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Posted by vertigoruntime 12 hours ago

Astra for Law(openai.com)
472 points | 506 comments
ivraatiems 9 hours ago|
I know someone who works in law and deals particularly with an area of US benefits and healthcare law. One of their workflows for lower-level employees at their firm involves taking in documents from healthcare plans and organizations, analyzing them for certain kinds of data, and then importing that data into an internal system they use to analyze and provide guidance on plans. The internal system can contain hundreds of documents for an individual client. All of the documents have the same information (roughly) but in totally diverse formats and styles. Once it's in the system, it's easy to compare and analyze across documents and the research process is much faster.

They recently bought a Claude subscription and began using Claude to do the initial read of the documents and output JSON they can import into their internal systems. The work still must be reviewed by an attorney - Claude is nowhere near making the kinds of judgments a lawyer would make about this content - but it has increased their throughput from 2-3 documents an hour to 8-10 documents an hour by killing the busy work.

LLMs have great advantages for this kind of work - but not for decision-making. I just don't see OpenAI ever admitting that.

(I've left some details intentionally vague because this is a very specific area of law and I don't want my friends to be identified without their consent.)

ManuelKiessling 1 hour ago||
I just realized how refreshing it is to read an honest take like "from 2-3 documents an hour to 8-10 documents an hour" instead of "it's doing the work of a month in 5 minutes!!!!1".
eru 1 hour ago|||
Agreed. However:

That's a factor of 3 to 5 improvement reported on here. If you keep stacking these kinds of improvements, you end up at month to minutes pretty quickly.

gf000 6 minutes ago|||
That doesn't take into account dependencies between tasks, where bottlenecks can happen. In any case, Amdahl's law applies regarding what kind of speedup you can get in such a case.
leptons 1 hour ago||||
The AI can't make a reliable judgement, so now you have to hire 3x to 5x more to make those judgements if you have the documents coming in at 3x to 5x faster. Or you'll have one severely overworked lawyer. It's the same problem developers have with thousands of AI generated PRs. Just because you speed up one thing doesn't mean the whole system works faster, and yes a human really does need to be in the loop or you end up with even bigger problems, and lawsuits.
franciscop 1 hour ago||
No, that'd only be true the judgement was the full work. If the judgement was 33% of the work and the rest was just old plain e.g. typing, that is now fully automated and instantaneous, then you automate 2/3 of the work, getting 3x in productivity.
monax 1 hour ago|||
10 women can't make a baby in a month
egeozcan 31 minutes ago|||
Sorry for being so detached from the discussion and your actual point but if someone had made a dystopian sci-fi novel with the tagline following your sentence with "...or can they?", and made it all cheesy, I'd read it in one sitting.
lukan 26 minutes ago||
You mean each women all producing parts of the baby one then one women/machine putting all the parts together?
croon 3 minutes ago|||
I'm too bad of a writer to be scared of giving my ideas away, but I'd explore a pupae stage, where (layman disclaimer, if it isn't abundantly clear from my incoming butchering of the science) the butterfly is basically melted down into a goop with no "brain part" or "feet part" of the goop existing until reformed, yet retain their memories. If you divided that goop up and imagined there was a gestation time reduction, before combining it for the final stage of formation, you'd have some "plausible" (loose definition here) venue for it.
egeozcan 5 minutes ago|||
In the future, because of bad things we did to the atmosphere and stuff, miscarriages are the common ending of a pregnancy, instead of being the exception. One evil company finds a way to accelerate the process by using 10 women, lowering the chances of miscarriage simply by reducing the time in womb.

I thought, something like a medication helping the women develop the baby in 30 days, but seriously damages the host in a couple of days, so the fetus gets transferred from host to host. Some die, but the evil rich don't care. Your idea could also work though.

I realize that this is totally the wrong corner of the internet to post this but I guess today I'll just go with it.

lukan 1 minute ago||
Yeah, that plot might actually work and is more believable than mine. (some women actually do feel like a baby is a parasite growing inside them - this would be a extreme version of it)
eru 55 minutes ago|||
Throughput-wise, they can. Latency-wise, you are right.
stymaar 3 hours ago|||
> They recently bought a Claude subscription and began using Claude to do the initial read of the documents and output JSON they can import into their internal systems. The work still must be reviewed by an attorney - Claude is nowhere near making the kinds of judgments a lawyer would make about this content - but it has increased their throughput from 2-3 documents an hour to 8-10 documents an hour by killing the busy work.

At my company we're also in the process of deploying a system that does exactly that. And what's interesting is that you absolutely do not need a frontier model for that, a small VLM (vision-language model), with optionally a little bit of fine-tuning, gives you the same output quality at a fraction of the latency and cost.

dguest 31 minutes ago|||
I'm wondering if the bottom is going to fall out of frontier models when people start to realize this. Sure, as an experienced programmer you can tell the difference between a compact free model and the ones that are 100x bigger and cost billions to train, but 90% of busy work is dead simple: turn a PDF into json fields, or do the inverse and fill out a form. As the tools for this conversion become more widespread you can also imagine an economic shift toward efficient information brokers that make frontier models less necessary.

It's also not really clear if everyone is going to want a frontier model when the real implications sink in. Maybe we'll get sick of incomprehensible code optimizations and people wile tire of reading AI prose that feels ever-more-human. There might be a few use cases, but who is going to pay for this when providers start charging enough to be profitable.

KoolKat23 28 minutes ago|||
This is really where Gemini still excels. Honestly from my experience the others aren't as good.
jorvi 52 minutes ago|||
LLMs are still absolutely horrid at analyzing PDFs so the results they are getting must be chock full of errors..
Gareth321 22 minutes ago||
Are they? I've had excellent success. The confusing part of this is that there are two types of PDF. The first is a "normal" digital PDF. The second is a scanned PDF. The first can essentially be read like a document. LLMs have no issues with this. It's the second kind of PDF where the constraint becomes the vision capability, and this is very impressive with Astra. I've had no issues with either. I imagine there could be issues with unusually dense and/or misaligned text on scanned PDFs, but I have not tested this.

The bottom line, though, is that PDF OCR is usually regarded as a solved problem. LLMs won't usually do the recognition itself. It will farm it out to established tools which are very good.

armcat 56 minutes ago|||
How do these use cases stack up (for real) in legal AI tools like Legora and Harvey?

Disclaimer: I used to work in legaltech, but not those two companies.

refurb 6 hours ago|||
I’m curious how this increased throughput happens.

You’ve accurately stated that AI isn’t as rigorous as a trained attorney. Doesn’t that mean that every single datapoint must be confirmed by a human?

How is that quicker than just using a human to read the content and make the call? Data entry savings?

ivraatiems 4 hours ago|||
Yes, remember that these are effectively random PDFs in various different designs and formats, some of them not editable or even OCR'd.

It took a human attorney 20-30 minutes on average to manually copy-paste data from these PDFs into a spreadsheet (while also fixing any errors they found in the document and re-checking for quality).

Now, the AI copies everything into the spreadsheet in a small amount of time, and then the human reviews it. It takes maybe ~5-7 minutes to scroll to the appropriate pages in the document, read the lines vs the spreadsheet, and make corrections. So you've gone from 2-3 items an hour to ~8-10 items an hour.

Maybe you could pay someone to develop an OCR/ML application that could do this. But that project would never be profitable, even with the time savings. At the cost of a couple Claude subscriptions, it makes sense.

newAccount2025 3 hours ago|||
Does the human find enough bugs that they stay on guard, or just rubber stamp everything without really looking at it? It’s hard to stay vigilant when stuff looks plausible.
eru 1 hour ago||
Complete speculation: you could instruct Claude to hide one random mistake in every document.

And Claude should write down the mistake in a sealed envelope, so it doesn't make into the database.

