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Comment by gopalv | Hacker News Reader

> The paper examines a world people will pay an AI lawyer $500 to write a document instead of paying a human lawyer $500 to write a document

Is your theory that the next week there will be an AI lawyer that charges only 400$, then it is a race to the bottom?

There is a proven way to avoid a race to the bottom for wages, which is what a trade union does - a union by acting as one controls a large supply of labour to keep wages high.

Replace that with a company and prices, it could very well be that a handful of companies could keep prices high by having a seller's market where everyone avoids a race to the bottom by incidentally making similar pricing calls (or flat out illegally doing it).

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There have been several startups that tried it, and they all immediately ran into hot water and failed.

The core problem is lawyers already automate plenty of their work, and lawyers get involved when the normal rules have failed.

You don't write a contract just to have a contract, you write one in case something goes wrong.

Litigation is highly dependent on the specific situation and case law. They're dealing with novel facts and arguing for new interpretations, not milling out an average of other legal works.

Also, you generally only get one bite at the apple, there's no do-overs if your AI screws up. You can hold a person accountable for malpractice.

> The core problem is lawyers already automate plenty of their work, and lawyers get involved when the normal rules have failed.

this is true - and the majority of work of lawyers is in knowing past information, and synthesising possible futures from those information. In contracts, they write up clauses to protect you from past issues that have arisen (and may be potential future issues, depending on how good/creative said lawyer is).

In civil suits, discovery is what used to take enormous amounts of time, but recent automation in discovery has helped tremendously, and vastly reduced the amount of grunt work required.

I can see AI help in both of these aspects. Now, whether the newer AI's can produce the type of creativity work that lawyers need to do post information extraction, is still up for debate. So far, it doesn't seem like it has reached the required level for which a client would trust a pure ai generated contract imho.

I suspect the day you'd trust an AI doctor to diagnose and treat you, would also be the day you'd trust an AI lawyer.

> There is a proven way to avoid a race to the bottom for wages, which is what a trade union does

US automotive, labor, and manufacturing unions couldn't remain competitive against developing economies, and the jobs moved overseas.

In the last few years, after US film workers went on strike and renegotiated their contracts, film production companies had the genius idea to start moving productions overseas and hire local crews. Only talent gets flown in.

What stops unions from ossifying, becoming too expensive, and getting replaced on the international labor market?

> What stops unions from ossifying, becoming too expensive, and getting replaced on the international labor market?

Labor action, such as strikes.

That doesn't make any sense as a response to his question. Labor actions just further motivate employers to offshore stuff. And global labor unions probably can't function because of sharp disparities in what constitutions good compensation.

Possibly protectionist tariffs.

You would need to coordinate across thousands of companies across the entire planet

That seems unlikely - law is very much tied to a place.

Yes, but legal documents don't necessarily need to be drafted by lawyers accredited in that locale. It usually helps though because they are familiar with the local law and other processes.

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