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For example, redlining an OEM agreement with my vendor. They pretty much all use the same template, and the objections are always the same. I tried using Claude first, and even my lawyer was impressed that it found things they missed. Then I used Claude to redline that type of contract and the other side said "your lawyer was surprisingly thorough". I had my lawyer do the final check, but saved a bunch of money doing the first three rounds with Claude instead. And my lawyer basically just said "looks good to me" by the time they reviewed it.
Or even writing a simple will or estate document.
It seems like LLMs are great for the kind of generic work you'd usually pawn off to a new associate or paralegal, but not for the important things that partners usually do.
This seems to be the common thread everywhere LLMs end up being useful. As the sole software developer? Pure trash, but as "tons of juniors we can shuffle boring tasks at": great. As the sole designer and maintainer of a website? It'll look like 150% slop and no will buy anything, but as a designers friend to create what they dictate: even a designer can throw together a good looking website quickly. Etc etc.
This seems to be the case with most industries that LLMs are impacting, coding, data input, legal etc.
Whilst it's great to get the time saving from not delegating to a junior (LLMs are much faster at the basic level 1 work) there's going to be this big knowledge gap that you really only gain from actually doing the mundane boring shit.
A lot of this _should_ be automated away, but we really need to think about how the next group of people are going to learn the skills and nuance to applying them. I don't really have an answer to that one other than still giving that work to junior staff, but they will then just utilise an LLM to help complete the job, and rightfully so, I'd have done exactly the same thing.
I think OpenAI tried doing this with some early chatgpt settings with "learning mode" or whatever that is. But an LLM just telling you what to do will never teach someone, there was something about having to go out and hunt for the answer through the sea of crap responses or wrong SO questions that really taught you something. How do you replicate that learning with an LLM and how do you apply that to different industries like Law?
That's what school is for. For the last 150 years we've automated a bunch of things, and then we send people to school to learn how those automations work, so they can make better automations.
Maybe law school will have to be a year longer. Or maybe some forward thinking firms will have new associates check the work of the LLM to gain that experience.
Law school is already 3 years long in the US (after 4 years of undergrad), and most agree the second two are a complete waste of time. Other jurisdictions are different, but the US market is by far the largest.
The first year is really teaching you the lingo and how to think like a lawyer. After that it’s almost entirely electives and rarely requires hard work (Fed Courts being the exception).
I don't know why the manner in which someone studied law would have any impact on how or what they practice now. Most of the law and skill learned is by actually practicing, not what you learn in law school. Law school is about how to think like a lawyer, not how to practice law.
Pretty much any even mid-sized legal market is going to have really well-respected attorneys who graduated from some fancy top 5 law school, and some really well-respected attorneys who graduated from a local law school where they took night classes.
Like how people use AI to write their resume and then the HR department uses AI to screen the resumes, the 2 AI's duke it out.
We see this coming, and we intend to survive and have nothing to lose...
Will they understand the point when football gets taken over by AI, robot players and all?
Or won't they even stop at AI pastors and pray for the second coming of "Super J AI"?
It's not.
We have advanced CNC mills and lathes, and apprentices still learn doing things manually to understand how the tools work, their failure modes, and more.
There are machines that mix drinks, but you still learn to bartend by doing it manually and making mistakes, not starting out with machines.
Same with writing. Same with software. Doing the "simple", automatable thing is how you learn how the system works.
School can't be the same. Plenty of people have tried, but being effective in the real world is different.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
You could say the same about grilling burgers. And yet, there are millions of burger cooks around the world grilling hundreds of millions of patties everyday with zero knowledge of how to grill burgers, at McDonald's and other bottom of the barrel fast food chains.
If not for the social aspect of being asked what you want for a drink and then watching it being made, bartenders would've already been replaced by mixer kiosks by now.
If there are cooks successfully grilling burgers, I think they would have to have knowledge of how to grill burgers.
> In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not.
Mostly agreed here.
> so they can make better automations.
That's not true at all. Aspiring accountants learn how to use spreadsheets, instead of doing their sums by hand. But we don't expect them to make better versions of MS Excel or come up with LLMs that can do all of that for them.
Schools came up with internships (which originated in the apprenticeship system) because they could not provide this experience, so how do you expect people to gain the necessary knowledge just from schools if there are no more internships or junior roles?
With strict version history that may be okay, but hopefully their agent already thought of that for them too!
When you automate physical movement, you atrophy. That implies ill health and helplessness/lack of resilience should your automata fail.
When you automate intellectual movement, the consequences are even more dire.
Most people lead a very immobile life already, in both aspects. They don't realize the consequences, if everybody did the same.
Tackling long-term problems and externalities must be done by someone outside the market.
