Gen AI Makes Legal Action Cheap – and Companies Need to Prepare
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Not everything (in the US at least) is actionable, but you still need someone to review each suit and determine whether or not to throw it out.
I’d rather have a tractable thought process which can be interrogated decide whether or not I can sue a corporation rather than an automated black box.
The whole point of law is that it’s humans regulating other humans. Not machines (in this case, built by wealthy humans) regulating humans.
The courts are not for the little guy with little claims, nor are they a high volume system.
The judge is there to course correct and cap
This is most like going to gum up the courts.
2. McDonalds could make it so to get inside you have to agree to arbitration of any disputes. That's usually just used by companies to make you use arbitration instead of the courts when you have a complaint, but offhand I can't think of any reason they couldn't require arbitration in the other direction.
The courts are essentially inaccessible to 99% of the population. You can go to small claims court where the limit for damages is $12,500 in California (less than a half year’s rent around here), or you can hire a lawyer and pay $50-100K minimum before the trial even starts (on both sides).
The upshot is that I’m out around $100K (spread across a few different incidents) with absolutely no legal recourse.
Anyway, more access to the courts (and faster/more painful rejection of nuisance suits) would go a long way to fixing our legal system.
It would also be good if private individuals could directly press criminal charges.
That seems at first glance like a bad idea. Can you explain your thinking as to how and why it might work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution
...has a good summary of how it works in a number of countries.
What are those lawyers doing that’s worth so much, and that one cannot do themselves if they have time and mental capacity for it?
I don’t know about courts (though I managed my way through a simple divorce case without any need for a lawyer), but e.g. immigration attorneys are typically drastically overpriced for the services they provide - and I’ve dealt with six immigration events (two people, two countries, four events obtaining new residencies and two renewals, all six sharing a lot but being different situations under different clauses - lottery, income, marriage, family reunion) without any significant issues. Contrary to every single lawyer it wasn’t some rocket science - just stuff to learn, forms to fill and protocols to follow. And this makes me wonder if legal is actually as inaccessible and as risky to a layman as lawyers picture it…
It reminds me of the old story of the plumber being called to a house that's leaking water out of a pipe, and the plumber looks around, finds one valve and gives it a half turn, and then writes a bill for 100$. The home owner is outraged he is charging so much for just a couple of minutes, and the plumber responds, "You aren't paying me to turn a valve, you are paying me to know which valve to turn."
Sure you could learn the law and represent yourself, but you can't expect results to be as good as anyone who practices law might do. It's a knowledge field, and experience matters.
Well, that’s not perfectly accurate comparison. When adjusted for nuances it’s much less clear what’s best. If a quick course is all you really need to get something done, and there are no e.g. maintenance concerns (so you don’t care if something is merely acceptable and not up to the best standards - as I get it, without any research, the case is effectively an one-off thing), and the professional services are notoriously costly, it makes me wonder why. In such scenario DIY approach looks very compelling to me.
Because I’ve heard the same thing about immigration and it turned out to be false. My current understanding is that there are a lot of immigration cases that may need a lawyer but a lot more where it’s a total waste of money.
Of course I can be wrong. There are always nuances and differences. That’s why I’ve asked what makes it so costly.
The "scale" itself is the problem. Because companies are so huge, and their reach is so huge, it invites techniques that increase the efficiency of attacks. Human beings weren't meant to handle things at such scales, and that is part of the reason we have the problem of AI in the first place.
If we lived in smaller, more self-sufficient communities, then we would not have scale and the people in such communities would not have much desire to develop AI either. AI is the natural reaction of a large populace who look for a technological solution to the immense chaos of information.
Yes, because they’d be too busy worrying about food and disease to bother with much else. Agrarian societies weren’t fun.
I suppose you've lived in one? Or are you just fearmongering? Because agrarian societies certainly weren't always worrying about food and disease. What about the Amish? They certainly manage decently without too much technology.
You could say AI is the child of internet, as it was the internet that cooked up the massive trillion token datasets. Without internet, no AI.
But if you look closely, internet resembles AI - you can search for images instead of generating, there are billions you can choose from. You can search for information and you can chat on social networks instead of using a LLM. It's the same with AI but even better, human made. An HGI made of humans and networks.
The only reason large companies attract these attacks is because large companies have large bank accounts.
That’s it. That’s the reason. There’s no need to theorize about small communities or humans developing AI in reaction to something.
Scammers see a tool, an opportunity for exploitation, and a target with something they want (money). They leverage the tool to try to extract what they want from the most likely target.
