Comment by jbstack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbstack | Hacker News Reader

I'm a legal professional who uses AI to help with my work.

I couldn't ever imagine making a court submission with hallucinated legal references. It seems incredibly obvious to me that you have to check what the AI says. If the AI gives me a case citation, I go into Westlaw and I look up and read the case. Only then do I include it in my submission if it supports my argument.

The majority of the time, AI saves me a lot of work by leading me straight to the legislation or case law that I need. Sometimes it completely makes things up. The only way to know the difference is to check everything.

I'm genuinely amazed that there are lawyers who don't realise this. Even pre-AI it was always drilled into us at law school that you never rely on Google results (e.g. blogs, law firm websites, etc.) as any kind of authoritative source. Even government-published legal guidance is suspect (I have often found it to be subtly wrong when compared to the source material). You can use these things as a starting point to help guide the overall direction of your research, but your final work has to be based on reading the legislation and case law yourself. Anything short of that is a recipe for a professional negligence claim from your client.

> I'm genuinely amazed that there are lawyers who don't realise this.

Just remember who the bottom half of your law school classmates were. Sometimes we forget those people.

Don't forget the top half, either. In my experience, the people willing to sit down and fully do the work every time like GP are pretty rare compared to the lazy but lucky/charming/connected top and the lazy but unlucky/outsider bottom.

Keep being a real one, GP. It's so hard to not become jaded.

>Even government-published legal guidance is suspect (I have often found it to be subtly wrong when compared to the source material)

This is more often a feature than a bug in my experience.

I tend to think it's neither, but rather an inevitable result of the lossy process of condensing legal text (which has been carefully written to include all the nuance the drafter wanted) to something shorter and simpler.

I've seen way, way, way too much cases where the key clauses or details that someone who does not deal in the subject on behalf of others for money will need to know because it tells them of some "less crappy" path that they can go through to do a regulated thing, or know exactly what they need to know to dial back their thing so they don't have to put up with all the BS that getting .gov permission entails are conveniently omitted from the text they present to the general public.

Like if you follow their instructions in good faith you'll wind up going through 80% of the permitting you'd need to open a restaurant just to have some boy scouts sell baked goods at your strip mall. In the best possible case the secretary is over-worked and doesn't wanna do the bullshit and whispers to you "why don't you just <tweak some unimportant particulars> and then you wouldn't even need a permit". Ditto for just about every other thing that the government regulates on the high end but the casual or incidental user is less subject to.

IDK if it's ass covering or malice because the distinction doesn't matter. It's hostile to the public these agencies are supposed to serve.

>> I'm genuinely amazed that there are lawyers who don't realise this

Its not lawyers, its everyone.

Yeah but you don't really expect everyone to hold their work to a very high standard.

You do expect it from most professionals.

That is a very sekf contradictory statement, isn't it

As an aside, "bar exam" and "passing the bar" comes from the bar/railing physically or symbolically separating the public from the legal practitioners in a courtroom.

"Set a high bar" comes from pole vaulting.

Since I found this interesting I had to look this up in wikipedia:

>The call to the bar[1] is a legal term of art in most common law jurisdictions where persons must be qualified to be allowed to argue in court on behalf of another party and are then said to have been "called to the bar" or to have received "call to the bar". "The bar" is now used as a collective noun for barristers, but literally referred to the wooden barrier in old courtrooms, which separated the often crowded public area at the rear from the space near the judges reserved for those having business with the court. Barristers would sit or stand immediately behind it, facing the judge, and could use it as a table for their briefs.

> You do expect it from most professionals

If you've never met a "professional" perhaps.

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