The problem is that most business owners and shareholders are cut from the same cloth and only care about maximizing short term profits.
Well, laws and regulations forbid the obvious contracts that would help you fix these things.
But eg no one has sued Google management for giving company resources to charity. And in general, companies can have all kinds of goals, as long as shareholders are ok with them.
Going on a tangent: it's usually safe to assume that investors want money, because you can further most goals you care about with money. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence for an AI flavoured take on the same topic.
> To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
When a company pays for training and education of an employee, they risk that the employee jumps ship and takes that investment with her. Contractually, you could use bonds or contract penalties to curb that kind of behaviour, but there are limitations on what contract terms are enforceable or even legal.
After all, if there's no chance of employees being trained anywhere else because nobody else is doing it yet, why would you decide to start training employees? The exchange wouldn't be equivalent in any way, there's a real possibility that you would never benefit at all. You'd be the only source of training, so anyone who bounced off from you could never have been someone who bounced off to you.
In the bad old days, Adam Smith already complained about how apprentices were treated.
Btw, Ford famously raised wages to 5 USD a day, because he had crazy high turnover. Workers weren't all that likely to stay than nowadays.
I'm not quite sure what the latter half of your comment is arguing for or against. Are you saying that it is in the best self interest of individual companies to train workers? Or are you saying that training workers is something altruistic?
Sure there is, market forces quickly push the person making 6% out of business, because the one making 8% can lower their prices, or use that extra capital to buy up more resources.
Why spend excess to train when you can do it somewhere else for a lot cheaper? Cheap energy subsidized often by taxpayers is the real issue, and instead of those subsidies helping those paying for it, it's just moved capital upwards.
How so? See how eg Amazon's shareholders were famously patient with them. Similar for Tesla, and lots of other companies. Including both public and private.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50068391 for a bit more nuance aside from the universal statements.
We humans are _amazing_ pattern matching machines and learning “if you do this thing this other thing occurs” is literally what our brains were built for.
It’s just the current few thousand years of technical progress that have been a departure from this reality - we found out about analytical thinking and that by deeply analysing something you can do a shit ton more.
If you look at scientific progress before Industrial Revolution it’s all trial and error between patterns. And I feel like the new crop of devs are silently settling in into this very human and familiar pattern.
On the one hand I think it will probably be good for the “mental health” of people in this profession - you become more like an alchemist acquiring bags of tricks on what works, sharing incantations with others, because sitting down and learning _why_ it works in detail would be a time luxury few would be able to afford.
But that would mean the people under the hood that build the LLMs and who debug the really broken system would be charging the premium.
I honestly don’t think that in and off itself would be such a bad thing.
What I personally am really scared about is the price for labour that is sharply declining. I don’t worry about ASI too much, but when you read history it is absolutely full of stories of great human suffering because “labour was cheap” no need to improve working conditions because there is always someone else willing to take it up.
We had the Industrial Revolution _because_ of the plague making labour expensive and driving the benefit for innovation. Before that nobody really cared. With LLMs doing things becomes vastly cheaper, so the labour itself becomes cheap with it.
Now looking at the state of the engineered world - how absolutely shitty everything is (as opposed to what it technically could be) - there is a shit ton of stuff to be done so the work should be there to fill it. But maybe the capital will move in another direction - nobody can predict the future, I just hope we don’t end up in a dystopian hellscape for the sake of my children.
That might be true, but that's not something for you to worry about as a customer of these services.
I don't worry about how my hairdresser practices either. I just pay for a good (enough) haircut.
> I don't really have an answer to that one other than still giving that work to junior staff, but they will then just utilise an LLM to help complete the job, and rightfully so, I'd have done exactly the same thing.
We can check how other industries have gone through these kinds of transformation before. Eg spreadsheets removed a lot of the worst drudgery that junior accountants and junior bankers used to have to do. But their industries adapted.
If they're not, they should be.
> Will you still say it's great when it is the society as a whole?
Yes. A world in which menial tasks are taken care of by computers is a wonderful idea.
The important part is that our society needs to transform around that. If all capital accrues to the owners of the AI, then we'll have a problem. If we remake society so that everyone shares in the success, that's a very different idea.
I agree with this. Do you see this happening in our society today? Do you even see an effort for doing this?
That's not the trend though. We're approaching a world where all tasks are taken care off by computers (excluding those that don't have sufficiently adept robots).
You're sitting with the idea that "I'll be the ideas guy, and the AI will do the design, art, coding, accounts, contracts, reviews, support and everything else so I have to employ no one at all".
When labour has no value, who on earth are you planning to sell to? The potential customer has no money anyway, because labour has no value.
