

I’m not sure the startup’s name is especially germane though. If anything, it seems to fit right in with human lawyers like 1-800-BEAT-DUI.

AI could be very useful for helping pro-so litigants prepare documents. I imagine with this use case as well as the oral argument use case, judges are also worried about low quality output wasting the court's time.

What the parent was referring to is the fact that if AI starts to consume the low-end (starting with traffic tickets), actual lawyers for trials will become even more expensive, and thus poorer people will actually fare worse because they will lose their already-limited access to human lawyers. Yes, their case might get handled with less hassle and cheaper, but the quality of the service is not -better-, it's just cheaper/easier.

Locally, it's a somewhat significant problem that people are getting caught for violent crimes and getting released immediately and reoffending.

1) The driver was actually speeding

and

2) The driver is trying to get off on a technicality

Is that the case?

In the US do you get "points" on your driving license so that if you are caught speeding several times in the space of a couple of years you get banned?

In the UK being caught mildly speeding (say doing 60 in a 50), in the course of 3 years it's typically

1st time: 3 hour course and £100

2nd, 3rd, 4th time: 3 points and £100

5th time: Driving ban and £100 (or more)

It is dishonest to conflate "not being sentenced yet" with "got out".

I'm thinking a good SaaS might just be train localized llm's for every city, state, county law and partition the lm based on where it can seek info, then just use it as one big search engine, and of course work in citations, etc.

The issue is that we cannot punish or disbar ChatGPT for misbehavior like this.

I look forward to it snarkily telling me that the CFAA was "wRiTtEn In BlOoD" and then post-hoc editing its comment with links it Googled up that have titles supporting its point and bodies that contradict.

It feels like with a little more tuning so as not to be misleading this stuff is on the verge of being useful. In the meantime I'll get some popcorn and enjoy spectating the comment wars between chat(gpt)bots and the subset of HN commenters who formerly had a local monopoly on such behavior.

I'm a lawyer working on a case involving neural networks. So I've been playing around with ChatGPT (for fun, its not involved in my case at all--the NN is a much different context) and trying to get it to do stuff like that. Maybe I'm not using the full feature set (does it have better APIs not accessible on the main page?) but it doesn't seem even close to being able to write pleadings or arguments.

It's surprising good at summarizing things that you might including pleadings or arguments though. But even then its got a 1/3 chance of fucking up massively.

But it's way more advanced than I imagined it would be. Very impressive technology.

That's a really funny use of the word, considering that the whole purpose of what they're trying to do is the opposite of exploit those of lesser means.

If you can explain to me how what they're trying to do is going to is by definition of the word "exploit" then I will change my mind, otherwise otherwise I will continue to think you have no idea how ironic it is for someone offering an equivalent service or something that will be the equivalent service for a much lower cost as "exploiting someone."

It seems like the legal industry doesn't like competition.

I was saying that not knowing the law is not a defense yet the laws are so complex that an expensive expert that dedicated all their study to the law is practically (as in, yes, you have the option to not use a lawyer) required in court.

It is not the same for many profession. In no other profession are non-experts expected and required to know the matter.

But what if that white shoe law firm is using chatGPT to respond to your emails and gather information about your case and then billing you? If they use it, does that make it okay?

Lawyers are actually worse. Lots of paper based administration. Patent lawyers use expensive search systems that are hard to use and query. But even that is pretty unintelligent and that's actually by design. They want to screen everything manually. I build search engines for a living, either group could benefit massively from even a simple one.

The introduction of AI to this space has not happened yet. The little bit of experimentation that has happened with analyzing MRI scans, expert systems, etc. has of course had a limited impact. But most doctors operate without any of that.

I think you are overestimating what search engines do, and underestimating what AI can do. Not in the distant future but right now.

You certainly can't have someone able to challenge the official record of what happened.

Not because a doctor is wrong, but it’s nearly impossible for a general doctor (not a highly specialized one) to know every possibility, but an AI can look at so many factors, living area, other diagnosis related to similar environments, every similar looking scan from the entire dataset, etc. and maybe with the help of a doctor you can pinpoint a solution.

