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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.
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