Last year when i mentioned this application of LLMs somewhere on Reddit (in the course of arguing that white -collar workers are an endangered species) it was met with scorn by commenters who insisted that machines could never match the skill and care needed to write and review contracts and the like, at least not to the level demanded by the legal profession. Well maybe the human standard isn't that high to begin with; my dad was just telling me last night the story of how his lawyer had urged him to cave to a plaintiff's demands because the judge who was hearing the case "gets bored and doesn't like reading the documents." (The judge's son is currently running for the office of county prosecutor, lol.)
You then get a decision that your AI agent explains to you.
What could possibly go wrong? You will have to ask your agent for that.
On top of that, dealing with text is literally what LLMs are all about.
The problem with accuracy, hallucinations and just generally ensuring responses are grounded in factual stuff is in large part and engineering problem.
The point is that you expend a lot of effort into the engineering problem that is ensuring, to the absolute best of your ability, that what the AI gives you back is correct. Then the humans still verify it. One could then ask whether that doesn't just make the whole automation process redundant, but I don't think so. There are ways to make the verification process much easier. For example, direct links to and quotes from every cited thing, and so on.
I think the question is not “will AI able to do the work people used to do one year ago?”
but more
“will people, in the new environment where AI does the work that they used to do one year ago, still provide a competitive advantage?”
My gut feeling is: yes!
Kind of like how they can take crazy ideas and dress them in better vocabulary.
Every AI tool they tested completely shit the bed and ended up requiring more time for contract review than a human review, and completely failed to spot any of the issues that were actually relevant to our industry. The AIs were also for some reason really focused on lack of consideration, even though that was not an issue with any of the tested contracts.
So, to me it isn't curious that your experience with Claude has been positive. Provided you know what you're doing and you aren't asking Claude to go too far outside the expected norm, there wouldn't typically be a compelling reason for most contract attorneys to push back.
Weirdly, I wonder the net effect of me helping them accidentally tighten their terms to something enforceable.
Hmm, Claude, make a note to just figure out if the doc holds together before I bother.
Garbage in, garbage out. Right, everyone knows this.
So, my question is, if I redline a document, I don't just see what's there but also what is missing. Ai generally only work with what's avoailavle and unless you specifcally ask for it, it wont question it.
Take a rental agreement for example. I have tested this before, gave a redlining task whatever, and the draft did not have either a start date clause or a period Claude and none flagged it.
A lawyer would find this easily.
What I am trying to say is, among other things, you get a DMCA notice for example and you use Claude to file a reply, it will find all the proper citations, statutes, etc but if the other side didnt invoke a point, Claude will have no way to object to that because it isn't in the notice.
That is my only issue.
The problem compounds, if a person later reviews it, they skim over because they expect other people to have done their job first....
How could we trust legal product from a company who was ignoring privacy protection law like that?
Also, the Grok one made the front page, why am I only hearing it through a minor comment?
I suspect you never heard about it because almost nobody uses ZCode, even among Z.AI subscribers.
I am not trying to disparage these people, but I am really upset with this entire situation. I genuinely don’t know how we will recover from this loss of trust.
I live in the US, so I'd probably rather have the CCP snoop through my data than have the US government do it. If I lived in China, it would be the opposite.
<rant>
Again, I am not pissed at you or anyone in your position. I get it. I am pissed at the Project 2025 type people who destroyed our institutions, and in the decades prior they destroyed our mutual trust in our own country. (With the help of foreign actors ffs)
2025 types declared us the enemy while they took over everything, and it turns out it goes both ways. BTW, I don't mean this in left/right partisan way. The 2025/authoritarian type people don't seem to be aware that they made even non-partisan people feel like they are now being tread upon. There is so much proof of this on HN, like this thread, and many others.
My thesis is that just like every other authoritarian scheme in the last hundred years, these people have not thought it through, and in the end will make their country less powerful. Would be arguably OK if there weren’t even bigger assholes ready to fill the vacuum.
</rant>
Authoritorian state with highly controlled internet and financial system isnt exactly a good place for running criminal enterprises.
There just 1.4 billions people in a country and many of them well educated and tech-savvy, so it obvious there just more scammers in total. But I doubt higher percent of population doing scams than average in the world.
OP was talking about about China, no one here is using NK AI models or software stacks, so your comment is not only factually wrong, it’s plain fear mongering propaganda.
“When our products are used in ways that can affect someone's health, legal rights, finances, livelihood, or access to essential services, we require there to be a qualified ‘human in the loop’ (that is, someone who has the authority to review and, if necessary, change Claude’s recommendations), and for the individual affected to be told that AI was used.”
Something as common as a family law case has the potential to affect all of the above. Now imagine being a petitioner, respondent, paralegal, or other 3rd party using Claude to review a draft document only to find out that Anthropic has sent your entire file to opposing counsel.