That’s what’s happening here. There isn’t some deeper philosophical explanation. Scammers just want money and they’ll use any tool they can in order to get it.
Making giant companies wasn’t the goal of society or anything, after all. Maybe the changing ground truth will produce new outcomes.
Actually there is. You are looking at the proximal cause, I am more interested in the ultimate, to borrow from the evolutionary biologists.
Your thesis doesn’t make sense about there being no desire for AI in small communities. Small communities absolutely want automation, both in the physical and information world.
Simplify the rules, make it easier to understand and reason about. The computers should be able to determine if someone is breaking a law, not trying to check if it is a bad law.
We should be using computing power where someone can ask: is this legal ? Can I do this? That’s the true value to society.
I don't think you can easily simplify it tbh.
As you can imagine, algorithmic decisions are incredibly difficult in any common law system. And while they might be viable in a civil law system, you would lose out on the ability of a judge to give consideration to the specific circumstances of each case.
In practise both systems end up unwieldy in an attempt to be fair. Common law systems because of the overwhelming amount of precedent to consider, civil law systems because the laws become incredibly long and complex, with complex interactions between laws
In the US if say a district court in California and a district court in Oregon adopt incompatible interpretations of a federal law, someone will appeal to the appeals court that covers both California and Oregon, that court will interpret that law and then that is binding in all that states under that appeals court (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington).
If some other appeals court in some other region goes a different way, it can go to the Supreme Court which makes an interpretation for the whole country.
We eventually reach consistency even if Congress is unwilling or unable to revisit the law.
This happens every few decades...A legislature wipes the slate clean and starts fresh with a new, simpler set of laws.
Then spend the next few years discovering why the old set of laws was so complicated, as they gradually reintroduce laws to deal with the edge cases, loopholes, etc. that the new laws created. And then you end up with a complicated set of laws again.
The people who get hurt when you "simplify" the legal code aren't the corporations; they have the money to get good legal advice, nor the criminals since they don't particularly care about following the law in the first place. It's the common people who get hurt when the law is simplified, because most people are fundamentally law-abiding, and the law is complicated to deal with all the people who are not.
The whole article is about how with minimal effort you can cost companies and individuals beaucoup bucks in legal expenses.
No. Not a chance. If you sue me with LLM-generated filings, I’m going to be paying a lawyer to mercilessly win, using LLMs as needed (perhaps using LLMs to test various responses to your filings that cause your LLM to spit out something that is terrible for you but you’d have no idea since you aren’t using a lawyer).
Essentially run by a handful of families and inner circle. Just another shadow govt. type entity.
The high court found a constitutional right to the quota even though it wasn’t in the text of the constitution. Textualism could have saved the government.
Generative AI won't be able to handle the law. That will require actual AI (meaning, a system that is capable of understanding, not just one that predicts which word should follow another as Gen AI does now).
Remember that reminder about the fate of horses after the automobile was invented? How about the fate the transportation jobs? In 1910, approximately 13% of the workforce (about 6.7 million people) were involved in transportation-related employment. By 2023, this percentage decreased to 10.3%, but the absolute number grew to around 21.3 million people due to population growth.
We started with more demand for computer skills to increase manufacturing efficiency, and now there is increasingly cheaper and better software to lower the barrier to learning CAD
I envision a similar transition for law and justice.
Jevon's Paradox is not a law of nature.
- - - -
Mark Miller pointed out, "A Computer's Perspective on Moore's Law: Humans are getting more expensive at an exponential rate."
The explosion of AI means that humans are getting more valuable, but only for doing things that only humans (not AI) can do.
It's probably related to the nature of human desire.
One of the primary points of human life is learning the undesirability of desire itself.
- - - -
Jevons paradox, on the other hand, isn't metaphysical. When you make the road wider more people drive on it, but widening the road didn't conjure up those people and their cars. The road was too narrow. If you kept adding lanes to the freeway eventually everyone who needed or wanted to drive on it would have enough space.
Now metaphorically speaking we're considering a situation where widening the freeway is so cheap that we can make the freeway as wide as we like, and we're making free self-driving cars, and people can send the cars on the freeway to do anything at all, even really trivial things, and we imagine endless freeway and endless cars until the world is covered in freeways. Something like that?
I guess we do have to solve the problem of human nature and our tendency to flagrantly waste our time and resources on dumb stuff, eh? How does AI help us do that?
So we went to the clerk, and said, out of all these forms, which ones do we have to file?
