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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29423 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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I've been hearing rumblings that it has made impact in the legal profession, big law firms are probably supplementing their paralegal staff, at least, and likely their attorneys.

We hear about the obvious ones that get caught fabricating caselaw wholesale, but I'd bet it's effective enough that most of the time no outsider notices.

https://www.floridabar.org/the-florida-bar-news/miami-dade-public-defender-is-using-artificial-intelligence-for-research-and-for-case-preparation/

I find it is excellent for small simple contracts. Want an NDA, a form for a leave of absence application, a privacy policy for a website, a small contract to sell a used car, a contract to hire the neighbors kid to work a bit during the summer as a tester or similar it works well. A will for a person who has simple finances or the paperwork that needs to be signed when checking into a hotel.

It is pretty great at coming up with domain/name combos for a business.

Chatgpt did a better job of explaining the swedish tax forms for me than the government website.

One thing I have realized after spending a few years in the startup scene is how legal expenses are a huge burden on a startup. Various contracts need to be drafted and they can cost thousands each. ChatGPT can draft these simple contracts.

I will use it for tasks where the scope of work is easily defined.

I've found it makes researching unfamiliar areas of law about 5x faster. It really seems to "understand" statutory interpretation and I've yet to catch it making a material mistake. It does a good job comparing and explaining two different statutes that are on point, especially when provided with current caselaw.

I have also used it to fine-tune an appellant brief. It is at least as helpful as having a particularly bright law student with access to massive knowledge reserves to bounce ideas off of.

A year or so back I suggested that any person who is currently in Law School should drop out. I think it is still good advice, although I understand the counter-arguments. It will not be long before these things are smarter and faster than any first-year associate.

What kind of law do you practice? I'm currently in litigation but I've done oil and gas law in the past and dabbled in bankruptcy and simple estate planning along the way, and I have a hard time thinking of any obvious uses for AI. It may make legal research easier, but I do legal research maybe a few times a year, and clients don't like paying for it so we usually only do it at their request, and they only seem to request it whenever I'm already pretty busy, so cutting my research billables by a couple hours wouldn't make much of a dent in the overall amount of work I have. The thing about most litigation is that few issues arise where there's any real fuzzy question that needs research. If you practice in one area the relevant appellate decisions are well-known and new ones are rare enough that it's news when they're handed down. This was even true when I was in oil and gas, and a relatively large number of decisions were being handed down during the boom, covering the three states I worked in.

Anyway, in litigation at least, I'm rarely ever doing the typical lawyer thing of applying the law to the facts and making an argument. What I spend most of my time doing is gathering facts and analyzing them so I can first make an argument to the client to get settlement authority in the amount I think I need and then making an argument to opposing counsel that they should accept what I'm offering them. The relevant information here is 1. The facts of the case at hand, and 2. The facts of other cases my firm has settled with Plaintiff's counsel. Any LLM would need access to hundreds of pages of depositions, thousands of pages of medical records, interrogatories, fact witness lists, expert reports, innumerable pages of discovery material, and other information each case generates. And then multiply this by every case the office has ever handled, and some that they didn't. Almost every case I handle involves discovery evidence and deposition testimony from prior cases that the Plaintiff is relying on as evidence. And I need it to digest the facts of all recent cases (at least the past 5 years, sometimes longer) to compare settlement amounts. In order to do this, a firm would need to be running their own AI servers, which would have to be training constantly. And that doesn't even get to the other problem, that AI can't take a deposition.

In oil and gas it's even worse since my job was in title, and title records are stashed in courthouses and often haven't been digitized. Some counties are getting better with digitizing land records but few counties have attempted to digitize historical probate records, and the ones that have don't have online access. I'm not aware of any county that has digitized historical court records. With the exception of Ohio, the counties that do have online access are fee-based, and I doubt many companies are willing to give AI the authority to charge credit cards. And once you do get the records, anything before about 1920 is going to be handwritten, often poorly, and anything before about 1970 is going to be typewritten in a way that OCR struggles with. Some online systems don't work off of a typical database, but simply have scanned index pages that require you to manually enter the book and page number you're looking for. These use indexing systems that computers have made obsolete, and it's an open question whether an AI could figure out how to use them absent specific instructions. But the ultimate question is whether or not the general AI's that exist now would even be able to understand what they're supposed to be doing. There's also the problem that even knowing if a particular instrument even applies to the parcel in question. In states that predate the US Land Survey System, property descriptions will often start with "Beginning at a white oak" or something similarly nonspecific, then run through survey calls. Sometimes the calls have inaccuracies that need to be untangled. Sometimes (particularly with old leases and ROWs) it will just state the owners of the adjoining property. Sometimes (pretty often, actually, a title chain will simply stop cold because it passed through an estate and the only record of the transfer is the probate record of the person who died, whose name you probably don't know. I could continue but you get the idea. Figuring out a title takes years of learning various techniques based on the resources available. And God help you if you work in West Virginia.

