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by piker12 hours ago |
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upvoteby jmkd12 hours ago|
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Max Junestrand has consistently said Legora treats the model layer as swappable, selecting across frontier providers rather than building the product around one.

OpenAI didn't need to name Legora and Harvey in the second paragraph of the launch post.

They are pre-empting the obvious interpretation of Astra for Law: that moving this far up the legal stack puts them in direct competition with their biggest legal AI customers.

“Don't worry, they can build on us” is a pretty conspicuous message to include on launch day.

They have clearly thought about some pessimistic outcomes.

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upvoteby timpera9 hours ago|
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Switching from ChatGPT Enterprise to Legora at my firm was a godsend, it's so much better for legal work, even with the frequent changes to the underlying models.
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upvoteby TZubiri9 hours ago|
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>Max Junestrand has consistently said Legora treats the model layer as swappable, selecting across frontier providers rather than building the product around one.

Vendor-neutrality for LLMs is such a weak thesis all around, whether for providers or consumers. It weakens the product by being promiscuous and gains no material benefit at all.

LLMs are magic byte(byte) functions, it doesn't make sense to say "we have different providers for magic".

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upvoteby datadrivenangel7 hours ago|
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Different flavors of magic require different ritual components and in the name of all that is stable and production worthy, please don't get a necromancer to do your civil construction magic.

Vendor-neutrality helps reduce lock-in, and OpenAI and Anthropic are big enough that the reduction is valuable.

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upvoteby noisy_boy5 hours ago|
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Really? Even when the magic is differently priced across magicians?
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upvoteby JumpCrisscross11 hours ago|
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"We are also expanding our work on privacy and governance to give law firms specific controls for confidential client work"

This is everything OpenAI have to say about privacy in this announcement. No guarantees. No promises. Just a pinky-swear promise.

Anyone trusting them–or a lawyer who relies on them–for legal work deserves what they get.

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upvoteby dathinab10 hours ago|
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the thing is a lot of the legal work which will go through this is drafting 100 and 1 variations of draft versions of standard contracts not containing any trade secrets where the contract can be drafted with "replacement/place holder names"

the kind of work mostly done by juniors not yet through their final exam and other "non" lawyers etc.

so it's a slippery slope of "lets just use it for <this> things where it doesn't matter" and then out of laziness and convenience it creeps into all the other places (at least for drafts).

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upvoteby dd8601fn10 hours ago|
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Lawyers are already llm’ing their work and getting slapped around in court for making shit up.

There’s another case making headlines every week.

I get the feeling a lot of them won’t care about this stuff.

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upvoteby byzantinegene3 hours ago|
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they could potentially lose their license, I think that's worth caring about.
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upvoteby forrestthewoods12 hours ago|
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If there is any cartel that deserves to be broken its legal search. May they die a miserable death.
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upvoteby ericd12 hours ago|
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Yeah, it should be freely available, you have to be able to know the rules you're supposed to obey in order to obey them well. I've been making a free API for US law search, you can point whatever model you want at it: https://law.agentlookups.ai/

Very much a work in progress, only federal and state so far, no municipal codes yet, and no case law yet. Big hole, I know. Also working on making the search ranking work better.

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upvoteby manyatoms12 hours ago|
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is there a dataset/torrent with all the underlying laws?
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upvoteby ericd12 hours ago|
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Right now it's just a bunch of crawlers for the individual states. If there's interest, I could periodically stand up snapshot torrents or something. That something you'd be interested in?

Alternatively, if someone else knows an all-in-one option that exists, I wouldn't mind retiring those crawlers...

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upvoteby timschmidt12 hours ago|
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Not op, but that's a very interesting proposition. While the law and legal code are technically property of the people, I'm not aware of any single point of download for it all.
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upvoteby rayiner12 hours ago|
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There’s no single point of download for it all because there’s thousands of autonomous entities that issue law and adjudicate cases, at least 51 of them distinct sovereign entities.
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upvoteby datsci_est_201511 hours ago|
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We could enforce (suggest?) a common format / api at the federal level. Especially if it’s incentivized with funding that more than justifies the cost of maintenance. Similar to how federal interstate funding is only available to states with a 21+ drinking age.
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upvoteby Something12349 hours ago|
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Govinfo.gov is neat because you see the different attempts at common formats that have been attempted in the past.
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upvoteby ericd10 hours ago|
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Yeah, going to the courts and municipal code seems like it's going to be a heavy lift. Many of them seem to hang off of municode, though, so maybe it's not a huge number of unique crawlers.
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upvoteby ericd8 hours ago|
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OK, I just bundled it into a torrent, available here: https://law.agentlookups.ai/downloads/

If you decide to give it a download, let me know if you have any issues with it/suggestions for improvement.

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upvoteby qingcharles11 hours ago|
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There is none, not for statutes and definitely not for case law; even at the appellate level where you have multiple federal circuits, then 50 states, then territories, military, tribal and a whole host of other niche courts. And the appellate court systems can be split into districts, and by lower and higher levels.

Then if you want to really get into it, The People should also be able to access trial court level, and at that point you have over 3000 distinct court systems with their own access systems, usually requiring logins and CAPTCHAs, and half of them not even having anything accessible online at all, and the other half only having recent stuff online and the rest rotting in a flooded basement.

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upvoteby rzzzt10 hours ago|
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A third-party project converted an official XML source of German laws to Markdown documents, but the repo is a bit dormant:

- https://okfn.de/en/projekte/bundesgit

- https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

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upvoteby tfehring11 hours ago|
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https://axiom.org is working on this but very early.
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upvoteby ericd10 hours ago|
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Cool, thanks for the pointer!
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upvoteby elpakal12 hours ago|
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> By using the legal search index, Astra for Law can search U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, and administrative decisions across a corpus of more than 230 million URLs, with sources added daily. Our work with Free Law Project, the nonprofit behind CourtListener, brings its case-law collection covering more than 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law (opens in a new window) into this research experience.

Found that to be very interesting

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upvoteby rayiner11 hours ago|
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CourtListener already has an MCP interface and Grok is quite good at pulling from it. In my experience, Grok 4.6 is quite good at analyzing legal cases and human-written documents. Better than Opus 5. I'm not sure if it's better than Fable 5.1 on that task, b/c I'm not willing to spend my precious Fable tokens on case law searches lol.
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upvoteby teiferer12 hours ago|
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Let's swap it out for the AI cartel!
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