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Notes -
So far bigger models have not fixed the serious flaws that all LLMs have: they have no common sense and make boneheaded errors. Importantly, they don't learn from these errors without more training. So when your production LLM is messing up, there's often no way to give it feedback.
Maybe the next model will solve this problem. The progress has been fast enough that I wouldn't doubt anything. But assuming this isn't fixed right away...
Not replaceable: Truck drivers, call center workers, data entry
Replaceable: Lawyers and paralegals
What are LLMs good at? Searching for information and creating boiler plate. Instead of lawyers reading hundreds of pages of legal documents, just load it into an LLM and then ask it questions. Want to create 10 pages of fancy legalese? Just write it in plain English and have the LLM make it sound like a lawyer wrote it.
LLMs are probably already capable of doing 90% of what lawyers do.
On the other side, there's a good chance lawyers will use this new efficiency to create longer and longer legal documents that require an LLM to parse.
In criminal law the state pays the bills and a hugely disproportionate percentage of senior government officials and politicians are (former) lawyers, so I doubt that their sinecures end any time soon. In commercial/corporate law the profession as a whole is already hugely over staffed and overpaid, the issue is it’s an endless defection game where you have to pay a ton of money to get ‘the best’ lawyers so you don’t get fucked by various sneaky techniques employed by the other side who have ‘the best’ lawyers and so on (both of these lawyers went to the same institutions and are friends and indeed even coworkers on other cases). It’s essentially a tax on commercial activity facilitated via the legal profession.
In many ways a lot of finance is similar, so I sympathize, but the incentives lean against automation as long as the people making the decisions can hand out money to their friends, and that describes an extremely high percentage of PMC jobs in professional services (law, finance, consulting, accounting).
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Lawyers using LLMs has mostly not gone well for them thus far.
Are we sure about that? There's surely some good examples of mistakes, but what we don't see is the millions of legal documents that are already searched or created with LLMs.
What I am proposing is not a LLM-lawyer, but that an LLM can be a force amplifier for existing lawyers.
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