Hacker News Reader

Comment by snitty | Hacker News Reader

>Asking the LLM for relevant case law and checking it up - productive use of LLM

That's a terrible use for an LLM. There are several deterministic search engines attorneys use to find relevant case law, where you don't have to check to see if the cases actually exist after it produces results. Plus, the actual text of the case is usually very important, and isn't available if you're using an LLM.

Which isn't to say they're not useful for attorneys. I've had success getting them to do some secretarial and administrative things. But for the core of what attorneys do, they're not great.

View on HN

For law firms creating their own repositories of case law, having LLMs search via summaries, and then dive into the selected cases to extract pertinent information seems like an obvious great use case to build a solution using LLMs.

The orchestration of LLms that will be reading transcripts, reading emails, reading case law, and preparing briefs with sources is unavoidable in the next 3 years. I don’t doubt multiple industry specialized solutions are already under development.

Just asking chatGPT to make your case for you is missing the opportunity.

If anyone is unable to get Claud 3.7 or Gemini 2.5 to accelerate their development work I have to doubt their sentience at this point. (Or more likely doubt that they’re actively testing these things regularly)

Law firms don't create their own repos of case law. They use a database like westlaw or lexis. LLMs "preparing briefs with sources" would be a disaster and wholly misunderstands what legal writing entails.

This lawyer uses llms for everything. Correspondence, document review, drafting demands, drafting pleadings,discovery requests, discovery responses, golden rule letters, motions, responses to motions, deposition outlines, depo prep, voir dire, opening, direct, cross, closings.

I find it very useful to review the output and consider its suggestions.

I don’t trust it blindly, and I often don’t use most of what it suggests; but I do apply critical thinking to evaluate what might be useful.

The simplest example is using it as a reverse dictionary. If I know there’s a word for a concept, I’ll ask an LLM. When I read the response, I either recognize the word or verify it using a regular dictionary.

I think a lot of the contention in these discussions is because people are using it for different purposes: it's unreliable for some purposes and it is excellent at others.

> For law firms creating their own repositories of case law

Wait, why would a law firm create its own repository of case law? It's not like it has access to secret case law that other lawfirms do not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com