I have worked with many lawyers in my career. The bad ones will look at a contract and tell you fifty things that can be improved. Meanwhile, you take the same contract to a really great lawyer and they tell you that's it's not worth fighting over the changes and to just keep it as is. It's kind of like how a beginner or intermediate software engineer might tell you how you can build out a k8s or auto-scaling fargate cluster for your project and a really senior engineer might look at the same thing and explain that it's not worth worrying about scalability right now.
I find that when I feed contracts to ChatGPT (which I do all the time) it will try to find 50 things wrong with it. For example, as a test, i fed chatgpt an employment offer from a US government agency. It came back with 1152 words and 14 recommended (some of them substantial) changes. Meanwhile, any half-decent employment attorney would probably laugh at me if I asked them to redline an employment offer from the State Department.
That might not be due to the contents but rather due to the fact that they won't negotiate I'd presume
The same has happened with modern finance. Despite more technology that has power to drive more transparent/efficient markets, we have less perfect information sharing and a larger group of middlemen capturing a growing share of profits of the economy
Even without that, I think it'll be extremely valuable to clients to allow them to answer simple questions without a lawyer, figure out the lay of the land so they can supervise their counsel, etc.
But programmers have this concept of a "code review" where another person looks at the code to look for problems.
We use this same technique with our LLMs. Most mistakes are caught by having a second LLM look at it. Doesn't even need to be a different model - just make sure it has a different context.
I find that the number of issues discovered is noticeably higher if you do use different models though. I'm doing some very finicky things (formal semantics) and find that there's value in review panels as large as 5 different models from different families. It gets even more profitable if you set it up as a truly agentic panel where after writing their own separate reviews they get to see what others have said, and adjust their positions or defend them etc. Some models are not that good by themselves but can be surprisingly good at finding flaws in others' reasoning (Grok for example).
Not so in other knowledge work. There's no test harness for a contract and error is non-recoverable. Likewise in finance. There are specific ways of doing things and these ways are many times set in regulations. LLMs can assist all day, sure. But replacing the human, in highly regulated, zero tolerance for error environment?
It doesn't matter how smart someone is, they need specialized training to be good at these jobs. Specialized training in the area the company specializes in.
There is a category error in all this that is hard to think about because of the normal discourse and ordinary language. We say people work in "finance" but no one works in just "finance". They work at a company that has a specialization within "finance", inside a hierarchy that has specialization on top of specialization.
What we really need is exactly what we don't have and aren't going to get. A type of LORA that generalizes the task specific intelligence needed from a very small sample size and that in practice makes so many less mistakes in a highly regulated, zero tolerance for error environment that it is irresponsible to not use the model.
I have worked in this type of environment for 3 years and I have made zero mistakes in 3 years. The people that make even a small number of mistakes get fired.
Any real automation in this area is going to be incredibly slow and piecemeal over a long period of time because even an amazing model would need a long time to prove itself against what the human standards for error rates are.
Logically, this actually doesn't make sense strictly speaking because the sentence creates a paradox: doesn't it make clear whether it includes itself or not, and each reading ends up in trouble. There is a "tradition" in law around the world to accept the only benign reading of such clauses, which I always found funny given that in all other ways lawyers adopt the most adversarial mindset imaginable.
>> You should know - for coding they make terrible mistakes as well.
>> But programmers have this concept of a "code review" where another person looks at the code to look for problems.
That is an incredible statement that could not be further from the truth. Large scale adoption of email, searchable document databases like Westlaw, LexisNexis, PACER, etc.. , OCR Software, electronic signatures, and tons more have had a much more defineably positive impact on the legal profession since the internet came about.
A lot of contract-lawyering involves getting ahead of when things go south and the two previously agreeing parties find themselves in disagreement.
If the expensive person is still better at getting what _you_ want from a contract then it’s always worth doing that.
There’s a reason lawyers are so expensive to begin with - they do very complicated stuff with very expensive consequences if done badly.
The interesting question is whether AI can fill a niche these can’t — or, alternatively, help a layperson evaluate a contract they’re asked to sign better than they could themselves.
Contract law has evolved because transfering the ownership of things is fraught with difficulty. Ownership as a concept itself is notoriously hard to define.
Consider housing - when you buy a house you own that land. Except if its an apartment, you just own the internal walls. Or when the government aquires your land through eminent domain. Or mineral rights - which don't belong to you, you just own the top 5 feet of topsoil. Or if you neglect a property and some squats in it. Or if you were given a fraudulent payment, and they take back the property.
Just getting people to agree is notoriously difficult when people have different often conflicting desires.
Do you know how difficult and costly it is to sue an attorney for malpractice?
With AI models this option does not exist. I can't sue OpenAI because the contract that I got ChatGPT to draft carelessly exposes me to some type of financial loss. I can't contact the state bar and have Open AI banned from drafting up contracts or doing any other work that lawyers are licenced to perform. Even if I could it would not compare to a lawyer loosing their license to practice for life. If I tell a friend or acquaintance about my negative experience they will still likely use OpenAI for professional work and chalk up my experience to a skill issue or premature use of the technology.
Also note the use of the word "professionals". I was referring to doctors, engineers, accountants etc too.
Not being snarky here but I've encountered some really crappy lawyers and they seem to be doing great ($$$).
