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Comment by caporaltito | Hacker News Reader

Developers and lawyers have a lot in common. In the end, we write rules that are interpreted, whether a machine or a judge.

Therefore I think the same things apply as in software development, when you start to think you can fire lawyers and replace them with AI: you will then bear the responsibility of the job they did before. That means it can go the right way, but it can also go the wrong, wrong way.

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Funny you should phrase it this way. One of the better self-taught software engineers I know had a prior career as a defense attorney. When I had the privilege of working with him about ten years ago, he used to say "legal arguments are kind of like code that you run on a judge, instead of a CPU".

Gives a whole new meaning to ‘illegal operation’.

I had the same reaction when I had a will made. "If this case, do this; if that case, do that; otherwise do such-and-such"...

Although without the timing conflicts. :-)

The notion of a smart contract (as implemented by blockchains like Ethereum) makes the difference between a legal contract and code even smaller: the [Solidity] code IS the (unambiguous) contract.

Unfortunately “smart contracts” are missing two key features that real contracts have: a number of squishy conditions required to make them valid, and the ability to have a judge determine that a contract is not legally unenforceable even if otherwise valid.

To me AI in law seems better since you have a judge at the end. If you get something wrong it'll most likely be fine. There seems to be some tolerance for mistakes when representing yourself so it's most likely helpful for small claims and fighting tickets/fines. In a perfect world people wouldn't be paying BS fines or letting people scam them because they can't be arsed to take 2-3 days to deal with it the first time (once you've done the spiel once it's much easier).

Would make more sense if it was not written in a natural language such as English, but Lojban instead. It is not ambiguous at all (but can be made). The difference is that natural languages are naturally ambiguous, whereas Lojban is not, but can be made so, for poetry or whatever.

Every language is ambiguous. There's a gap between language (description) and reality. No formal logic can bridge this.

https://www.lojban.org/files/why-lojban/whylojb.txt

Legal English isn't natural English.

I do not see how a subset of English could be called unnatural, as opposed to Lojban.

Good points. But the main point of the article was not about replacing lawyers with AI - rather it was about using AI to be an informed client and thus work more in partnership with lawyers.

right, and the same thing is true when hiring software developers as a non technical[*] person. you need to make an effort to understand what the devs are building and you need to guide them to work towards the goals you want to achive and the constraints you have (budget, time, etc). if you don't they will focus on things that are not important and you will spend more money than you planned on a solution that doesn't quite fit your needs.

(*) as a technical person too, but then the understanding part takes less effort and you can skip using AI to do it

Absolutely. I'm working on a "legal IDE" for this exact reason.

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