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. 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.
    JumpCrisscross · 1790582096 · focus · HN ↗
    That law is essentially a diff. The USC (the actual statute) tends to be easier to read through.

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