Thread

As A.I. makes law firms more efficient, clients ask: 'Where's my discount?'

150 points · 162 comments · mooreds

dabinat · 1790566087 · focus · HN ↗
My experience with lawyers is that if you need a legal document, they often have templates ready to go and will take 10 seconds to find & replace your company name into the document. I know this because they often don’t proofread it afterwards. They then charge you $1000 for that 10 seconds of work. Given that I have felt ripped off by many lawyers, I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.
1. Der_Einzige · 1790568382 · focus · HN ↗
  Lawyer jokes are on point and on brand for a reason.
  They grift about as hard as tech workers did pre-2022. Relying on the fact that no one can easily audit their work to justify their one hour of actually work despite making easily 300K+ a year.
  Please kill their golden goose. Most lawyers are actively harmful to society.
  1. lurk2 · 1790569138 · focus · HN ↗
    > They grift about as hard as tech workers did pre-2022. Relying on the fact that no one can easily audit their work to justify their one hour of actually work despite making easily 300K+ a year.
    This isn’t true at all.
  2. georgeburdell · 1790569332 · focus · HN ↗
    On the other hand, I'm horrified at the thought of zero marginal cost legal work given the strain of the current workload on courts.
    [deleted] · 1790569697 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    Razengan · 1790570612 · focus · HN ↗
    > strain of the current workload on courts
    Maybe courts could be replaced by AI too once it's good enough?
    With the right to escalate to human judges of course.
    and without turning it into current phone helplines or support chatbots, god please.
    shen · 1790571479 · focus · HN ↗
    How often are you satisfied with the answers from the customer service chatbot vs immediately looking for the talk to a human button?
    Razengan · 1790588003 · focus · HN ↗
    Never. Added that prayer
    hibikir · 1790570842 · focus · HN ↗
    The law works because most people won't break it, most disputes don't even end up in anyone getting sued, and most lawsuits end up in settlements before too much court time was spent. Break any of those things, and systems crack. Break multiple, and it all collapses.
    If the cost of what a lawyer does today drops to pennies, the system probably needs robo-judges, and/or massive penalties for taking something in front of a human judge when the facts sufficiently completely one sided, as making them pay the winning party's legal fees will become insufficient deterrence.
    somenameforme · 1790572702 · focus · HN ↗
    That is self inflicted by having a system where you're expected to plead not guilty when you're guilty, because otherwise you get screwed. In other country's legal systems, pleading not guilty when ultimately found guilty is taken as a lack of remorse and tends to result in harsh sentencing. By contrast if somebody pleads guilty, shows remorse, and works with the police and others then they can expect to receive relatively lenient sentencing, all other things being equal.
    nradov · 1790574677 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think it will be a huge problem. People aren't going to commit more crimes so the caseload there won't increase much. "Jailhouse lawyers" might file more appeals of their own convictions but those seldom go very far.
    On the civil side, high-dollar disputes are already litigated. The real potential growth enabled by cheaper legal services will be in small claims. Those courts can be scaled up because they don't require a jury or even a real judge.
  3. hermannj314 · 1790570314 · focus · HN ↗
    I see no evidence that in our nation's 250 year history or the broader practice of law (specifically adversarial law), that lawyers are working to make their job more efficient, legal outcomes more reliable, or legal tools more accessible.
    Burn their entire industry to the ground. I welcome making the practice of law an AI-only field and ban humans from working in it to remove prejudice, misconduct, expense. As a former foster parent, I've seen children being delayed justice for weeks because two lawyers couldn't find time for a 15 minute conversation in front a judge. I've hated all lawyers ever since. Gatekeeping priesthood of the 21st century.
    somenameforme · 1790572419 · focus · HN ↗
    The priesthood metaphor works quite well as well since everything they touch ends up in a fashion that may as well have been written in Latin. And it's all wholly unnecessary since, contrary to the common perception of law operating on esoteric interpretations of a comma, lots of things in law come down to reasonable discretion. Of course exercising that reasonable discretion oneself requires first decrypting the text, which is outside the bounds of most laymen. So lawyers get paid lots of money to decipher texts that lawyers were paid lots of money to encipher using a legal system composed by politicians who were themselves, overwhelmingly, lawyers as well.
    Dante's 8th Circle indeed.
    nradov · 1790574199 · focus · HN ↗
