I know someone who works in law and deals particularly with an area of US benefits and healthcare law. One of their workflows for lower-level employees at their firm involves taking in documents from healthcare plans and organizations, analyzing them for certain kinds of data, and then importing that data into an internal system they use to analyze and provide guidance on plans. The internal system can contain hundreds of documents for an individual client. All of the documents have the same information (roughly) but in totally diverse formats and styles. Once it's in the system, it's easy to compare and analyze across documents and the research process is much faster.
They recently bought a Claude subscription and began using Claude to do the initial read of the documents and output JSON they can import into their internal systems. The work still must be reviewed by an attorney - Claude is nowhere near making the kinds of judgments a lawyer would make about this content - but it has increased their throughput from 2-3 documents an hour to 8-10 documents an hour by killing the busy work.
LLMs have great advantages for this kind of work - but not for decision-making. I just don't see OpenAI ever admitting that.
(I've left some details intentionally vague because this is a very specific area of law and I don't want my friends to be identified without their consent.)
I see problems in LLMs doing research, making drafts, etc.
I see 3 kinds of potential users.
1. Non legal background people trying to avoid going to a lawyer. They should definitely NOT use an LLMs.
2. Fresh out of law school graduates.
They think they can do fast work, draft quick replies, do fast case research, enh. They should go the traditional route of interning, learning the "art", they probably won't need it because they will learn "how the law works"
3. Established attorneys.
They usually have templates made for most things, over their career, they have established routines of making things fast, maybe it can help them but to say replacing good chunk of work or offloading to LLMs isn't probably going to go well.
There is a reason why interns are made to do grunt work. The "chain of command" is built so they learn on basic stuff, learn to make decisions, etc. Without these basic decisions under their belt, an intern can't take bigger decisions later on. They just won't know....
There are 3x as many lawyers per capita in the US as we had in the 1970s. Credit agreements that used to be 50 pages are now 500. This increase in volume has not lead to any increase in actual value. The legal profession is a metastatic cancer on our society. Un-fuck this situation and maybe I'll think about taking your advice of not using a LLM.
ivraatiems · · focus · HN ↗
They recently bought a Claude subscription and began using Claude to do the initial read of the documents and output JSON they can import into their internal systems. The work still must be reviewed by an attorney - Claude is nowhere near making the kinds of judgments a lawyer would make about this content - but it has increased their throughput from 2-3 documents an hour to 8-10 documents an hour by killing the busy work.
LLMs have great advantages for this kind of work - but not for decision-making. I just don't see OpenAI ever admitting that.
(I've left some details intentionally vague because this is a very specific area of law and I don't want my friends to be identified without their consent.)
2Gkashmiri · · focus · HN ↗
I see problems in LLMs doing research, making drafts, etc.
I see 3 kinds of potential users.
1. Non legal background people trying to avoid going to a lawyer. They should definitely NOT use an LLMs.
2. Fresh out of law school graduates.
They think they can do fast work, draft quick replies, do fast case research, enh. They should go the traditional route of interning, learning the "art", they probably won't need it because they will learn "how the law works"
3. Established attorneys. They usually have templates made for most things, over their career, they have established routines of making things fast, maybe it can help them but to say replacing good chunk of work or offloading to LLMs isn't probably going to go well.
There is a reason why interns are made to do grunt work. The "chain of command" is built so they learn on basic stuff, learn to make decisions, etc. Without these basic decisions under their belt, an intern can't take bigger decisions later on. They just won't know....
consensus1 · · focus · HN ↗
rayiner · · focus · HN ↗
eru · · focus · HN ↗
That very first image uses a different inflation indices for each of the two lines in the graph.
They also only post pictures without linking to sources.