It sounds egregious, but Anthropic is clearly stating they will use their own judgment to control what people can do with its product, and that they will treat customer data as if it's theirs to disseminate. So there's a massive opportunity for an unbiased tool willing to fill this void.
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/innovation/thomso...
Haven't they been perfectly clear about that from day one with the ToS? I'm not saying I like it but it hardly seems unreasonable.
> they will treat customer data as if it's theirs to disseminate
Not sure where you're getting that. What you quoted in no way implies that.
No. They did not have triggers that "paused" work from day one and only recently ramped it up to up-sell Mythos and a verification program meaning that in my opinion any code Claude creates is suspect as it can not perform a proper security analysis. I now have to divert half my spend from Anthropic to Grok. I would prefer to not do this. I am not converting a room into a data-center or spending enterprise level funding on my hobbies.
I wouldn't be surprised if that turns out to be their stupidest mistake. I mean, if I can't swear at their code is that b/c they think it's conscious? In which case they're liable for providing me with an employee that makes mistakes rather than just software?
> Anthropic: you can't use our product to fully-autonomously make decisions that affect human health, finances, etc with no human in the loop.
> victor9000: If you review a draft document with claude, anthropic will send your entire file to opposing counsel
What is the connection here? Anthropic has obviously never done anything like this and it's not indicated that they will by the thing you quoted.
Though that doesn't seem like a corporate terms-of-use thing as much as a training issue.
There are required exceptions to attorney client privilege[0]:
> the confidentiality rule is subject to limited exceptions. Paragraph (b)(1) recognizes the overriding value of life and physical integrity and permits disclosure reasonably necessary to prevent reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm
An eventual lawyer-bot probably should be able to identify this, however this does pose a conondrum.
If the lawyer gets told by the LLM "the client's words indicate there may be a threat to life that requires you report them to the police", there could be various liability associated with either path of action.
If the lawyer reports them to the police, but then the client challenges that on grounds of attorney-client privilege being broken, is "the LLM said it qualified" a valid reason that'll prevent the lawyer from being found at fault?
If they lawyer doesn't report them, but then the client commits said murder, would the lawyer be liable if their LLM transcript were admitted into evidence under the theory of "you should've listened to the LLM telling you that you had to report it"?
This is an inherent problem with giving LLMs (or computers in general!) any say over anything that threatens someone's life or liberty, even with a human in the loop. Same applies to the potential for AI-driven upcoding in hospital environments where a doctor has to weigh potentially ignoring the AI and then missing some diagnosis (Safest path is probably to run extra tests to check if the AI's theory is correct, but then that's still de-facto upcoding).
0: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/professional_responsibili...
How about, the LLM flagged it, I reviewed it, and it clearly meets the standard for mandatory reporting.
If the LLM flags it (which in a sanely designed system should be a high bar with very few false positives) and they fail to review it for bad reasons, they could be liable.
I feel like neither of these scenarios are particularly hard to address.
If you are ascribing intent ("Anthropic designed a system that intentionally does this") or emergent model intent ("OMG at AGI") then I mostly agree.
But there's a more pedestrian version of this, where an unwise person puts a model in an open loop without sufficient HiL checking and then the model does dumb things. There are even some recent stories about OpenAI and Anthropic systems "emailing the FBI", which is sufficiently close to "emailing opposing counsel" [1][2].
But even if you feel those stories are trolling/marketing/etc., I think it's clear that there's a plausible risk model here. If you hook up an LLM to a toolset that has access to Outlook and your file system and opposing counsel's email address, then of course the dumb thing could happen. The LLM doesn't need to be AGI/ASI; in fact, to me, the worse the model capability the more likely this sort of screw-up feels. There are even (non-sarcastic) instructions or CoT roll-outs I could imagine which might elicit a sequence of tool calls the net effect of which is an errant disclosure.
So this feels less "unforeseeable lightning strike" and more "car accident while driving at speed". I'd put the HF hack in that bucket as well.
A sufficiently careful engineer and a well-trained expert operator can together properly constrain the system to not do the dangerous thing. But, in general, that is not how agentic systems or their underlying models are currently being designed, and most users are not receiving sufficient training.
A lot of these LLM-backed products feel very poorly engineered, rushed, and optimized for brain-feel instead of surfacing and forcing the user to acknowledge the large quantities of actual essential complexity in play. It's all very "unsafe at any speed".
--
[1] https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/chatgpt/articles/chatgpt-allegedly...
[2] https://www.bgr.com/2055251/anthropic-ai-claude-contact-fbi/
It says right there that affected individual will be notified by anthropic that AI was used against him. And I’m sure the certain individual can send a emails requesting all data regarding him from anthropic.
