I used LLMs to replace a lawyer this year to great effect. I successfully advised myself as to the right strategy and drafted an immigration petition in the correct language. Granted it wasn't 100% LLMs (I also supplemented it with "traditional" online research and wrote the letter myself using the LLM version as rough guidance), but still, I certainly would've gone to a real lawyer in 2024 for this stuff but didn't.
Professional advisory work can be divided into two types:
1. Once you know the rules of the game, the next move is immediately obvious.
2. Knowing the rules is not enough to know the next move -- that requires judgement and experience.
LLMs in the hands of someone smart and savvy can easily replace the first type of work.
Lawyers nearly universally tend to: convince clients they need a lawyer; promote extreme views; charge legal fees (that ultimately result in financial damages to the client). There are no winners in this game, except for lawyers, who are having a lovely time. Even if you won the case, you've lost, because the pie got smaller due to lawyer fees.
"You can't trust the output, it doesn't understand bigger systems"
"Its an art, you need to learn the ropes of it to truly write good code"
Its a very dangerous line of thinking. Software engineering will never be the same, as writing code has basically vanished from the daily workflow. Not for every specialized usecase, but for many.
In my experience, it is incredibly hard, practically impossible, to find a lawyer who will even talk to you. I think this is a valid use case to get at least some understanding what the next steps might be and if it even makes sense to seek legal representation.
There was a post here a few weeks ago about a UK court being inundated with some kind of claims (unfair dismissal?). To submit a claim you do not need a lawyer, but the process is (intentionally?) vague and very complicated, so it takes a lot of effort to figure it out yourself. But AI makes that kind of stuff easy.
AI is not going to replace layers billing big corporate clients millions a month, but it will replace things that are fairly standardized processes, that don't require a lawyer, but today are just too complicated for regular people.
I'm not sure there's quite accurate. The form is really not that difficult to complete.
It's basically: Party details, type of claim, particulars, damages
Obviously knowing these details requires some legal knowledge but I actually think ET claims are easy enough to bring if you've got the time to do a little research and build your case. Almost all ET judgments are public so there isn't the usual difficulty with research as you get with law reports being restricted either.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65bcbd214a666...
On the margin, AI will drop these guys' billable hours.
Really? I find them quite talkative. But I'm not sure what kinds of questions you are pestering them with?
In any case, the whole discussion reminds me of people using LLM to replace medical professionals.
For both: unless you have a doctor or a lawyer always on standby, you have to make a decision on whether to even go and seek out one of these professionals. By definition, you make that decisions without professional help. I think LLMs can help you there with the initial research to decide whether it's even worth it to contact the professionals.
If there is no precedence for X happening when Y , Z, P, Q, R are special combinations , the judge decides and sets precedence. But if another judge interprets it differently with similar set of circumstances it is not considered incorrect I presume especially if in different jurisdiction unless overridden by a higher court. This is my layman understanding but I think this design is wrong and essentially where human subjectivity controls the system.
Subjectivity is not totally avoidable in law but the goal of the legal system should be reduce it as much as possible along with ambiguity.
Law is intentionally not code. The world is not something you can program.
Since this is a thread about using ChatGPT for law, I should note that this is actually one of the most important reasons you'd rather hire a lawyer than ChatGPT to represent you. A good lawyer or firm will know the local judges and how they tend to lean on ambiguities in their area of expertise, and will be able to use that information to both advise you and tailor their arguments to appeal to the judge's sensibilities. There is an element of unfairness to this, to be sure, but you'd find much more unfairness really quickly with machine-generated judgments because of how messy and non-compressable real world circumstances are.
That might be true, but that doesn't mean you benefit from training up juniors.
These situations usually are not ones that an individual can justify the time or money to contact an actual lawyer, but then if they do decide to contact one they will come in with better questions and more of a sense of what they are expecting.
This is similar to medical. Should you use LLM to diagnose yourself, treat yourself with prescription drugs you buy from shady gray market online sellers? No. But you can use it very well to know when it's time to go to the doctor and what to ask.
LLMs can help with that. I don't think they are worse at this than me trying to figure this out all by myself.
3 kinds of users that don't scare the shit out of you.
My buddy works with lots of folks that have gone all in on Harvey. There are other kids of users.
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.