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Comment by Schmerika | Hacker News Reader

> There's so many inefficiencies that are trivially solved with existing tech frameworks.

There really, really are.

The legal industry is well aware of that fact - and how many billable hours they stand to lose by making their work more efficient and understandable.

You know how tax prep companies spent over $90m 'lobbying' Congress to ensure that filing your taxes remains difficult and complicated [0]?

Well, lawyers know just as well or better how to butter their bread; and they will pull out every dirty trick they have to scupper attempts to make practising law more transparent or efficient in any way.

0 - https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2023/09/tax-prep-companies-...

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It's not just the legal industry, it's the legislators. I used to be friends with a former state senator, who had a background in forensic accounting. She said they purposely made the bills harder to parse than necessary so it was hard to figure out what they were actually doing. Given enough time, people could do it but in practice there wasn't time before voting on the bill, and that was on purpose too. Of course some of it was to reward lobbyists or do other unpopular things, but she used to read bills from back to front because the back was where they put all the graft. An example I remember was $50K in taxpayer money going to a congressman's birthday party.

For a while I thought about trying to write software that would turn the obscure natural-language diffs in written bills into a readable diff, showing the laws before and after with highlighted changes. But she said they just got the bills as paper printouts which weren't always even up-to-date, so it might not have helped much. Maybe now they're online. And LLMs might make the project easier.

Presumably, there must be some point in time where the bill is made public in some form before going to a vote. If you could get the right tool in the hands of a journalist to turn whatever obscure format it’s in into something legible by an ordinary person there’s probably value there.

and then we have people touting Jevon's paradox as outcome of AI disruption leading to more work. Before we create new work we need to figure out how to reduce incentive of people to unnecessarily complicate stuff and to be honest the answer is never clean or easy

unfortunately, laws are not everything. you need to know how to get around them. our country for example has the habit of creating a lex fugitiva that means that some regulations could be changed in other not related laws. good luck finding the correct regulation without a law degree

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