A review that doesn't find the mistake counts as invalid.

k4tsu 51 minutes ago||
This is what bag scanners at airports do - the hit rate is so low and the job so boring the software projects fake contraband onto the imagery. Fail to spot the knuckledusters and expect a chat with the manager.
ricky54 2 hours ago||||
Don't forget that humans have a not insignificant error rate when copy/pasting or copy/typing data.
tkgally 38 minutes ago||
And it's possible to run each document through the LLM pipeline multiple times, using different models and/or prompts each time, to check for errors and inconsistencies. That will take more time and cost more, but it can reduce the error and hallucination rate significantly.
barrenko 3 hours ago||||
I'm doing some public court records processing for bankruptcy cases (interested mostly to seek out corruption in big national cases), and yes, the "variousness" of random PDFs is exactly the issue. Trying to get the cost for a whole case down to a minimum.

Sample is around 300 court dates, shy under 1k files.

At best I'm building a claude skills file.

stymaar 3 hours ago|||
> Maybe you could pay someone to develop an OCR/ML application that could do this. But that project would never be profitable, even with the time savings. At the cost of a couple Claude subscriptions, it makes sense.

A better use of these Claude subscription would be to develop the app (which it can pretty much do at that point) and you could iterate to make the workflow even more efficient than your current one.

ivraatiems 3 hours ago||
Nobody working there has the requisite experience to do this in a reasonable amount of time. These are not particularly tech-savvy folks, Claude use aside.
eru 1 hour ago||
Yes. And it might not even be worth it, as the AI agents gets cheaper and cheaper.

Keep in mind that the task is fixed, so as the frontier of AI advances, you can switch to a cheaper trailing edge system and still get the same or even better performance for this task.

juiceland 6 hours ago||||
You don’t need a trained attorney to schematize data. The LLMs are used to make the data easier to understand and manipulate.
cromka 6 hours ago||
They'll also hallucinate and change meaning in the process of extraction and "schematization"
margalabargala 5 hours ago|||
Not necessarily. Depends how you use it.

"Write a python script that breaks down this PDF by X feature" would not hallucinate anything in the PDF. Certainly you could trivially double check that all text in the extracted JSON was in the text layer of the PDF.

jeffbee 5 hours ago|||
How much experience do you have with LLMs exactly? It would be consistent with my experience if Claude stuck in a line of python that just emits a JSON literal with no justification, potentially buried in a large program where an untrained person might not notice it. I don't even trust them if the output consists of structured data paired with source images from the PDF, because I've experienced LLMs fabricating the source rectangles to match the output. I only use tools like this by asking for programs, because as you note LLMs are good at that, and the verification process consists of tool calls to legitimate PDF manipulation tools so I have some confidence everything is above board. Even then I only do this for hobbies, not anything that matters.
terminalcommand 5 hours ago||
Lawyer here. I used to trust Claude as hallucinations are near non-existent now. However for large volume tasks such as due diligence exercises, they still happen. We also tried Legora's tabular review, there were also numerous halucinated provisions in our due diligence exercise.
rayiner 4 hours ago||
Junior associates hallucinate too...
NateEag 3 hours ago|||
And when they do, you can train them or fire them, and they learn not to do it.

LLMs change not a whit, and there's no one to take responsibility for the failure (and thus no way to fix it).

As the new variation on the old theme has it, "A computer can never be held accountable, and so very many people are trying to get them make management decisions."

IanCal 2 hours ago||
You can’t train people to never make a mistake, particularly when doing highly repetitive work like this. You must build your systems to account for that regardless.
podocarp 1 hour ago|||
You can scold juniors and they will learn. You can't scold Claude.
stevesimmons 1 hour ago|||
Surely the rate of improvement in new LLM models is the equivalent mechanism?
eru 1 hour ago|||
You can scold Claude. Just doesn't make a difference.
chrisjj 40 minutes ago||
... until you hit Claude's risable "model welfare" protection.
chrisjj 50 minutes ago|||
That's a recipe for disaster in my experience. I tried it (with Claude) on a simple tabular bank statement PDF, and it transposed two amounts, placinh each against the other's description. And the bot assured me the result was cotrect. The chance of a human checker catching such corruption is low.
margalabargala 4 minutes ago||
Interesting. Did that PDF have a text layer or did you ask Claude to OCR it? If the latter I'm not surprised at all.
ferngodfather 4 hours ago||||
Doing similar-ish things with Claude, it's helpful to have something to ground it.

For instance, if you can say:

"Refer to the database schema in x.sql as your source of truth for the database structure we want to import into*. Do not invent data, tables or columns that do not exist. Carefully match all output against this database schema and do not create output that doesn't exist if it does not match the schema, simply skip it."

You will end up with a far better result in my experience.

Gotta treat it like a child.

chrisjj 32 minutes ago||
> Gotta treat it like a child.

"Sorry for that, Your Honour, but we gave that case prep work to a child."

ivraatiems 4 hours ago|||
They do, sometimes. That's why the review still has to happen.

But now it's comparing already filled columns on a spreadsheet, not copy-pasting every single thing from an (often uncopyable) PDF.

chrisjj 26 minutes ago||
> But now it's comparing already filled columns on a spreadsheet

... with a PDF, right?

> not copy-pasting every single thing from an (often uncopyable) PDF

Obviously the PDF is copyable, else your bot would not be copying it.

edmundsauto 4 hours ago|||
Reviewing something takes less time than producing it.
lolakutty 2 hours ago||
I...don't think that is universally true.
edmundsauto 2 hours ago|||
Few things are. It also doesn’t require standards. “Stamp this diff” culture is everywhere even before AI. A stamp is literally easier than anything else.

Whether that is useful measurement I suppose depends on the circumstances.

eru 1 hour ago|||
Yes, but empirically in this case, it seems to be true.
2Gkashmiri 6 hours ago|||
I'm a lawyer myself.

I see problems in LLMs doing research, making drafts, etc.

I see 3 kinds of potential users.

1. Non legal background people trying to avoid going to a lawyer. They should definitely NOT use an LLMs.

2. Fresh out of law school graduates.

They think they can do fast work, draft quick replies, do fast case research, enh. They should go the traditional route of interning, learning the "art", they probably won't need it because they will learn "how the law works"

3. Established attorneys. They usually have templates made for most things, over their career, they have established routines of making things fast, maybe it can help them but to say replacing good chunk of work or offloading to LLMs isn't probably going to go well.

There is a reason why interns are made to do grunt work. The "chain of command" is built so they learn on basic stuff, learn to make decisions, etc. Without these basic decisions under their belt, an intern can't take bigger decisions later on. They just won't know....

roncesvalles 5 hours ago|||
>Non legal background people trying to avoid going to a lawyer. They should definitely NOT use an LLMs.

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.

throwaway89864 4 hours ago||
If it is at all possible to replace a lawyer with an LLM, it should always be the preferred choice. Using a lawyer is not a zero-sum game, using an LLM is.

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.

eru 1 hour ago||
Is that based on personal experience, or just anecdata?
p0deje 6 hours ago||||
> Non legal background people trying to avoid going to a lawyer. They should definitely NOT use an LLMs.

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.

fy20 5 hours ago|||
Agree. Now imagine the same thing in less developed and/or less well off countries.

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.

eru 1 hour ago|||
> AI is not going to replace layers billing big corporate clients millions a month, [...]

On the margin, AI will drop these guys' billable hours.

ferngodfather 4 hours ago|||
> 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.

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...

eru 1 hour ago|||
> In my experience, it is incredibly hard, practically impossible, to find a lawyer who will even talk to you.

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.

newyankee 6 hours ago||||
Might be true today, but I still feel pareto principle applies. These points also sound like gatekeeping a bit and I hope future AI versions prove that law is also essentially something that can be made as programmable as possible for most common answers if the underlying principles and constitution are organised such.

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.

applfanboysbgon 6 hours ago||
Your understanding is correct, but where your understanding goes astray is thinking that that's a bug. The subjectivity is a feature. It is not possible to specify what should legally happen for all possible circumstances the entirety of humankind faces. Like, literally not possible. We humans can't even create rigorous specifications for what our programs should do that keep up with their evolving requirements, and you want to make life-ruining decisions set in stone based on a rigorous set of predetermined rules about all possible circumstances the entirety of humanity could face any time in the future in an evolving world?