I think there is a good avenue for a strong supporting role for AI. And teaching people to use it as a support mechanism.

She can be sued and lose her license.

You can only sue for negligence if you can prove you were going to win without the negligence. And it will cost you ten thousand dollars just to begin the process.

So if there's any doubt that you're going to win - any at all - your own $600/hr lawyer can flat out fuck you over. And there isn't a fucking thing you can do about it.

If they had, they could have saved thrmselves a lot of trouble, or designed a less-illegal publicity stunt.

It's about putting the first wedge in.

ChatGPT: "Your honor, that couldn't have been me, as I drive a red Mustang, not a blue minivan, and was in Nepal climbing a mountain at the time.."

Defendant: "Your honor, that couldn't have been my, as I drive a red Mustang, not a blue minivan, and was in Nepal climbing a mountain at the time."

Prosecutor: "Um, this photo clearly shows your face in this blue minivan, and there's no evidence you've been to Nepal."

Judge: "I'm holding you in contempt of court, and sentence you to 7 days in jail for perjury."

8<----

I don't think the argument is that AI is never allowed to represent someone in court; just that before it happens, a sufficient amount of vetting must be done. At a bare minimum, the legal AI needs to know not to lead the defendant to perjure themselves.

Lying to a judge is generally not a good idea. You can go from traffic ticket to contempt of court real fast if you start lying in court.

ChatGPT also assumes you're speaking the truth. If you ask it about a topic and say "that's wrong, the actual facts are..." then it'll change argumentation to support your position. You probably don't want your legal representation to become your prosecutor when they use the right type of phrasing.

The downside of contesting a traffic ticket is not “failing to get rid of the ticket”. The ticket amount amounts to a no contest plea bargain offer, not the maximum penalty for the offense, not to mentiom the potential additional penalties for violating court rules.

https://brunolaw.com/resources/general-criminal-law/what-to-...

Then once this process starts you automatically get

  * Suspended driver’s license
  * Ineligible to renew your driver’s license
  * Ineligible to register your vehicle
  * Vehicle being towed and impounded
  * Increased insurance premiums

For instance, as I discovered recently going through this process myself - here in UK when applying for British citizenship you have to disclose any court orders against you. Now here's a thing - if you were given a ticket for speeding, accepted it and paid it then that's it, no harm done. If it's less than 3 tickets in the last 5 years then you don't even need to list it on the application form.

However, if you went to court to contest it and lost, then you now have a court order against you - and that's an automatic 3 year ban on British citizenship applications, and even after that you always have to list it as a thing that happened and it can be used to argue you are of "bad character" and be used to deny you the citizenship.

So yes, failing to get rid of a traffic ticket(in the court of law) can absolutely ruin your life.

My favorite was this guy who got a ticket on a bicycle for not having a headlight, moved out of state and ten years later had his car impounded for driving without a license because they apparently suspended it for getting (or, more correctly, not paying) a ticket he got on a bicycle.

I’m guessing he never tried changing his license to the new state because Arizona licenses are good until you’re 65.

Money only stops when forced to by regulators.

Turbotax, Quicken, etc, is a great warning, those companies lobby to increase complexity of trivial matters (like personal tax returns). The same companies will do this with 'trivial' legal matters, and the only way forward is to buy their software.

Not sure anyone really would want to operate on themselves (because the need for a surgeon in an important event in their life is somehow "wrong").

Teaching is even more important, and we use professional teachers. Building a house is also an important moment in our lives, and most people would do well to accept the advice of a professional architect.

There is a problem where the laws so complex and numerous it is no longer practical to understand them or follow them all. People have a bias and don't seem very good at separating "good idea in the current context" from "thing that should be legally required". Let alone navigating the complexity of the phrase "cost benefit analysis". Anyone who lives life while obeying all laws to the letter is at a serious disadvantage to the average human - although since it is impossible to know what all the laws are it is unlikely anyone could do this.

But that arcanery isn't what drives the need for lawyers. You'd have to be crazy to engage with something as powerful and erratic as a legal system on your own. And crazy people do frequently represent themselves already.