It really sucks one cannot publish something like "this guy charged me $5k, wrote my name wrong and forgot important paperwork the day we showed up to court" as that could make you liable for damages. There should be a safe harbor for that.
That's pretty much what bar associations are for, filing a complaint against an attorney at the bar seems like a pretty standard procedure.
>There should be a safe harbor for that.
A safe harbor would be the opposite, it would be immunity for the lawyer.
I had start with asking for a contact with some details I provided. But then I ask the model to be an experienced corporate lawyer and ask me a series of questions to gather the details it needed and then write the contract. The result covered a lot of details that were highly relevant but were absent from the original attempt.
The key insight is that you can lean on the model to cover your unknown unknowns.
There could still be more unknowns that I did not encounter and by definition don't know about.
And the final output could be wrong, wording, exact legal terminology etc.
Can we say working with an actual lawyer is guaranteed to be better, more correct? Lawyers are people and they also make mistakes, wake up on the wrong side of the bed, hate their job etc, just like the rest of us.
This is due to the fact that LLMs are statistical processes that rely on pseudo random numbers in chosing what to say and how to say it to a substantial degree.
Another one suckered by the plausibility engines.
I agree. But, we will need a lot fewer of them. My small company called our lawyer a lot more before the advent of AI. Mostly to clarify a few things or review simpler contracts. Now, for simple things, we do not call them at all.
(1) Rich people will use human expertise and "the rest of us" will use AI models to get by. This could happen in law, but also in medicine (in particular in societies that - like in the US - do not have universal healthcare).
(2) A positive effect in both domains may be that access to knowledge will be broader and cheaper.
I hope I will be wrong about (1) - I would not like to live in such a two-class society.
I'm currently negotiating with someone who I feel is clearly using AI and this is EXACTLY what has been happening
But will their glamorous salaries persist? That is the question that matters.
AI doesn't need to wipe out lawyers. If they just depress salaries enough, virtually nobody is going to want to be a lawyer anymore.
(Not that I think AI will necessarily have that effect. We just don't know yet)
Very few people, if any, are going to bust ass in law school or medical school if they're not going to get rich off it. Better to do literally anything else.
This doesn’t replace lawyers, but paralegals surely will be affected. A good enough model could shrink the number of paralegals needed in a firm.
some variant of "oh i am capable of generating text i know nothing about, but it helps to have a human i can rely on to tell me more about the text i know nothing about."
pick up a bachelors degree worth of books to humble yourself
Law LLM will surely help competent lawyers in their fields with greater sources of knowledge not in their core area of expertise.
The outcome of a case shouldn't depend on someone's fallible ability to recall facts or convince other people or point their index finger*
Law should generally be deterministic. One's CHA stat should have no bearing on justice.
There should still be human judges, but the middleman between the judge and petitioner could easily be removed, and have generally been seen as leeches since forever anyway.
Though, like how the USA opts to remain in the Stone Age with regard to tax filing because of lobbying by tax software companies, this faction of society will flail the hardest before they admit they're obsolete.
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* What's a lawyer's favorite programming language? Objection C.
A lot of communication is conveyed through more than the words themselves though and even though it's often misinterpreted people put a lot of value in that information. I suspect that even if we took away the ability to see the people involved judges and jurors would still find bias in the tone/quality of people's voices. Even if everything was reduced to text they'd find bias based on word choices, phrasing, spelling, and grammar.
Lawyers can practice, can represent you in court, etc. that's not going away soon.
An example is in the banking industry, where making a loan used to require deep analysis of a person’s credit worthiness. Now they use an algorithm (credit scores) which means someone with less experience can do it.
If law follows the same pattern, a job done by someone making $500/hour might be done by someone making $50/hour.
but how much of the revenue of the average law firm comes from that, vs the day-to-day "we need this relatively routine contract reviewed" sort of work?
So who is going to define your strategy, represent you in court, adapt the strategy to changing circumstances, negotiate with counter-parties on a mutually accepted settlement? A paralegal? An AI model? Please
How to fix the lack of trust which is needed to conduct a transaction
Contracts affix a moment of trust in time, so even when trust is lost between parties the contract has guardrails for behavior and consequences for acting outside those rails
There are many transactions that are completely inaccessible to most people because the need for a contract or lawyer is too high
LLM use allows for those inaccessible transactions to decrease, and get people further along to the point where a lawyer is accessible as well, and economically viable to use
>Its just like code I suppose, if you can read and understand and validate
I share this, when I asked an attorney for a contract, they were much simpler when compared to self redacted or AI redacted contract, it was as if I were rediscovering lots of concepts and I HAD to put them in paper, even if they were defaults and were essentially no-ops.
Comparable to:
> Mkdir $PWD/path
instead of
> mkdir path
or conditions so rare that they don't merit including.
> x = 0
> if x!=0:
> raise Exception("Bit flip by solar rays or otherwise")
At the very least because the attorney monopoly assigns a 5ish year of training as PoW and natural personhood as Identity as protection for Sybil Attacks.
If anything, the exclusive right of attorneys to represent clients in court, file motions, and enjoy professional secret, is more valuable, as it's not something AI can ever compete at. (Barring a wild recognition of machines as humans, or an overturn of the impossibility of companies to appear in court.)