Law is intentionally not code. The world is not something you can program.

amunozo 2 hours ago|||
Isn't achieving a rigorous, unique specificarion what civil law tries to achieve? Not that it is a success, but the idea behind it. Sorry if this is a silly question, but this is how I understand it.
applfanboysbgon 1 hour ago||
No, it doesn't. It aims to provide a fairly comprehensive framework within which judgments can be made, but it is absolutely expected that there are edge cases and ambiguities which are resolved by human judgment of the circumstances.

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.

amunozo 1 hour ago||
I understand, thank you so much for the detailed answer.
rayiner 4 hours ago|||
Write me the code that says how the Lindsay Clancy case should have come out.
azan_ 3 hours ago||
if murder: verdict = guilty
eru 1 hour ago||||
> There is a reason why interns are made to do grunt work. The "chain of command" is built so they learn on basic stuff, learn to make decisions, etc. Without these basic decisions under their belt, an intern can't take bigger decisions later on. They just won't know....

That might be true, but that doesn't mean you benefit from training up juniors.

zhivota 5 hours ago||||
I do think non legal background folks can use LLMs today to sense check legal ideas, like for instance, "what are my legal rights in this situation?"

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.

eru 1 hour ago||
Yes. Unless you have a lawyer or doctor on standby, you have to make the decision whether to contact them. And by definition you have to make that choice without professional help.

LLMs can help with that. I don't think they are worse at this than me trying to figure this out all by myself.

littlecranky67 2 hours ago||||
You can replace "laywer" with "software engineer" in your post and it holds equally true. I think this also applies to other factions.
jcims 6 hours ago||||
>I see 3 kinds of potential users.

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.

consensus1 5 hours ago||||
There are 3x as many lawyers per capita in the US as we had in the 1970s. Credit agreements that used to be 50 pages are now 500. This increase in volume has not lead to any increase in actual value. The legal profession is a metastatic cancer on our society. Un-fuck this situation and maybe I'll think about taking your advice of not using a LLM.
rayiner 3 hours ago|||
Another thing that happened in 1971! https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
eru 1 hour ago||
That's website is a great showcase of how to lie with statistics.

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.

amunozo 2 hours ago|||
Once again, LLMs comes to solve a problem that should not be there in the first place.
nullsanity 6 hours ago|||
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inemesitaffia 3 hours ago|||
They'd be better off outsourcing to lawyers in another country.
lemonlimetea 8 hours ago|||
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MiroslavPokorny 7 hours ago||
My dog can review documents at an even faster rate.

You havent given any proofs or even comments that the work is the same level of quality or accuracy.

TallGuyShort 7 hours ago|||
I'm thinking back to some of my interactions with corporate lawyers and you know what? My bar (<- pun) for trusting Astra more than a lawyer is pretty low.
newyankee 6 hours ago||
Visit a developing or corrupt country and you will realise the LLMs of today analyse better than the judges from purely precedence and literature review POV
ivraatiems 7 hours ago||||
The proof would be that the attorney who did the work before, and who still reviews all ingested data, says it is.
MiroslavPokorny 4 hours ago||
Exactly.

The statements in the post are opinions, there is no actual PROOF they are true, and thats my point.

samtp 7 hours ago|||
You should free your dog then because a creature that intelligent should not be anyone's pet.
nradov 6 hours ago||
And free the biglaw junior associates while we're at it!
ivraatiems 4 hours ago||
They're lawyers. They don't deserve freedom.
DannyBee 8 hours ago||
Lawyer here (non practicing so to be clear none of this affects me):

most comments I read here don't seem to realize that different areas of law have very very different economic models and don't even mention which one they think will be affected or why, they just sort of lump it all together.

For example: It is highly unlikely llms will have any meaningful effect on high value personal injury law - I don't see a 5 million dollar case being handed to an LLM when the majority of the cost is in trial aids and not even lawyers. It may affect where and how they advertise. It may affect how they work. But it seems really unlikely to put any of them out of business any time soon by people doing it themselves.

Will it affect other areas more? Maybe. Probably? But so far I haven't seen a ton of comments that make specific enough arguments that they could really be debated or responded to effectively with a useful opinion

intrasight 8 hours ago||
> them out of business any time soon

No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected. You wont want or need associate attorneys when you can hire a brilliant AI associate for 1/10th the price.

w10-1 7 hours ago|||
> You wont want or need associate attorneys

In commercial law, the business model is to rent the associates out to clients at rates higher than you pay (d/t your supervision). No client will pay $350/hour for your AI.

And for direct billing, it's not your interest to do things faster for the client (at risk of making a mistake).

So the real question is whether these pay-by-the-hour models will die as a result of competition from fixed-price transactions made viable via automation. I think not because the entire difficulty of legal work is that it's a complex bundle of issues until you sort them out; once sorted, there's really little to do other than execute (read: paralegals).

terminalcommand 4 hours ago|||
Corporate lawyer at big law firm here. I believe the model will be like this: we will review your 1000 agreements but with AI. AI is generally accurate but has some risks, if you agree we will charge you less. The client will agree. Instead of spending 300-400 hours to review the ageeements AI will do instantly. A lawyer will spend the time on reviewing the red flags identified and draft a report. We already do the same with translation. Before computer translation became good (i.e pre-Deepl era), we used to translate documents (cease and desist letters, court petitions etc.) ourselves. Now we offer AI translation free of charge. If client wants reliance on the translation we charge a small bit. Lawfirms are also under pressure for meeting internal budgets. Most clients ask for capped fees. If you charge 10k for a job to a client and the hourly costs ramp up to 20k, the management criticises the partner, the associates become unwilling to work for the partner (as their hours get written off). So with AI law firms can bet more competitively as the cost (human attorney hours) are reduced.
dakolli 15 minutes ago||
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SamBam 7 hours ago||||
> No client will pay $350/hour for your AI.

But they may be willing to pay $200/hour for your AI (plus, of course, your final expertise in the matter as the lawyer), and the firm can ditch the paralegals and pocket the difference.

The point is, if you need fewer grunts doing the busywork, you can charge less and be competitive.

sahila 7 hours ago||||
There's a middle area too between your options - a law firm that utilizes AI offers cheaper pricing than the current firms for the same work. Ideally competition will drive prices down but of course law doesn't have the benefit of do-overs on cases, so reputation still plays a big factor.
fittingopposite 3 hours ago||
That's the big question, how prices evolve if LLMs increase supply. Standard economic theory says that prices must collapse. There is probably still a short time of 2-5 years where AI native firms can pocket in quite some arbitrage but I guess markets will eventually figure it out and prices will collapse. This is not only for law. The same applies to all the other industries where LLMs can be used to automate work tasks.
eviks 7 hours ago||||
> No client will pay $350/hour for your AI.

But they already do! There are cases of professional service firms creating their reports using LLMs, there have even been a few prominent scandals re the fake data generated in them

tiahura 6 hours ago|||
It is in litigation as well. The issue is that corporate clients are demanding AI. They don’t want to pay associates to do a first draft, they want senior partner to just push the ChatGPT button and then check it.
consumer451 7 hours ago||||
> No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected.

Whether everyone at the labs knows it or not, this it what they are doing to entire industries, starting with software: Embrace, extend, and extinguish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

What a time to be alive!!?

nradov 6 hours ago||||
It'll be like software. The demand for both software and legal services is effectively infinite. If it becomes cheaper to file lawsuits then we'll get more lawsuits, not the same number of lawsuits at a lower price.