    The legal profession is hardly a priesthood. If you're referring to contracts, most of the language is pretty simple. You have to learn a bit of jargon but much less than in software development. I think a lot of people are just intimidated or lazy and don't even try.
    somenameforme · 1790575415 · focus · HN ↗
    Feel free to have a go at this: <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6028/text" rel="nofollow">https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6028...
    It's a critical law currently working its way through congress. It's not only indecipherable, but far longer than the entire original US Constitution. And that's a trend - when things were done by people and for people, they tended to be brief and clear. As lawyers got involved, everything became a convoluted indecipherable mess which may as well be written in Latin.
    tzs · 1790577082 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's not only indecipherable, but far longer than the entire original US Constitution.
    I took a look at a few random sections of it and didn't see anything undecipherable, other than maybe things that lack enough context because it is written as a diff from the current law.
    The comparison to the length of the Constitution makes little sense to me. The Constitution establishes a framework and some power allocations. It says almost nothing about the bazillion lower level details necessary to actual have a functioning county.
    somenameforme · 1790579042 · focus · HN ↗
    The point I'm making about the discretion is that in the past the law would lay out a general framework, and that framework would be interpreted with some reasonable discretion assumed for its legal interpretation. And that is still the case. The only difference is that now laws are written in such a way that they're largely incomprehensible to non-lawyers, and I suspect even to most lawyers outside their domain of expertise.
    Obviously individual sections of a law are going to literally 'decipherable' in the sense that they are written in English, but try to tell me what that bill "really" does, the incentive for its passing, the implications, and so forth. Almost nobody would be able to do that. By contrast read the Constitution and anybody could easily understand the structure of the United States government. Or similarly the Bill of Rights lays out some of the most critical rights and restrictions in the US, yet each is no longer than a few sentences which are easily understood.
    tzs · 1790631920 · focus · HN ↗
    > [...] but try to tell me what that bill "really" does, the incentive for its passing, the implications, and so forth. Almost nobody would be able to do that. By contrast read the Constitution and anybody could easily understand the structure of the United States government.
    OK, but now in addition to understanding the structure of US government from reading the Constitution try to understand those things you ask of the bill: the incentive for passing the Constitution, its implications, and so forth.
    At the least you also need to read the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist papers, many early debates in Congress over what the heck the Constitution means, many early Supreme Court cases, and probably a fair bit of history to understand the issues the country had under the Articles of Confederation that the Constitution was supposed to address.
    Same for the Bill of Rights.
    In modern terms things like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are prompts. Bills and case law are implementations.
    The implementations are complicated because (1) law concerns people and what they do and people and their endeavors are complicated, (2) we have a whole lot of people in a large interconnected and interdependent economy, and (3) a whole lot of people look for any ambiguity they can find and try to exploit it for their own gain, often to great detriment to others, so bills need to be explicit to cover the edge cases.
    somenameforme · 1790643541 · focus · HN ↗
    Look at the language in that bill, or any, and you'll see that when it all comes down to it, it no in way whatsoever, covers all edge cases. The law constantly uses broad strokes and relies on reasonable interpretations to clarify ambiguities. And this is the same for all bills. The law isn't like code, and doesn't try to be like code. The obfuscation is completely unnecessary.
    Similarly when I speak of the motivation for things, I'm not speaking of some subtle and nuanced historical understanding of motivation, but simply what something does and why somebody might want it. If somebody is of average intelligence they can easily infer such from the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and so forth. But in that bill I referenced, you can't even ELI5 the law, let alone why or what it would change. It's an obfuscated mess. And none of this is necessary at all.
    JumpCrisscross · 1790582096 · focus · HN ↗
    That law is essentially a diff. The USC (the actual statute) tends to be easier to read through.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.