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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience.

The outcome of a case shouldn't depend on someone's fallible ability to recall facts or convince other people or point their index finger*

Law should generally be deterministic. One's CHA stat should have no bearing on justice.

There should still be human judges, but the middleman between the judge and petitioner could easily be removed, and have generally been seen as leeches since forever anyway.

Though, like how the USA opts to remain in the Stone Age with regard to tax filing because of lobbying by tax software companies, this faction of society will flail the hardest before they admit they're obsolete.

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* What's a lawyer's favorite programming language? Objection C.

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The ability to clearly and effectively communicate, and the ability to know and recall the facts of a case is always going to be important. It'd probably be a more fair system if judges and jurors couldn't see the attorneys or even the people they're representing. Now that many cases are handled over video calls it'd be pretty easy to make that change.

A lot of communication is conveyed through more than the words themselves though and even though it's often misinterpreted people put a lot of value in that information. I suspect that even if we took away the ability to see the people involved judges and jurors would still find bias in the tone/quality of people's voices. Even if everything was reduced to text they'd find bias based on word choices, phrasing, spelling, and grammar.

Yep, just yesterday, Nike removed one leach middlemen called retailers and sell directly through their app. Turns out working out very well for them too.

If you have been following this story for the past couple of years, this has been disastrous for Nike.

The law is much more interpretation and argument based than logic routing based than you seem to believe.

I mean the law is somewhat deterministic, an amazing lawyer can't just win any case.

An Amazing Lawyer not winning an unwinnable case = a good thing.

A Mediocre Lawyer not winning a winnable case = not a good thing.

Say a starving child steals a loaf of bread. The law says all theft is at least 1 year in prison. But the judge can see that the child is actually destitute and it was his first time. The judge could shorten the sentence to 1 week; that's fine, there should be room for interpretation and leniency.

But it should NOT depend on whether that child had a persuasive lawyer or not.

A good "AI Lawyer" would simply behave as how ALL lawyers SHOULD: Simply present the facts, the laws that apply to those, offer suggestions for the verdict, and the possible long-term consequences for each possible verdict, without injecting dramatization, exaggeration, or attempts to pull at heartstrings etc.

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