There will still be jobs for competent associate attorneys to prompt LLMs and review output. But frankly a lot of attorneys — especially many of those who attended "Third Tier Toilet" (TTT) law schools — were always a waste of money and should have never entered the profession in the first place.

yonaguska 6 hours ago|||
There is a huge problem in at least family law where a tactic is to simply ddos your opponent with motions and frivolous complaints until someone runs out of money and settles. I'm watching someone finally successfully defend themselves using a Harvey like tool they built themselves. An appellate attorney they consulted with recently, told them they had never seen anyone going pro se get as far as they had in appellate court. So I'm hoping that this serves as a return to making the legal system more accessible, and not just something used to railroad people.
bushbaba 6 hours ago|||
You can’t 10x the number of lawsuits, as the courts are already at capacity. If frivolous lawsuits become common they’ll just change the laws to require a greater damages for it to be heard.
nradov 5 hours ago||
Lawsuits are just one type of legal services. There will also be more contract reviews, more cease-and-desist letters, more patent applications, more regulatory comments, more license applications, etc. Although I do expect legislatures will eventually budget for expanding civil court systems in response to lobbying from business groups to speed up trials.
goldlimetea 8 hours ago|||
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thelastgallon 7 hours ago|||
Can AI replace divorce lawyers? Marriage has no friction, but divorce is high friction. Made impossibly expensive and time consuming because of the cartel of divorce industry.
rayiner 7 hours ago|||
There are hundreds if not thousands of divorce lawyers. How is it a “cartel?”

Divorce is expensive because divorces are acrimonious and people in that situation would rather spend the assets fucking each other over than letting the other person get them.

eloisant 2 hours ago|||
In France many divorces are uncontested, but you're still require to use a lawyer (the same for both spouses).

On the other hand most couples with kids are not married, so the separation doesn't require a lawyer...

thelastgallon 5 hours ago|||
Divorce is expensive because it is big bucks for the lawyers and family court cartel. They have a vested interest in not changing the laws. When laws are made fair, and the perverse incentives to divorce are lessened, divorce rates plunge. However, divorce lawyers lobby against these laws.

Kentucky became the first state to pass a law making equally shared custody the default arrangement in divorces and separations.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/the-equal-custody-experiment...: Divorce Plunged in Kentucky. Equal Custody for Fathers Is a Big Reason Why.

rayiner 4 hours ago||
"Cartel" has a meaning. Explain how either of those things is a cartel?
ghshephard 7 hours ago||||
AI will likely replace divorce lawyers (or, at least make existing divorce lawyers much more efficient) - for non-contested divorces that are amicable. Roughly 95% of what a divorce lawyer does in that context is entirely automatable.
byzantinegene 6 hours ago||
amicable divorces are like 5% of all divorces, so there's not much to be won there
Aramgutang 5 hours ago||
You may have misread that statistic, it's exactly the opposite: around 5% divorces are not resolved amicably and proceed to be litigated in court.
phyzix5761 5 hours ago||||
Divorce is extremely cheap if you both agree on everything. Its literally one of the options on the divorce filing. You just pay the court fees. The problem is both parties rarely agree on everything and that's when it gets expensive.
wise_young_man 6 hours ago||||
There’s an argument to be made if divorce was easier than more people might get married when they are less serious. My view though is make it harder to get married and easier to get divorced.
samtp 7 hours ago||||
"Marriage has no friction" is only something that could be written by someone who was never married.
alehlopeh 6 hours ago||
He clearly meant getting married has no friction, while getting out of a marriage has quite a bit. Presumably there’s friction in the marriage otherwise why would they get divorced.
w10-1 7 hours ago||||
> Made impossibly expensive

huh? Many/most are no-fault jurisdictions with strict rules on dividing community property. Divorce is easy and cheap, unless it's hard to find assets.

consensus1 5 hours ago||||
It's not just the divorce lawyers. We have 3x as many lawyers per capita in the US as in the 1970s. The system is designed by lawyers for lawyers. They will create more bureaucracy and more procedure to consume any surplus.
altmanaltman 5 hours ago|||
> the cartel of divorce industry

So like a group of lawyers among the "divorce industry" who set prices for divorce and stuff? or wtf do you mean?

tiahura 6 hours ago|||
Personal injury attorney. AI is entrenched of every single phase of litigation, from the busywork of getting records, research, developing case theory and themes, expert selection, expert collaboration, negotiating, drafting demands, drafting pleadings, drafting discovery, drafting discovery responses, deposition prep, motion practice, jury selection, voir dire, opening statements, witness direct outlines, witness cross outlines, closing statements, and appeals.
DannyBee 5 hours ago||
Yeah, this matches my friends - they use LLM's for tons of things, using Eve and such. But nobody is replacing the lawyers themselves in cases of any value.

I also have friends in the world of high-volume personal injury (IE the morgan and morgan's of the world) but they also aren't being replaced by LLMs so far.

fittingopposite 2 hours ago||
Emphasis on "so far"
rayiner 8 hours ago|||
I'd love to get your thoughts on the current frontier models for law, or a link to anything you've written on the subject. Where do you think they're at?
dprkh 8 hours ago|||
LLMs will never replace human experts.
vjvjvjvjghv 6 hours ago|||
The word “never” is a dangerous word. In my lifetime I have seen it many times where something was supposed to “never” happen only to see it happen a few years later.
ghshephard 7 hours ago||||
I'll buy that - but, how often does one need an honest-to-goodness expert? 99% of the time most people's requirements can be satisfied with general-competence, and, while the AI systems we have today are mostly only generally competent in porting code from one language to another - they are getting consistently better. I expect we'll start to see general competence in many more areas in the next few years.
dprkh 6 hours ago||
> I'll buy that - but, how often does one need an honest-to-goodness expert?

Any time you are doing anything important, where the outcome actually matters. For example, I was recently applying for a study permit and if I generated my application using an LLM instead of consulting with an immigration lawyer and writing it myself, I would not have gotten my study permit. I was recently applying for internships, and if I hadn't paid a real recruiter to review my resume and advise me, I would not have gotten my interview. And trust me, I spent at least an hour trying to get an LLM to generate what I wanted, but no matter how I begged or described what I wanted, it was no use. Good luck fine tuning an LLM to be good at any of this.

> they are getting consistently better

No, they are not getting better, and they will never replace an actual human expert, because a human expert has the actual experience and up-to-date knowledge of what they are an expert at, and also all the complementary context and the current state of affairs in that area. The LLM has none of that.

calvinmorrison 8 hours ago||||
LLMs are replacing human experts
dprkh 8 hours ago||
in cases where the quality of the output doesn't matter
dimitri-vs 8 hours ago|||
Many people have very low quality thresholds
dprkh 8 hours ago||
Then hopefully at some point they get to experience the consequences of having low quality thresholds, and perhaps then their quality thresholds will increase.
sbarre 7 hours ago||
This is a weirdly reductive take.

There are plenty of areas where a "low bar" is more than enough. "low" doesn't necessarily mean bad here, it can simply mean "not the best".

I would argue the majority (in the true sense of the word) of white-collar service work does not require an expert.

It requires someone who has reasonable qualifications in the given field, and the motivation ($) to help you with your task.

So no one needs a top-shelf $900/hour lawyer to draw up a basic low-stakes contract where both parties agree to all the terms as written. You just need someone to ensure that the contract is legally valid as written.

dprkh 6 hours ago||
Are implying that an LLM can accurately evaluate whether a contract is legally valid?
scottyah 7 hours ago||||
Or in the long term, no new experts are being made because no companies want to sponsor the slow work and resources that becoming an expert take
akoboldfrying 6 hours ago|||
Are you aware of what frontier AI has done to mathematics in the last 6 months?
Culonavirus 2 hours ago|||
Lol no one cares. Most of that is smoke and mirrors anyways. Stokes was plagiarized. Most of these "breakthrough" solutions are actually present in the training data and in the prompts researchers and mathematicians input into ChatGPT themselves, prompts OpenAI then steals even when you don't agree to improve the model.

PS: I use LLMs every day, basically let Codex write most of my code (after 15+ years of professional programming), these are amazing tools, smart in some ways, but completely demented in others. People just need to fucking stop being AI doomers and AI coomers. Is this technology great? Yes. Is it worth 10 trillion? Hell fucking no. If we get to a point where RSI is a thing, then maybe. So far it's not a thing and its not even close.

chrisjj 10 minutes ago||||
Turned it in to fuel for the OpenAI PR dept.?
dprkh 6 hours ago|||
I suppose not. I am not a mathematician, and there has been too much drama to understand anything.
lemonlimesoda 8 hours ago|||
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3ddsaa 8 hours ago|||
There's a huge problem on here - many people stepping outside of their domains of expertise with surface level knowledge.