That qualifier is not in the terms, the same rules apply for human in the loop, or agent assisted work
> Anthropic has obviously never done anything like this
Here's a clear case of human review resulting in a report to authorities, which is the exact policy they're now extending:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
This is actually good policy imo, if you are using AI in a way that can negatively someone's life there should be a human involved.
Infinite
Makes sense.
Law looks like rules, but it's not. It's centuries of codified human drama and fighting. It's mostly edge cases, because you really only fight when something goes wrong.
On top of that, lawyers are vehicles for liability. Can't give that to a chatbot lol
I don’t see the problem to be honest. Edge cases don’t bother the clankers. You think “programming”, all of it across all domains, plus the business side of things (which is a source of insanity itself), the pointy haired bosses, the ridiculous processes, the “UIs”, the complexity of a full system from top to bottom is rule-based and orderly?
Myopically looking at dev work makes it seem like this abstract wonderland but it’s seething, bristling whirlpools of psychology, neurodivergence and misaligned stakeholders all the way down.
Your point on liability is fair. I guess we can appoint liability crumple zones but I suspect they won’t rake in 200-300 an hour. Besides liability can very much be given to a “chatbot”. I don’t see how any legal entity can’t take it on. I agree that society is not ready for it, not at all, but I fail to see the fundamental blockers.
All of that is testable if the incentives are there and AI incentivizes testing.
Good luck testing law!
If you don't have that, look at how many people bitch that Google or Paypal or whatever cut them off with no warning and no concern for the circumstances. Now imagine that, but like for your house or your kids.
Law is not clear, rational code. Law is human drama, in all its many, many forms.
People like to pretend “CRUD” is this solved problem and I see it is, in theory, yet in practice CRUD hides a lot of bullshit that gets swept under the rug.
In a very interesting way the systems I worked on were always encodings of “centuries” of drama, psychology and politics. It just happens a lot faster on the software side.
As much novelty as there is in human interactions.
90% of legal work where there is a plaintiff and defendant is pressuring a settlement. My wife, an attorney, does not consider that to be "litigation".
But, for your sake, it's probably best that you accept your wife's definition.
EDIT: specifically around the use of judicial precedent in case-law.
Opus 5.5 scores 4% on it.
How much of your work is truly novel and unique? Not 100%
An 80% miss rate on a benchmark suggests to me that automation has a very long way to go, even for the drafting and research phases.
Imagine a bunch of lawyers arguing what programming is. Even a bunch of programmers arguing what programming is abnoxious at worst and a mental exercise at best.
Domain knowledge is informative sometimes but mainly overrated: the success of LLMs proves just that. What most lawyers do is fairly standardized and routine, efforts to invoke mystery cases or "novel" is an attempt at resisting the inevitable. The "the only British food in Palo Alto" equivalent of unique skills.
True of...literally every occupation.
Programmers typically don’t know law outside of which license allows them to get code for free.
b) I have met Lawyer colleagues who didnt know how build a =SUM() in Excel
So, I doubt....
That doesn't mean they don't exist. I went to law school with many former software engineers, many of whom are now prosecuting patents on behalf of high tech companies, and some of whom went back to engineering (like me).
"I have never met ______" is of no consequence to anyone; it's an argument style best avoided unless you're talking about deities or space aliens.
Yeah, and how many of drivers or software engineers can fix their car's engine? Just a few. Even though in priciple there's not much to it.
If lawyerin’ was always doing something novel, it wouldn’t be much of a set of laws. The bulk of lawyerin’ in the US is, I would guess without a whit of substantiation, a lot of small claims and standard form type things. Not discounting the value of the profession in any way, but if one job based on standard codes can have its basic functions replaced by AI, why not another?
See https://hls.harvard.edu/bernard-koteen-office-of-public-inte...
Look at the trajectory not where it’s now.
Here are 3 examples (there are more): https://github.com/harveyai/harvey-labs/issues/191
I don't know the other fields well enough, but if all your clients end up needlessly detained or admit to things they have a valid defense for, eventually people will notice. It's not exactly the two major sins that will definitely get you disbarred - stealing money and screwing client while representing them - but it's definitely at least incompetent. They seem to not understand that common law jurisdictions are fundamentally different from civil ones, and also, there's quite a bit of difference between how the system evolved in each country. Or that in China what's printed is basically more like a manifesto, since it's almost entirely run by the bureaucracy and personal relationships, and lawyers that aren't foreign-trained and work for foreign firms aren't considered prestigious since the courts are essentially entirely for show.
