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Comment by davorak | Hacker News Reader

> If you have communications that can be used as evidence you're probably in the wrong.

That does not match my second hand accounts of how the law and lawyers work at this level, at least in the USA. Lawyers, at least in part because it is there job, will scrutinize every communication for anything that has the slight chance to be interrupted in their cases favor regardless if that interpretation is truthful.

The system of law in the USA is adversarial, the Lawyer's job is to present the case in the best possible light not to find and present the truth. So if something taken out of context plays well for their case it will be used. That could include decades old communications that no one remembers happening on a tangental topic.

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Much more than that, the legal system is just engaging in empire building here: Everything that is potentially relevant is subject to discovery, which increases billable hours…

And I assume approximately nobody in the legal sector has any interest in reducing these.

The collateral damage of the incentive structure created by this dynamic must be vast. Deleting everything by default as a (reasonable, at a micro-level!) leads to immense institutional knowledge loss.

> The collateral damage of the incentive structure created by this dynamic must be vast. Deleting everything by default as a (reasonable, at a micro-level!) leads to immense institutional knowledge loss.

Agree wholeheartedly, would be great if would could step off this path, but I have not heard of any efforts in that direction or groups that champion it.

Won't LLMs make this really easy?

"Hey ChatGPT, find quotes in this 6 TB of chats to support my argument"

Possibly? I wouldn't bet on lawyers billing any less per page of document discovery either way.

Some of them are bound to if there is free market competition going on. Anyways, they are certainly not going to let 6 million documents get in the way of a big settlement.

> Some of them are bound to if there is free market competition going on.

I trust the free market to solve over-litigation about as much as I trust it to prevent over-treatments in dentistry.

Free markets work well in many cases, but self-regulation that directly diminishes the total addressable market is not exactly common.

> they are certainly not going to let 6 million documents get in the way of a big settlement

No, but the loser will pay for their discovery – and after at most a few steps of indirection, by extension all of society.

You should trust that better search tools than LLMs exist for large collections of documents for legal discovery.

Exactly, the legal system's job is not necessarily finding the truth. It's who can convince the judge/jury better even if they use nasty tactics.

> Exactly, the legal system's job is not necessarily finding the truth.

The system purpose is to try and find the truth, because that helps society function, but is imperfect. It is good enough, so far, to keep society functioning, though its imperfection allows injustice to happen.

> It's who can convince the judge/jury better even if they use nasty tactics.

The adversarial system[1] does result in nasty tactics emerging, and I think there is room there for improvement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adversarial_system

As Cardinal Richelieu famously said, “if you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”

But you won't be able to _only_ use 6 lines from honest men. Their lawyer will produce the other ~300 lines of context.

This quote is frequently misinterpreted. It is not a comment on the mutability of language in general, it is a comment on centralized authoritarian power, which the Cardinal sought and wielded. Because he personally wielded so much power, he needed only the flimsiest excuse to condemn someone.

The U.S. legal system does not empower prosecutors in this way. They are free to provide quotes out of context, of course, but defense counsel are just as free to provide the missing context, and neither actually gets to make the decision to convict.

Don’t underestimate a federal prosecutor. Perhaps we need a new saying: “If you give me six lines from the US Code, I can get a plea bargain from the most honest of men.”

In this case, hiding your chats is not exactly going to help you. If anything, it will be showing up prominently in the list of charges against you as destruction of evidence and impeding investigation.

For criminal actions in the US, at the least, what you do say can be held against you.

What you don't say cannot, and what communications you destroy (as part of an ongoing general "document management" policy, not as a specific response to a lawful demand for records) cannot.

However if you phrase your document management policy as "apply these guidelines so that our illegal activity cannot be documented by us as illegal" you will be having a Bad Day should that policy come before a prosecutor, Grand Jury, or court.

Good thing we're not in the absolutist monarchy now, and have such things as courts and laws.

NB: That's attributed to Richelieu, and AFAIK it's not something specifically that he said, though it seems to be in the spirit of much of his practice.

Something of which I'm aware as I've featured precisely that quote on a number of my profiles across the Internet under this 'nym.

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