Its teh same reason claude for finance hasn't turned the finance world upside down.

This is getting tiresome seriously. Why wont these geeks learn some lessons?

grosswait 7 hours ago|||
Yeah geeks just stop trying! Seriously? Yeah, we’re in a bubble and narratives are ahead of reality but if you really don’t think AI is and will continue to eat knowledge work, just keep making your buggy whips.
consensus1 5 hours ago||||
Many people stepping in their domains of expertise with surface level knowledge
dhanizael 5 hours ago|||
i agree with this, maybe.
robomartin 3 hours ago||
One of the things I've been noticing are lawyers getting annoyed when they realized you spent time working a matter with an LLM. In the cases I've seen, it had nothing to do with the quality of what came out of the LLM. It seems to be related to --and this is only my perspective-- a reality where now reasonably intelligent/experienced clients are coming to them with a case fairly well digested, whereas before they would have to pay the law firm tens of thousands of dollars to ingest documentation and information and do the digestion.

In a couple of instances I've come to the table better informed about the relevant law and case history than the attorneys were. In many ways I think this is a matter of people understanding that none of us are infinite human databases, so you can't know everything. Instead of rejecting LLMs (perhaps being passive-aggressive), they should embrace them as well as better-informed clients.

Having used LLMs for software development I know full well just how terrible they can be if you don't know what you are doing, don't guide the work correctly, etc. So I am not taking legal LLM analysis as ground truth, but it isn't garbage either.

halamadrid 10 hours ago||
The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience. I attempted drafting a contract with some points myself using AI, but after several edits I wasn't sure if it was correct. Sending it to an actual lawyer ended up in so many corrections I couldn't imagine the first time. One big thing was the overly excessive protective clauses which didn't make sense for reality or conflicted with another.

Its just like code I suppose, if you can read and understand and validate, you can use it to scale and otherwise it could end up being a vibe effort.

chadash 8 hours ago||
I'd correct this to "The need for actual GOOD lawyers will persist I think from my own experience."

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.

mbreese 7 hours ago|||
I’ve found that good lawyers are about getting things done. You could nitpick the terms of a contract, but would you rather buy the house or have a perfect contract? Once I realized that, my view of lawyers changed (for the better).
k099 8 hours ago|||
YAGNI isn't just for software.
DesaiAshu 9 hours ago|||
In my recent experience, it seems like LLMs may even increase need/demand for actual lawyers (more ideas + more words = more lawyer time). I expect lawyers will generally adopt the technologies that will benefit them, rather than the technologies that would increase standardization and trust

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

Buttons840 9 hours ago|||
I want to take a step back and observe that you're saying expensive specialists will continue to be required if two parties want to make an agreement. That seems like something worth fixing rather than just accepting.
overfeed 9 hours ago|||
> I want to take a step back and observe that you're saying expensive specialists will continue to be required if two parties want to make an agreement.

A lot of contract-lawyering involves getting ahead of when things go south and the two previously agreeing parties find themselves in disagreement.

jjmarr 9 hours ago||
Same for SWE. AIs will churn out happy path vibe slop and fail when something unexpected happens by swallowing errors or having a bunch of terrible "fallbacks".
jonplackett 9 hours ago||||
The problem is those two people are in conflict not collaboration.

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.

SchemaLoad 9 hours ago||
It's probably somewhat of a zero sum game. Both sides lawyers have AI tools which probably just keeps them on a level playing field rather than actually making anything cheaper or faster.
jonplackett 8 hours ago||
I spoke to a very very high up corporate lawyer specialising in tech - so knows Ai is real. And they said AI contracts are the bane of their existence. They’d rather you arrive with no idea what you want than a contract partially written by AI. They said it usually takes longer with an AI starting point than starting from scratch.
NoboruWataya 9 hours ago||||
Millions if not billions of agreements are made every day without the involvement of lawyers. Lawyers are only needed for particularly complex situations and even there they are generally only "needed" in the sense that parties feel they would add value.
smelendez 8 hours ago||
Yeah, and you can already get fill in the blank legal forms for a lot of basic situations, including leases, wills, employment agreements, etc.

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.

mcculley 9 hours ago||||
In my experience, those expensive specialists help me protect against things me and the counterparty cannot even imagine when making an agreement. Do you mean that this would be fixed by AI or by making simpler agreements?
1attice 5 hours ago||
It can imagine what yourself report that you cannot :)
legostormtroopr 9 hours ago|||
How?

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.

MiroslavPokorny 7 hours ago||
Most people dont appreciate that the world is a complex place. Nothing is ever simple, sure concepts can be extremely simplified but the nuances and details are lost. These details are the important parts, just ask a surgeon or rocket scientist etc.
rayiner 10 hours ago|||
LLMs are the first genuinely useful legal tech since the Internet. I'm pretty shocked, though, at the delta between how competent Claude is on code versus legal work. It's good for research and data organization, but terrible for drafting. I wonder if this is a structural problem with the lack of feedback loops. In law, there's no compiler to check for logical or continuity errors in your brief, and there's no unit tests to check for correctness or performance.

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.

qarl 9 hours ago|||
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.

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.

int_19h 7 hours ago|||
> 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).

flyinglizard 9 hours ago|||
Programming has a long standing culture of accepting the code to be somewhat wrong, so we have various tests, linters, reviews and error handling. Also in programming there are many ways to do something and it's the end result that matters most.

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?

jll29 8 hours ago|||
You could say the Salvatorian Clause in contracts is like exception handling: a "catch (all)": even if some clauses in this contract are illegal, the remaining contract stays in place.

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.

qarl 9 hours ago|||
I don't understand. I just provided advice about getting better output. Are you trying to reply to someone else?
flyinglizard 9 hours ago||
You made some points worthy of expansion:

>> 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.

samtp 10 hours ago||||
> LLMs are the first genuinely useful legal tech since the Internet

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.

rayiner 10 hours ago||
I think "email" and "westlaw" fairly count as "the Internet." LLMs might be bigger than either of those.
samtp 10 hours ago||
The internet came well before both of those. And none of the example I gave have lead to lawyers regularly being fined in court because of "hallucinations"
throwaway20222 10 hours ago||||
I have found that it’s useful generally speaking to get the intent of contracts and red lines, but actual drafting I agree is where I lose all confidence. My guess is that the significance of the difference between using a word like “and“ or “or“ can be so meaningful that that level of nuance can often be lost. But I know nothing I’m not in the space, I just pay too much money for lawyers.
cannonpalms 6 hours ago|||
Law is certainly a less verifiable domain
jcfrei 10 hours ago|||
Not trying to be dismissive here but a lawyer will always edit your proposal. I do think lawyers will persist but not as many. And they will work very differently, much like we already use claude / codex to code - a big part of the contract probably won't be read by the lawyer.
cromka 10 hours ago||
I would rather argue they SPECIFICALLY will read everything. However, they'll likely often just be like "I'd phrase this differently but that works, too".
skeptic_ai 3 hours ago||
Have you watched Nathan for you? There is a lawyer that didn’t read on tv. And almost got in trouble.
01100011 8 hours ago|||
Also, unlike SW engineers, lawyers control their industry and will quickly circle the wagons to protect themselves. Paralegals are probably screwed, but lawyers will do fine. I'm considering law as my post-ai-SWE-apocolypse career path.
mekael 6 hours ago||
I’m thinking asking the same lines, but also looking into research / lab chemist so I can hang out with my best friend. If im going to change careers so drastically, I might as well enjoy the company.
CTDOCodebases 10 hours ago|||
Human professionals put their reputation and finances at risk when performing their work. This risk functions as a guarantee.
ElProlactin 8 hours ago|||
> Human professionals put their reputation and finances at risk when performing their work. This risk functions as a guarantee.

Do you know how difficult and costly it is to sue an attorney for malpractice?

moralestapia 10 hours ago|||
Do they?