And the clerk said that they couldn't tell us because that would be offering legal advice. The lawyers had gotten laws passed preventing the clerk from telling us what forms we needed to give the clerk. Nice.
After a couple of minutes of thought, we decided to just fill them all out. So we filled out everything and handed it to the clerk.
The clerk then proceeded to cherry pick the forms they needed, and handed the rest back to us. ("My sole regret is that I have but one face to palm for my country.")
I think in the last 25 years, it's probably only gotten a lot worse.
* My wife and I own several rental properties.
* The properties are in an LLC that we formed.
* I went to local housing court to file papers for an eviction (non-payment of rent).
* I hand the paperwork to the clerk and the clerk says, "I need your ID to determine that you actually own the property ..."
* Me: "Actually, my name won't be listed. It'll be listed under the name of our LLC."
* Clerk: "Then you can't file the eviction yourself. You have to be represented by a lawyer."
* Me: "???? Can't I just prove that I'm an officer of the LLC?"
* Clerk: "No. If it's not directly owned by you, you need a lawyer to proceed with the eviction."
* Me: "But I can represent the LLC in every other capacity that I can think of. You're telling me that I can't do this on my own?"
* Clerk: "I don't make the rules ..."
$1500 later, I have to keep my lawyer on task to file the paperwork.
<grumble>
The clerk wasn't going to tell you which forms you needed to give him, because if the divorce had been messed up by you giving him the wrong forms on his advice, he could have been sued for the financial losses you and your ex-spouse incurred.
But it's convenient to blame it on the lawyers...
On a more serious note though, people not seeking justice due to complexity which leads to high costs is the real issue IMHO. Maybe the idea is that this is pushing people into finding a middle ground but it's also a known barrier to real justice.
So some years ago when Turkey wasn't as totalitarian as today but was on the way to become such, they started having a problems with the European Court of Human Rights. The cases begin to pile up.
EU proposed: Create a way for people to access the Constitutional court of Turkey, so you might resolve most of the issues before coming to us as.
Turkey's proposal: Why don't you introduce a considerable application fee, so the number of cases can drop dramatically because only a few can afford it?
So yeah, that was the Turkish style. The EU way prevailed but this time Turkey dropped its bid to join EU and it simply started ignoring it's own Constitutional Court decisions.
I think the moral of the story is, it doesn't matter that much because people will end up doing it their own way.
My standard examples of this are that there's around three times as many heroin users in the UK as that country's total prison population, and that perfect enforcement of road traffic regulations would mean the only people allowed to drive would be people like me who don't have a car.
I hope that things like this result in massive liberalisation of legal systems worldwide; the alternative, de facto not de jure*, is one law for the rich and another for the poor.
* "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." - https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France
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The beginning of the article is supposed to hook you in and provide you some plausible basis for what follows. Yet, they chose to go with AI generating comments on proposed regulations. I’m not going to spend any time going into why that’s ridiculous, so feel free to write me off as a nutter or whatever, but the idea of that submitting a comment to a regulatory agency during a public comment will suddenly transform law and legal practice is about the weakest possible case to make. Public comments aren’t legal materials, they’re comments from the public. And I’ll bet you a year worth of salary that as people start flooding regulatory agencies with genAI produced public comments, a rule will appear (whether through regulation or through judicial interpretation) that agencies need not respond to nor even consider public comments submitted without some kind of declaration that it was not produced using genAI.
On the one hand this is great - real “democratization” of how society works.
But it’s going to break a whole lot of things in the short term while these processes are redesigned for this new world. And the fixes will likely be to come up with new ways of limiting the number of people who can engage.
A layperson can file their own lawsuit, and as long as they satisfy the requirements of the law outlining the necessary elements of the lawsuit, they don't need any jargon or special language. (Formatting is a court-imposed requirement; that does not come from the lawyers.)
Access to the courts is limited by imposing filing fees. An LLM like this won't change that; if anything the most likely response is to increase filing fees.
And as you can see, the authors are co-founders of some related startup and this article is nothing more than a weak pitch.
Depending on how badly these things get the summaries wrong it could certainly help with people trying to understand what their government is doing. I'd love to be able to download the contents of a bill from the Federal Register and have an accurate summary of all of the things it changes and how.
As with DoS, the interesting cases will be where an asymmetry exists in cost of request vs response (or amplification is possible).
In the short term it seems likely that the government will be on the losing side of this exchange.
A transfer on the blockchain, you mean.
I can see how AI is helping to improve humanity's existence.
The English rule provides that the party that loses in court pays the other party's legal costs.
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