With bankruptcy and estate planning, while actual legal questions are more prevalent, the bigger issue is being able to advise clients about what they should be doing. The kind of people willing to half-ass estate planning are the kind of people who are going to get a basic will off of Legal Zoom for 80 bucks anyway and allow their heirs to deal with the consequences of the fact that their estate wasn't so simple after all. (Practically every client I did a will for told me their situation was "really simple" and this was almost never the case. One guy had property in another state. One couple had a blended family. One guy owned a fucking restricted business.) Bankruptcy is theoretically more straightforward, especially Chapter 7s, but bankruptcy clients need someone to tell them that things are going to be okay as much as they need legal advice. These people come into your office absolutely scared to death and want to hug you when they leave.

And then there's the thing that local courts have their own customs that can't easily be translated to LLMs. Does the PA Statute of Repose apply to equipment that's permanently affixed to a structure? In Cambria County it does, in Allegheny County it usually doesn't, and it's not something anyone is ever going to appeal. How will the bankruptcy trustee treat a particular situation? Depends on the trustee. These are things you can only know if you're a lawyer who practices in the jurisdiction, and there are no written opinions to guide the AI. I admit that it has some theoretical uses, but I wouldn't start telling people to drop out of law school just yet. I mean, there are plenty of reasons to not go to law school, but this isn't one of them.

I work in a specific heavily statutory / reg based area of the law.

I have asked it difficult questions about statutory interpretation and found that it missed a lot. So YMMV.

Just a note that you may be interested in my above reply.

If the model you're using allows you to upload information, it HAS helped to simply give it access to the corpus of laws that you're working with.

Digging deeper into regulatory law, beyond just the high level statutes where the rules and rulings may not have been part of the training data does seem like it would require heavier specialization.

God dang it's just so cool that we have so many smart and accomplished professional folks on here. Thanks for this insight, really interesting stuff.

Ironically I don't feel that accomplished because I consistently hang out in places where high level degrees and incredibly intelligent professionals is almost the baseline.

I have my moments, though.

Wouldn't it take the same amount of time to explain to ChatGPT what you want in the contract as it would to just write it yourself?

If you can dictate notes for the contract in about 5 minutes, you'll have a first draft from ChatGPT much more quickly than you could create one yourself, even using existing forms.

Teach it how to use you forms and it'd be even better.

ChatGPT can draft these simple contracts.

If I was gambling my career on a startup and handing over 30/40/50/60% equity to the venture capitalists I don’t know that I’d trust ChatGPT to let me know I was being screwed over [even more than expected].

I would probably get a better contract for something that big. But there are a million little agreements that have to be signed. I got a rental agreement for a 4 square meter space in an atic written by chatgpt. If I lose that small amount of money because someone actually wants to bring it to court I am still saving money.

I got a rental agreement for a 4 square meter space in an atic written by chatgpt.

I feel like I'm missing something here. I don't know much about law, but every rental agreement I've signed has been the locality's standard rental agreement. I don't think they were technically required to use it, but there was just no reason not to. Why aren't all of those simple boring contracts that are so trivial ChatGPT could do it just a standard contract that you fill in the blanks on like those rental contracts? How does the LLM help?

Tangentially relevant...

It's bizarre how much custom legal work gets down. It would seem that governments or standards bodies could provide "standard contracts" for things like wills, employment contracts, leases etc... Instead, everyone get their own bespoke contract, and most of them are badly written.

We already have a standard will. It's called intestacy law. In contracts cases, as long as there is some minimal reason to believe a contract exists, courts have no problem writing missing terms for you, and they're consistent enough to be predictable. You don't even need a price.

You'd be surprised (or not) how badly a layperson can fuck things up even using a basic form with instructions in plain english.

Standard contracts from reputable sources are available if you look for them. For example:

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