They need to get like, one jurisdiction, one area in that jurisdiction, and specifically the kind of sub-sections in that area down pat. But they can't train on real material so they will never be able to do so. Their banner testimonials come from non-lawyers and that says it all.
I genuinely appreciate efforts to make access to justice more equitable & cost-effective. And I don’t actually much care if people are using these tools to draft boilerplate contract provisions, create initial document summaries, and other such mundane tasks.
But damn, uncritical reliance on these tools is setting yourself up for potentially serious downstream pain. I’ve yet to see legal automation (including LLMs) that can one-shot situationally appropriate and fully trustworthy outcomes in the absence of experienced human review.
Law is an imperfect effort to codify ever-evolving norms, and interpretation of the law is often more of an art than a science, requiring intuitive leaps and judgements not necessarily suited to statistical prediction machines. And even where the law appears to be reasonably settled, not every legal situation gets resolved in the form of words that somehow end up in a corpus of training data subsequently used to train a model.
In other words: legal LLMs are still very much caveat emptor. Trust if you must, but please, please, please, carefully verify before making potentially deeply consequential decisions based on the output of these tools.
Take, for example, India. The courts are backlogged like crazy. If you're not willing to bribe a judge or the opposite side's lawyer, you'r looking at multiple decades to settle simple cases.
I wish I could waive a wand and have some LLM just go through all of the 58 million pending court cases, identify the clear cut ones and free up the judges' time so they can work on the more difficult ones.
If both parties agree to use the LLM judge and be bound by what it decides, you don't need a real court.
Which illustrates my point that losers would throw it back to the courts under the guise of “the LLM arbitration was not fair” and then the cases would still take a decade to get seen in India.
My cousin has an open-and-shut land case. His father was allotted some barren government land ~50 years ago and they have happily been farming it ever since. But suddenly, ~30 years ago the government decided to build a highway near it. Its value went up. And it dawned on some bureaucrat that nobody had made any money from the initial allotment; an injustice that must be fixed pronto! So they passed an order cancelling the initial allotment, and cousin's family went to court. Now, for almost 30 years, the case has been dragging on through the court. They've been told multiple times: take 25% of the current market value of the land and "sell" it to us. But they insist on doing things the proper way, and have been running to/from the courts. They're on their 5th team of lawyers, afaik. Each new lawyer agrees that it's a clear cut case, but month after month it drags on.
Overall the system is organized to be slow and drain money from you. This is how lawyers, experts and others can put food on the table.
Furthermore, courts are paid for primarily by states. The tech solution would run into the same resource constraint that is already present.
All of this ignores a more fundamental aspect of the legal system, having a chance to have your case heard by a competent authority. Institutional sinews are built by doing the hard things and investing in it.
Also, I wonder if this is at all related to the recent reports that Harvey has been getting squeezed on margins by the US labs.
[edit] I'd go one step further too and say the training data should be explicitly requestable too so third parties can verify (freedom of information act styles).
we can start out with the hosted version for evaluation and then self host for production and real customers
First it is going to suck, like it did with coding but after a while it is going to be good enough for 90% of legal work. And finally when attorneys will feel the competition of AI doing their work for 10 cents of tokebs, they are going to be less arrogant and more motivated to finish a task instead of client babysitting them through the process.
"he who will be his own Counsellour, shall be sure to have a Fool for his Client."
How much worse the lawyer who subcontracts Freakazoid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freakazoid!
"Freakazoid has ... access to all of the Internet's knowledge. He cannot fly, but often runs around with his arms extended and making whooshing sounds with his mouth, pretending he is."
If I ask it about Irish law is it gonna mix in some US and British law in there because the training data has lots of that? Or hallucinate a mixture?
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Eventually, I hope we'll see many more specialised small models that run nicely on consumer and prosumer hardware. Like LLMs specific to income tax law for UK residents, or LLMs specific to building power delivery circuits for PD USB C devices. There probably is a point where the niche-ness does become to niche to justify the post training, but again, small models means much less training required.
Kind of begs the question if this even needs new/better data? Could you take the foundation model that's trained on everything, and then run a final fine tuning training run on just the set of foundation training data that you want the model to specialise in? Eg, extract just the training data that is about UK income tax law and then run a few epochos on just that? Any ML people know if this is a thing or if not, why it doesnt work?
So, if a US or EU person shares their private legal info here, it's processed and stored by an adversarial country that has no extradition treaty with their country?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Run a sanitized VDI with no local storage --> offshore independent entity (e.g. a Hong Kong Company) that holds the AI service contract and API license --> GLM-Legal.
Somebody ought to set this up for pro se work.
DOJ could cut Z.ai off from US-based payment systems (Mastercard/Visa) if they don't comply with subpoenas.