It's not equivalent at all. ChatGPT and DaVinci have not "studied the law" in the same way as any human would.

> If law firms believed it was bullshit, they would just put a very good attorney on that case and disprove it. Barring it from entry with threat of jailtime pretty much proves that they are full of shit and they know it.

This is a traffic ticket case. He's not up against Sullivan & Cromwell, he's up against some local prosecutor. I'm sure if some white shoe law firm were being paid hundreds of thousands to defend a case against a guy using ChatGPT, they'd be fine with it.

Even though we have an adversarial system, the state can't just let ordinary folk hang themselves with cheap half-baked "solutions". It would be unjust/bad press (delete as appropriate to your level of cynicism). That's why we have licensing requirements, etc.

The hero element for the product's home page describes it as "The World's First Robot Lawyer". Twice.

The difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance might be the smallest proveable piece of evidence. A word, an email, an assumption, an ommission etc.

They don’t even read the things they vote on. They’re huge and it’d be a full time job.

Oh you sweet summer child.

For example Indiana recently changed their Turn signal law from "Must put in on 300 feet before a lane change" to "Must signal in a reasonable time"

WTF is a reasonable time... well what ever time the cop, judge, or prosecutors says it is

The way to think about it is like a logical evaluation shortcut:

  if not ADA_EXEMPT and IS_VEHICLE:
    DISALLOW_IN_PARK

Using the IT analogy, it's less like C++, where each statement must pass compiler checks for the application to merely start, but more like a Python, where some illegal stuff may peacefully exist as long as it's never invoked.

EDIT: grammar

E.g. as someone else said in this threat, there is useful ambiguity in requirements like: „within reasonable time“. But if you are enumerating a bunch of things and their relationships, ambiguity is often not what you want, but what you get without some clear syntax.

In my experience it’s not uncommon to stumble upon legal texts like „a, b and c or d then …“. But what does that mean? Is this supposed to be „(a && b && c) || d“ or „(a && b) && (c || d)“? That’s stuff that could easily be clarified at times of writing by just using parenthesis. Or maybe using actual lists with one item per line instead of stupid csv embedded in your sentences.

https://www.wordrake.com/blog/3-must-know-comma-rules-for-la....

https://thewritelife.com/is-the-oxford-comma-necessary/#The_...

McKenzie Friends can't represent you in court, in most cases they're not allowed to address the court, but they can help you in all the other ways you'd expect, like quietly prompting you on what points to mention, keeping notes, ensuring you have the right paperwork. Friend stuff.

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

Since the world is already running like that, IT people should join the fun, otherwise we simply get screwed by other interest groups who are protected by those barriers. Since every one of those barriers simply increase the cost of whole society for the benefit of whoever behind them, we should setup our own barriers. If you do not graduate from a CS/SE degree you cannot take certification exams, and if you don't then you cannot do programming legally. We should increase further the cost of whole society to make everyone else realize the absurdity of those barriers.

You also can't have a human in the next room feeding you lines... even if that person is an attorney.

However, a party / attorney certainly can bring in notes / a casebook / etc. You can usually bring in a laptop, with search functions, pdfs, etc. An AI that quickly presents relevant information, documents, caselaw, etc. would 100% be allowed. However, if they're sworn in to testify, these would usually be taken away, because testimony is supposed to be from personal knowledge / memory.

Uhh, do you think most attorneys work cases that are in traffic court? That's not the case.

Presumably that's in the USA, where all sorts of things require a licence. But what's the definition of "legal advice", I wonder? Can an unlicensed person dodge the law just by saying "this is not legal advice" while advising someone how to draft a contract or what to say in court and charging for that advice?

If you want an example of advice that may or may not be "legal advice" think about how to fill in a tax return, how to apply for a government grant, how to apply for or challenge planning permission, how to deal with a difficult employer/employee/neighbour/tenant/landlord, how to apply for a patent, how to deal with various kinds of government inspector, ... That's all specialist stuff for which you might want professional advice but not necessarily from a "lawyer" (depending on what that word means in your part of the world).

Up here in Ontario I've had 1 ticket in my life. I just... no, there is no way you're getting hundreds as an individual.