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Comment by __loam | Hacker News Reader

Enough people have gotten owned for using these things in court that I think the more likely response is laughing at the ignorance then feeling threatened.

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1. Get owned in court because you used an LLM that made a poor legal argument.

2. Get owned out of court because you couldn't afford the $100K (minimum) that you have to pay to the lawyer's cartel to even be able to make your argument in front of a judge.

I'll take number 1. At least you have a fighting chance. And it's only going to get better. LLMs today are the worst they will ever be, whereas the lawyer's cartel rarely gets better and never cuts its prices.

Does it cost 100k minimum in the US to get a lawyer? Or am I misunderstanding something?

There is no "get a lawyer." You pay by the hour. And there is months to years of procedure before the judge even knows your lawsuit exists.

And the minimum to file a lawsuit comes out to 100k at standard rates ? Or was it just a random number?

It's going to cost you around $100K if you're lucky, and it could be a lot more. That's what I mean. There are no exact numbers because it depends on how many hours of lawyering it takes to get through the endless process and procedure (designed by lawyers, of course) before you ever even go to court. You can't know that in advance. And if the other side has more money than you, they know its to their advantage, so they will try to drag out the process and bleed you dry to gain leverage or even force you to drop the case.

Many lawyers work on contingency and take a set proportion of the settlement if they win instead of charging hourly.

That's assuming you are the one doing the suing and not the one getting sued. And even then, that applies to only very limited types of cases. And even then, the contingency is typically 33% (and sometimes can even eat over 50%) of your damages awarded, so the cost is massive in any case.

There is the option of small claims court which is massively cheaper, but it has very low limits for damages, so it's barely worth the effort.

> LLMs today are the worst they will ever be

Just wait till you see tomorrow's, trained on the slop fabricated by today's.

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