It’s also hard because no individual case would likely justify a move like that. It would have to be the sum of many, many cases.
note that the client using an enterprise tier does not grant the same privilege.
Don't know if GP's comment has any backing at all, but the statement that "not all judges agree" is probably literally true (though not necessarily meaningfully true), given that it's a recent case in a district court, issue hasn't been heard in an appeals court yet (presumably), and the fact that all things AI are constantly in flux.
That said I think it's generally a good idea to err on the "safe side" and assume that there's no privilege at all in communications with purported AI lawyers.
The opinion you cited is from an aiphobe judge. Searching ChatGPT is no different than searching Westlaw. If done in anticipation of litigation it’s likely privileged.
I think part of the reason there's so much propaganda around chinese tech is to scare you away from possibly using them, not for your own safety, but so Meta/Google/MS ect dont lose access to the ability to spy on every aspect of your life.
I love how we have to pretend like China is some scary boogeyman because people on screens say they are.
Let's think this all the way through in multiple actual scenarios... nope. Far worse than hiring a lawyer in your jurisdiction in multiple ways.
I think you've lost the plot a bit on this one.
I'm scared of China because of their lack of democracy and the terrifying stuff they do to their own citizenry, which presumably they'd very much like to expand.
Im really not sure why you or anyone thinks Western democracy is better (or real).
For starters, I've been told there is exactly zero voter fraud, ever.
The Chinese government is pretty despicable, but it's mostly focused inwards. 200 dead schoolgirls in Iran would tell you that for everyone else, the USA poses the much bigger risk.
As an American, I do not like this. But it is what it is. If China were the de factor world police, hoooo boy, we'd be having a different conversation.
you can't possibly be serious
"AI Hallucination Cases" - https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
If anyone here is looking for engineers to work on legal AI products, both of the students who worked on this project come highly recommended.
But also, interesting how the rate of cases peaked and seems to be going down now.
Hallucinations are one, "AI can't scale anymore" is another (remember that one?), limited context windows, strawberry problems, glue on pizza, sycophancy.
I don't want to say there's no problems, there are very serious ones. User psychosis, economic harms, alignment, cost of computer components, etc. But there's a lot of false positives that get turned into Ed Zitron articles along the way.
I don’t think hallucinations are a major issue with agentic coding a year later? At least, not for me.
Legal writing does have the problem that there is no such thing as a correct argument that a goal-driven loop can target. But basic things like “does this case even exist” seem solvable with research agents, and even harder problems like “does this case support the argument being made” seem conceptually very similar to questions I now ask Claude daily.
Non-deterministic software can behave orders of magnitude different based on how input is structured.
This factor is largely missed by bringing a deterministic mindset to trying AI.
This means the same problem solution can work for one person reliably, and not another and both are true.
Assertions that begin with a deterministic assessment using a snapshot in time of both the user and models capabilities are a new feature of this new category of software that will have to be better caught and expressed.
Are you still looking at code and agent traces to know if this is true or not?
At work, we still see hallucinations across all model families as we share bot claims for each others code
It does not tell you if the answer is correct, just if it converges. I think it will be a permanent problem in areas where answers do not have a an obvious definitive answer like coding and mathematics.
I think using adapters for different legal systems could improve results by 2% or 3% at a similar cost (perhaps under 1% of additional parameters) and allow for independent improvements. If the GLM team hasn't already considered this and adopts my suggestion, tips would be welcome.
For a field that is (appearingly) so complex and multi-faceted, surely agentic AI is bound to hallucinate, particularly when components of the law change?
This is really an open question. If anyone with more experience has thoughts on this I'd be very interested.
most law firms are basically assembly line processes that have one fixed specialty, with a small set of claims that they will file, and typically targeted at insurance companies, so there is very little real practice of law. you just set up your assembly line to scam insurance in your particular niche and then search for clients that fit your cut out. LLMs can definitely disrupt this model in interesting ways.
There are lots County or state specific law. Some case law in different state can be referenced for some legal principle, even if the same law does not exist your etc.
It have to be a full harness, not just a modal.
It is no surprise ZAI announced this a few weeks after Astra for Law:
I really find legal models kind of insulting and the people who think they are a good idea are being intentionally obtuse. The law isn’t based of base axioms and we literally just make stuff up a lot of the time. Everyday law usually isn’t breaking new ground, but if that’s the target, these models don’t have much value there either.
I'm sure we'll continue to see the occasional person who fails to understand they themselves will be held liable if they submit work done by an AI without vetting it, but it's not like they don't have ways of dealing with this.
In which case would this be the primary blame, and not the legal system itself, or you for actually doing the crime?