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.

YawningAngel 9 hours ago|||
Assuming you are in the US, there is a safe harbour called "opinion based on disclosed facts" for that. You could also fairly argue that the conduct of a lawyer is a matter of public concern
TZubiri 9 hours ago||||
> 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.

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.

bethekidyouwant 9 hours ago|||
Even if there were it would just be another court case
psadri 10 hours ago|||
I was in a similar situation and tried a different approach.

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.

samtp 9 hours ago|||
Your comment is a great example of the phenomenon where people think AI is an expert in areas that are not because they have no way to determine if the seemingly good looking result is genius, gibberish, or somewhere in between.
psadri 9 hours ago|||
The point was that you can go further than "write me a contact that says x,y and z". I actually believe the process I went through with the AI was a more custom, tailored experience than any interaction I have had with actual lawyers, who'd usually apply a template. The AI asked me a bunch of questions, many of which were relevant, and led to follow up questions. I could ask my own questions, make corrections, etc. and all along, they made sense to me. This part of the experience was great.

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.

jll29 8 hours ago|||
Here's another techniqe that gets you (even) more out of LLMs: run each prompt several times and compare the various outputs. It is not uncommon for models to contradict their own advice, and also you will get additional insights not included in previous runs.

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.

inopinatus 9 hours ago||||
> The result covered a lot of details that were highly relevant but were absent from the original attempt

Another one suckered by the plausibility engines.

dghlsakjg 10 hours ago|||
Did you validate the output with a lawyer?
psadri 9 hours ago||
No admittedly not. I can try it and report back.
cheema33 9 hours ago|||
> The need for actual lawyers will persist..

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.

barbazoo 9 hours ago||
Their work will get cheaper so it will become more accessible for people, increasing demand over all would be my guess to some degree at least.
jll29 8 hours ago||
I anticipate an effect on society that troubles me:

(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.

airstrike 7 hours ago|||
> One big thing was the overly excessive protective clauses which didn't make sense for reality or conflicted with another.

I'm currently negotiating with someone who I feel is clearly using AI and this is EXACTLY what has been happening

someothherguyy 2 hours ago|||
you can't in imagine the same way you couldn't imagine generating the text from your initial prompt. when will the hubris end?

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

matheusmoreira 10 hours ago|||
> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think

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.

NoboruWataya 9 hours ago|||
The salaries are a result of the insane hours they have to do. Biglaw needs to pay those salaries to keep getting young associates in the door because burnout is a real problem in the industry. If salaries were lower and hours/stresses were lower, you would probably still find people wanting to be lawyers. A different kind of person, maybe.

(Not that I think AI will necessarily have that effect. We just don't know yet)

matheusmoreira 4 hours ago||
Salaries are about scarcity and leverage, they have little to do with working hours. Nurses pull insane hours and they still don't get paid as much as doctors.

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.

NoboruWataya 41 minutes ago||
In Biglaw, the scarcity is driven by the hours and stress. If it was a chilled 9-5 job you would certainly have more people willing to do it, even if it paid less.
bethekidyouwant 9 hours ago|||
It’s a professional organization that only allows so many people to pass the bar per year so I don’t see that changing anytime soon… if anything if they need fewer lawyers they will just pass fewer people to keep their wages high
darth_avocado 10 hours ago|||
> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience

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.

snoman 9 hours ago||
As costs for legal work drop we might expect demand for that work to increase. For example, it may be the case that legal help becomes accessible to entire segments of the population that had no access previously.
ww520 10 hours ago|||
The best writer I know of was an associate attorney. He didn't have the technical background nor the in depth computer related knowledge, and relying on the information I fed him. But man the briefs he filed to the court were amazingly good. Reading them I would have been convinced his side was right if I were in the jury.

Law LLM will surely help competent lawyers in their fields with greater sources of knowledge not in their core area of expertise.

cannonpalms 5 hours ago|||
I don't want to imagine a world where juries were responsible for reading briefs and making decisions.
samtp 9 hours ago|||
Sure as long as they stop making things up.
drschwabe 9 hours ago|||
And to add to your last point yes it should also be like code: where the costs of development are coming down. Legal costs should trend down if law firms are effectively leveraging LLMs to accellerate their procedures (though I won't hold my breath)
Razengan 10 hours ago|||
> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience.

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.

----

* What's a lawyer's favorite programming language? Objection C.

autoexec 9 hours ago|||
The ability to clearly and effectively communicate, and the ability to know and recall the facts of a case is always going to be important. It'd probably be a more fair system if judges and jurors couldn't see the attorneys or even the people they're representing. Now that many cases are handled over video calls it'd be pretty easy to make that change.

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.

geodel 10 hours ago||||
Yep, just yesterday, Nike removed one leach middlemen called retailers and sell directly through their app. Turns out working out very well for them too.
cannonpalms 6 hours ago||
If you have been following this story for the past couple of years, this has been disastrous for Nike.
samtp 10 hours ago|||
The law is much more interpretation and argument based than logic routing based than you seem to believe.
skeptic_ai 3 hours ago|||
I got the exact opposite. A contract from a lawyer passed through ai found so many flaws.
QuiEgo 10 hours ago|||
Lawyers sure. Paralegals and assistants are cooked in the way typist and secretaries were back in the day.
moralestapia 10 hours ago||
Nope. Paralegals and assistants do the type of thing GP hired a lawyer for (and lawyers do, as well).

Lawyers can practice, can represent you in court, etc. that's not going away soon.

dd8601fn 9 hours ago||
Lawyers have that lovely regulatory wall, for better or worse.
janalsncm 10 hours ago|||
The typical pattern is called “deskilling”. It doesn’t usually mean a skilled profession will disappear overnight. Instead, the job might be done by less expensive folks like paralegals.

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.

samtp 10 hours ago|||
If you think paralegals + AI can do the job of good lawyers you don't understand the profession at all.
notatoad 10 hours ago|||
i don't think that's the point anybody is making. "good lawyers" is not the profession at risk here. a top tier courtroom lawyer won't be replaced by AI.

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?

rayiner 10 hours ago|||
Yes. And it would be the continuation of a trend that’s already been going on for two decades. When I started out as an associate at a fancy Wall Street firm, we had 30 people working on reviewing documents for this matter even that level of firm today would not be able to justify doing that anymore. We’re going to move from a pyramid model to more of a diamond shaped model with many fewer associated attorneys doing the legal research and information marshaling.
samtp 9 hours ago|||
> Instead, the job might be done by less expensive folks like paralegals.

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

victorbjorklund 9 hours ago|||
Very little of corporate law is in court. The mass of things is “does this contract look good?” And “what do we need to change in our business when regulation X comes into force?”
samtp 7 hours ago||
Yes hence why only 25% of the situations I presented were in court.
citizenkeen 7 hours ago|||
Former attorney here. A good paralegal is worth 3-4 junior attorneys. A good paralegal with AI should probably still have a senior attorney oversee them but this will absolutely hollow out firms.
calvinmorrison 8 hours ago|||
"law" and those who pratice "law" have managed to place itself largly in a monopoly. This is a huge drain on the economy. Law is expensive and irrational.
andriy_koval 9 hours ago|||
He just gad better prompt
TZubiri 9 hours ago|||
It's worth noting that the announcement seems to aim the product at lawyers or students rather than laymen.
yieldcrv 9 hours ago|||
Our entire world is about reducing the friction of conducting a transaction

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

TZubiri 9 hours ago|||
> One big thing was the overly excessive protective clauses which didn't make sense for reality or conflicted with another.

>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")

TZubiri 9 hours ago|||
>The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience

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.)

charcircuit 10 hours ago|||
What model did you use?
sick_of_slop 10 hours ago||
[dead]
piker 12 hours ago||
Second paragraph:

> API customers including Harvey and Legora will be able to build on Astra for Law, bringing this intelligence into their own products and workflows.