I fail to see how its your lawyers fault that you went to jail for a crime you didn't commit over the system as a whole. And I really fail to see how it's the lawyer's sole fault that you went to jail for a crime that you should - in fact - have went to jail for...
There are a lot of problems with the legal system (including with lawyers). This just doesn't seem like the hill to die on.
The sixth is taken seriously to the point that incompetent lawyer could be a valid reason for granting a retrial.
There are plenty of ways a lawyer can screw up procedurally that can drastically impact your case.
AI can not meaningfully suffer consequences for what it does, and the trend is to remove the human from the loop more and more.
Furthermore, it's entirely conceivable that you have a law firm staffed by lawyers who more-or-less just say "yeah sure whatever" to what this thing does and, when asked about what can be done to appeal something, or how a document didn't make it into evidence, or how a subpoena wasn't filed, just shrug their shoulders and go "iunno". Vibe-practicing law, basically. You need to have an idea of how they're using AI and in what parts of the case.
If merely sounding authoritative is enough to get past a judge, then vast numbers of people are already likely having years of their lives taken for no good reason, entirely without AI. Fix that, and a disclosure doesn't matter.
It's ultimately his name on the documents submitted to the court.
Common law in general seems essentially impossible to formalize in such a way to use purely deterministic reasoning models of yesteryear, but I'm sure many specific laws could be converted, especially in fields like tax law (I'm sure they already are by many big players)
They are obviously AI-generated (but does not disclose such) and frequently misses or conflates key details the same way Gemma in particular does. They're also bizarrely positive when I correct them instead of pissy and arrogant like I'm used to.
Nobody should be paying these rates for legal "work" performed by a machine that poorly acts the part.
I think an under-appreciate way AIs might disrupt the world is by giving individuals an agent that will ruthlessly optimize for them.
Companies have entire departments that spend all their time ruthlessly optimizing so they can charge an extra fee here, or spin up a new shell company there. Meanwhile, here I am in our capitalist society and I just enjoy relaxing and spending time with my wife and kids instead of maximally exploiting the capital I possess at all times--like a fool.
It will be interesting if we ever integrate AI so fully in our lives that the AI can maximally exploit all our capital. My AI might check prices, and I will drive past your store to save 5 bucks at the next. My AI might help me manage 27 LLCs and shell companies of my own so that I too can just disappear in a poof of legal smoke if I ever need to. Etc.
And the opportunity for a moat of AI that is correct and accountable(legally) is ripe for the picking.
It might also become a race to the bottom, since you can’t deliver on quality better than others anymore, you’ll have to put effort towards quantity. That could mean firms might pressure lawyers to sign as much as possible in a given time, while they’re still personally at risk/responsible for the documents they put out. That means either very hectic reading, and missing details, or no reading at all.
*And like socializer said, the written documents are only one part of the job.
But then I looked into it and I see that you actually do have to go to certain schools to become a lawyer. Having the knowledge is not enough, you have to pass through the proper (and expensive) gates as well.
I'm not really surprised.
If the human lawyers don't catch that on review, they're likely to have an angry judge and an AI saying "absolutely, you were right to call me out on that, I shouldn't have hallucinated a non-existent case and made the judge sanction you."
Come on, z.al --- post the weights!
This is dead on arrival just like their, very good, powerpoint building product.
Nobody in the western world wants their value added closed source services (submit your H2 strategy deck to their cloud? Your contracts? I think not) especially when they are priced increasingly close to frontier.
Z.ai doesn't fully appreciate the level of distrust by their clients from western markets for simply being Chinese origin.
They do have credibility but it comes from being both open and having extremely capable models.
Removing one of these pillars makes a marginal risk / reward tradeoff probably a nonstarter.
Maybe LATAM, BRICS, Middle East are more willing to accept a closed / relatively expensive value prop. But not US / EU.
Beyond the obvious possible profit motive these attacks can be arms length arranged by competitors or people with an axe to grind to trip you up and slow you down. Because your activity is valuable to you there is an asymmetry-- they can bring the action cheaply because they aren't risking much, but your defense is expensive because if you flub it you could lose everything.
Part of the value of a legal advisor generally and particularly something like a legal AI is that it lets you map risk surface: "What if we started selling all the customer secrets? would we go to ultra-prison?"-- you don't ask because you're going to do it, you ask to perform a sensitivity analysis, to know where the dragons are hiding, and to setup contingencies. For stuff you're actually doing/going to do you want advice backed by a team who can defend it if it goes wrong.
All of hosted AI is a big risk from the perspective of discovery-- but particularly or legal advice/research that seems extremely radioactive and a bad tradeoff.
If anything being outside of the west might be a slight asset on this risk-- as there is some chance that they respond to a subpoena with "bite me"... but that probably doesn't overcome the other concerns you raise.