In other words: "no, no, we're not eating our children to prep for the IPO. Don't worry."

jmkd 11 hours ago||
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.

timpera 8 hours ago|||
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.
TZubiri 8 hours ago|||
>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".

datadrivenangel 6 hours ago|||
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.

noisy_boy 4 hours ago|||
Really? Even when the magic is differently priced across magicians?
JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago|||
"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.

dathinab 9 hours ago|||
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).

dd8601fn 9 hours ago|||
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.

byzantinegene 2 hours ago||
they could potentially lose their license, I think that's worth caring about.
forrestthewoods 11 hours ago||
If there is any cartel that deserves to be broken its legal search. May they die a miserable death.
ericd 11 hours ago|||
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.

manyatoms 11 hours ago||
is there a dataset/torrent with all the underlying laws?
ericd 11 hours ago||
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...

timschmidt 11 hours ago|||
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.
rayiner 11 hours ago|||
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.
datsci_est_2015 11 hours ago|||
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.
Something1234 9 hours ago||
Govinfo.gov is neat because you see the different attempts at common formats that have been attempted in the past.
ericd 9 hours ago|||
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.
ericd 7 hours ago||||
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.

qingcharles 11 hours ago||||
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.

rzzzt 10 hours ago|||
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

tfehring 10 hours ago|||
https://axiom.org is working on this but very early.
ericd 9 hours ago||
Cool, thanks for the pointer!
elpakal 11 hours ago||||
> 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

rayiner 10 hours ago||
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.
teiferer 11 hours ago|||
Let's swap it out for the AI cartel!
jumploops 12 hours ago||
The courts are about to overrun with AI-generated lawsuits (even more so than they have been[0]).

[0]https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-c...

sva_ 11 hours ago||
I find the idea that people can use LLMs to exercise their rights as citizens appealing however. Many people aren't aware of the rights they have, and LLMs are pretty good at surfacing some stuff without having to pay lawyers. Having to hire a lawyer is imo actually a huge way of gatekeeping people from exercising their rights. I heard a lot of local German public institutions are currently being flooded with people arguing their case with the help of LLM that they previously weren't really realistically able to do. So I don't see it all as bad.
giarc 10 hours ago|||
>are pretty good at surfacing some stuff without having to pay lawyers

They are also really good at making stuff up as evidenced by the many, many, many examples you read in the news about actual lawyers using AI to write briefs that are full of errors and hallucinations.

In civil courts, you'd likely get more sympathy from a judge if you represented yourself and admitted your lack of understanding, rather than try to appear as someone you're not because you wrote some prompts and copied the output.

tokioyoyo 9 hours ago|||
Current court systems around the world are just not built to handle the flooding of cases from the citizens.

The stupidest analogy is open source projects having a hard time accepting LLM generated PRs from the masses, because review process is the bottleneck.

No idea how to fix this, to be honest. In coding world, with some mental gymnastics, I can see code not being reviewed by people anymore. In courts, things generally have more consequences, and you can’t really roll back decisions that easily.

paimapi 11 hours ago|||
you could probably write a cool little gotcha of an SF short story about a barren wasteland of a planet that keeps broadcasting out legalese that's revealed to just be LLM chatbot lawyers pedantically arguing with one another about xeno legal doctrine
Jordan-117 11 hours ago|||
Relevant:

https://www.ftrain.com/nanolaw

notahacker 11 hours ago|||
JG Ballard could probably turn that into something darkly atmospheric, and even more dystopic than his usual depopulated worlds...
mt_ 11 hours ago|||
The legal system, which is a machine/technology by itself, will be eaten out. I wonder what will replace it. Botnet law arbitrage? – Personal assistants constantly negotiating with each other to avoid permanent civil lawsuits?

the cost of making a legal argument can collapse while the cost of reaching an enforceable, legitimate decision may go higher, which will gate the "justice" system even more.

iphonecorridor 11 hours ago|||
The legal system is slow and inefficient by design.
rayiner 10 hours ago|||
It's really not. The legal system is slow and inefficient because it's a deeply pipelined system built to maximize the throughput of the bottleneck resource: judges. Judges are constitutional officers who exercise independent authority in meat space and thus are necessarily limited in number. The rest of the design flows from that.

If you got the judge, all the parties, and all the witnesses in a conference room together until the case was resolved, you could probably handle a lawsuit in a few months. But each judge has hundreds of cases pending before them, so that would never work. Instead, you get something like how a GPU works. You do some work on a case, submit the work to the court, then work on something else for a few months while you wait around to get the results back. Then you do some more work and submit it to the court, then go do something else for a few months while you wait to get the results back. A few months of actual work gets spread out over a few years that way.

10000truths 8 hours ago||
Why stop there? The bottleneck is not some immutable force of nature. The number of judges is determined by legislative action. It is within Congress's power to allocate new federal judicial seats, and likewise at the state level with the equivalent lawmaking body (for most states, at least). Why don't they do so?
rayiner 8 hours ago||
Because federal district court judges have a tremendous amount of power. You both don't want 10,000 of them running around and you don't want to water down the qualification for the position--if you did do that, then that would devalue their judgments, everyone would appeal, and you'd just shift the bottleneck up to the appellate courts.

At the end of the day, litigation is conflict resolution. You don't just need a decision, you need a decision from someone authoritative enough to bully Fortune 500 CEOs into submission to accept the judgment.

JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago|||
The legal system is robust and deliberate by design. That winds up being necessarily slow. But it doesn't need to be inefficient.
alexfringes 11 hours ago||||
You presented the concern from my adjacent comment perfectly (“LLM performance: common law vs civil law” essentially). So is AI possibly just growing the “Reverence for Professional Experience” factor that plays such a big role for legal compensation here in the US?
WolfeReader 11 hours ago||||
I am not sure "eaten out" was the correct phrase to use here.
pbkompasz 11 hours ago|||
Call it a Prediction Market
pampas 12 hours ago|||
They seem unaccountable. Every other profession has increased their productivity.
diegolas 11 hours ago|||
justice doesn't have to be productive it has to be fair
RugnirViking 11 hours ago|||
It's completely failing at that too. Public trust in the courts is lower than it's ever been, and it was never all that high to begin with
pampas 7 hours ago||||
You've never heard the phrase "justice delayed is justice denied"?
MiSeRyDeee 11 hours ago|||
how so? delayed justice is denied justice
kart23 6 hours ago||||
construction productivity is actually down since the 60s!
officeplant 11 hours ago|||
>Every other profession has increased their productivity.

You dropped this /s

aucisson_masque 11 hours ago|||
Don’t you have fee when initiating a lawsuit ?

I don’t know in the USA but in France, if it’s deemed that you launched a lawsuit knowing very well it wouldn’t succeed, you are susceptible to get a 10k€ fine. Even jail in serious cases.

underlipton 10 hours ago||
Yes. And you(r lawyer) can collect lawyer's fees and you can be made to pay the court fees, if you lose.

IME the American legal system is set-up to discourage litigation, though. A common tactic is to bury your opponent in the threat of heavy damages or jail-time to get them to settle for what you were originally after, which courts are perfectly happy to facilitate because it gets a potentially lengthy trial off their dockets. They'll punish (or be biased against) whichever party seems responsible for not accepting a "reasonable" settlement.

Algorithmic abuse of the system to extract payments already exists in the form of the debt collection industry.

Revanche1367 9 hours ago|||
The solution is obvious: AI judges! With complete immunity for model vendors of course, just in case some toddler is sentenced to death or something.
pampas 7 hours ago||
I wonder how many parties would prefer an AI judge over delayed justice.
ngruhn 11 hours ago|||
Why the hell are they not fighting fire with fire? This is not sustainable. But it is annoying that the AI labs get to play arms dealer, selling to both sides.
pampas 4 hours ago|||
Judges don't care if people have to wait months. What does it cost them?
toasty228 11 hours ago||||
How are we fighting it online? You cannot
b112 11 hours ago|||
It'll be like radar detector detector detectors, which were a thing for a while. Each side (cops, speeder) buying detectors to detect the detectors.
underlipton 10 hours ago||
There's a Judas Priest joke in here somewhere.
toomuchtodo 11 hours ago|||
https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
cbg0 12 hours ago||
No word on model hallucinations in the blog post.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-6-astra?omniscience...

pelagicAustral 12 hours ago||
Not like common law doesnt already have a lot of hallucination going on.
cobbzilla 12 hours ago||
can “penumbras and emanations” compete with hallucinations?
ch4s3 12 hours ago||
Common law is all about rummaging around in dead mens’ letters, LLMs are a natural fit.
alexfringes 11 hours ago||
Genuinely wondering (aka not snarky): Has anyone found frontier models to provide useful research in the context of European civil law systems?

Your comment made me wonder if there are any halfway-acceptable model benchmarks for law tasks? Specifically I’d love to know how the frontier models’ abilities compare between common law vs. civil law systems. My guess would be that an AI in a common law context should have a clearer idea of how a specific case is interpreted/accepted by (common law) practitioners, whereas trying to rely on AI in a civil law context, like Germany, can be daunting. In a few Germany-specific recent examples, the models feel like they present only (maybe too stubbornly?) the “civil law”-based laws. All while negating much of AI’s research benefits because civil statutes are portrayed as being absolutely accurate, binding, and their enforcement (and thereby the legal reality) being uniformly applied. Am I making this interpretation up? If so, how can I prove myself wrong?

jll29 8 hours ago||
I don't know of anything that is working yet, but I know some people working on it (intentionally vague).

Roman law, on which the legal systems of Germany, most of Europe, Turkey etc. are based relies more heavily on statutes than Anglo-American case law, but cases do play a role there, too. That's why a practically useful system also needs to have access to court decisions, commentary etc. - and while the statues are in the public domain, a lot of the other knowledge is owned by specialist publishers (such as: C.H. Beck, Nomos, Mohr Siebeck, De Gruyter, Otto Schmidt, C.F. Müller, Manz, Verlag Österreich, Schulthess, Stämpfli, Dalloz, LexisNexis, Lefebvre Dalloz, Giuffrè Francis Lefebvre, CEDAM, Giappichelli, Il Mulino, Aranzadi, Tirant lo Blanch, Marcial Pons, Dykinson, Tecnos, Lefebvre, Almedina, Gestlegal, AAFDL, Kluwer, Boom juridisch, Wolters Kluwer, Larcier-Intersentia, Anthemis, Sakkoulas, Nomiki Bibliothiki, Universul Juridic, Hamangiu).

Internationally, legal systems appear to undergo a sort of convergence, which means statutes increasingly matter in the U.S. and cases increasingly matter in European law (according to a law partner friend).

heaney-555 12 hours ago|||
The benchmark you linked to shows GPT-6 Astra having the lowest hallucination rate of all tested models.
jdiff 11 hours ago||
The blog post makes no mention. If the rate isn't 0% it should be mentioned for a field like this.
TomGarden 11 hours ago|||
Agreed. Hallucinations and reliability are the main hurdles to anything being 'agi' in my book
Tanjreeve 11 hours ago||
The definition of AGI is whatever a frontier lab wrote a blog about doing in the last week.
simianwords 11 hours ago|||
why this maximalism? There's nothing that has 0% hallucination including humans. lets use reasonable baselines.
drakythe 11 hours ago||
Humans can be sanctioned and fined, and eventually disbarred if they continue to lie in court filings.
john_strinlai 11 hours ago||
presumably that will remain true for the lawyers using the product
jdiff 10 hours ago||
So those lawyers will likely want to know about the likeliness of it, strategies to work around it, and overall mitigations.

It might be helpful if the company launching this product included such information in their blog post instead of ignoring it in a field with such a high cost of getting it wrong.

john_strinlai 9 hours ago||
agreed, but i dont think there are many (any?) product launch blogs that cover all the fine details and legal minutia of the product.

that all typically comes in pages of terms of service, purchase contracts, SLAs, conversations with your rep, knowledge base articles, and that sort of thing. not in the initial marketing post.

probably available by the "contact legal sales" link at the top of the post https://openai.com/business/contact-sales-legal/

jrflo 11 hours ago||
Does hallucination matter for this application? We've moved beyond raw recall being that important, it seems like for law specifically all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans.
Implicated 11 hours ago|||
> it seems like for law specifically all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans.

Don't be too sure about that. [0]

0: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

jakevoytko 10 hours ago||||
> all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans

I've talked to a lawyer about how they handle this. They do indeed double-check everything, since it'd be embarrassing (or worse) to send hallucinated statements to opposing council or to the court. They still find the assembly a huge time saver

But based on stories in the news on the subject, not everyone has this same level of diligence

samtp 10 hours ago||||
Sure but just like generating 100x more code, someone has to review it. So you are wasting everyone in court's time (defendants, prosecutors, judges, staff) by making them parse through what is quite often a bunch of hallucinated slop. Time that could be much better spent on parties who prepared and reviews their own arguments.
jordanpg 9 hours ago|||
The lawyers I know are very fixated on the problem of hallucinated case citations which is amusing to me as a onetime programmer, since case citations have a well-defined syntax and would be relatively easy to check programmatically.
massysett 8 hours ago||
Which makes it all the more bizarre that LLMs have this problem. Claude Code runs the code it generates through a compiler, why can’t an LLM run its product through a cite checker? I’ve seen LLMs fabricate citations.
heaney-555 7 hours ago||
A modern frontier model with an agentic harness will check its citations if the system instructions or prompt tell it to.

You can get an effectively-zero hallucination rate with the right setup already.

chr15m 7 hours ago||
"We have dangerous AGI that can destroy humanity."

"Also, all of your sensitive legal documents will be totally safe with us."

"Also, for some reason even though we have AGI and selling tokens is a fine business, we need to sell a new product specifically targeted at a very high margin and lucrative industry."

nerevarthelame 10 hours ago||
I'm not familiar with the Vals AI Legal Research Benchmark. But their website has other frontier models' scores, and the scores OpenAI is now revealing for "Astra for Law" are slightly less than Claude and Muse:

> The top is a three-way tie: Muse Spark 1.3 Max, Claude Opus 5, and Claude Fable 5.1 all reach 55.29% all-pass accuracy, a clear ~6-point step ahead of the next model. [Astra for Law reached 54.0%]

> Under partial-credit scoring, Claude Opus 5 reaches 90.58% weighted pass rate but 55.29% under strict all-pass grading, where every rubric check must pass. The gap shows models often get most of an answer right but fail on one or two required elements. [Astra for law reached 90.0%]

https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/legal_research

delichon 8 hours ago||
How long before we start building detailed models of each judge trained on all of their legal output, and then test various legal theories against those judge models in virtual moot court? Craft each pitch to the legal idiosyncrasies of the batter. I assume that real lawyers do this routinely and could use a simulator.
xpct 5 hours ago||
I feel like this is on a different trajectory than what LLM-based tech does. This type of individualistic extrapolation is one of the things they're really bad at, in my experience.
unstatusthequo 8 hours ago|||
This is already a thing to some extent. I don’t recall the products that do it, but judge profiles def exist and are taken into account .
avaer 5 hours ago||
What worries me is the step after this. If god forbid this proves successful and models accurately predict specific outcomes, people will start to ask whether the solution to AI slop lawsuits is to do the judging with AI too.
CobrastanJorji 4 hours ago|
> Astra for Law passed the evaluation’s overall correctness check on 54.0% of questions.

How is this a product that you are selling?

noisy_boy 4 hours ago||
On the promise of potential cost savings by means of firing and/or not hiring as much.
prodigycorp 4 hours ago||
Help me understand your consternation.
calyhre 3 hours ago|||
It’s barely any better than a coin flip
fragmede 4 hours ago||||
54.0% isn't particularly high.
prodigycorp 1 hour ago||
What I'm trying to say which doesnt seem obvious is that all models are x% correct at benchmarks until they get saturated, and then new benchmarks get made.
jambalaya8 3 hours ago|||
waiting for the actual Prodigy Corp. to show up and offer to buy your username out?

<my own consternation, stated>

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