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Posted by ilreb 7 hours ago

GLM-Legal(z.ai)
379 points | 214 commentspage 3
aliljet 6 hours ago|
How does this compare with existing frontier models especially when processing massive volumes of evidence that might be contradictory...
bb123 6 hours ago||
Would be nice if it said what legal system it is set up for. US law? Chinese law? European law? All of them? The author seems to assume we'd know.
alansaber 5 hours ago|
The benchmark is US law, I imagine it's been aggressively post-trained on it.
alansaber 5 hours ago||
Video is very SAAS-demo coded. I wonder if they worked with any in-domain legal experts at all.
maxdo 5 hours ago||
No fable 5.1 no opus 5.5 , no gpt 6.1 , benchmarks for the hype .
Havoc 5 hours ago||
Unexpected direction for zai to be going into
theokrueger 6 hours ago||
the liability model of these models is poor, i think progress in that domain should be a heavy focus.
vidarh 6 hours ago|
The legal space understands well how to tier services based on who has the liability. E.g. trainees and paralegals whose work is filtered through the lawyer who ultimately puts their name on what gets submitted to courts.

I'm sure we'll continue to see the occasional person who fails to understand they themselves will be held liable if they submit work done by an AI without vetting it, but it's not like they don't have ways of dealing with this.

bigstrat2003 3 hours ago||
Given how bad LLMs are at the domain I'm an expert in (programming), it will be a cold day in hell before I trust them to give me legal advice (or medical advice). Those are not trivial things where it doesn't matter if you get it wrong.
lenerdenator 7 hours ago||
There should be laws about disclosure on the part of attorneys about their use of AI. I know they're already using it, but spending years or decades in prison because Lionel Hutz, Esq. did something stupid at a prompt sounds unappealing to me.
tyromaniac 6 hours ago||
I think they should be somehow restricted to using non-generative models (or at least for the user facing output). Something that would only identify potentially relevant case law from an existing set, to accelerate the search process.

Common law in general seems essentially impossible to formalize in such a way to use purely deterministic reasoning models of yesteryear, but I'm sure many specific laws could be converted, especially in fields like tax law (I'm sure they already are by many big players)

elohimus 6 hours ago|||
A lot of law is combing through large bodies of rule sets and reference cases to find inputs or parallels relevant for a case. Are you sure you'd rather have Lionel Hutz, Esq. with his limited comprehension do that at half a page per minute?
otterley 6 hours ago|||
This capability has already existed for decades thanks to Westlaw and LexisNexis. These are indispensable tools in the lawyer’s kit.
alansaber 5 hours ago||
You're kidding, right? Using Astra to comb through cases is far faster than doing it manually in Westlaw. Models for research are pretty good now.
otterley 5 hours ago||
There’s no question that the technology has improved. It’s just that the way GP described the situation made it sound like there weren’t legal indices before.
lenerdenator 6 hours ago|||
Yes, actually, because Lionel can suffer a consequence. He can be sanctioned. He can be disbarred. He can be sued. He can be thrown in jail.

AI can not meaningfully suffer consequences for what it does, and the trend is to remove the human from the loop more and more.

Furthermore, it's entirely conceivable that you have a law firm staffed by lawyers who more-or-less just say "yeah sure whatever" to what this thing does and, when asked about what can be done to appeal something, or how a document didn't make it into evidence, or how a subpoena wasn't filed, just shrug their shoulders and go "iunno". Vibe-practicing law, basically. You need to have an idea of how they're using AI and in what parts of the case.

orangedog 6 hours ago|||
That same stuff can all still happen tot he lawyer who uses these tools. If he makes an egregious enough mistake, he's liable.
lenerdenator 6 hours ago||
And that's why you want him to have to disclose that he used those tools.
vidarh 6 hours ago||
Why do the tools matters? He is equally liable if he makes the mistakes without them.
bigstrat2003 3 hours ago||
So that you know he is more likely to make a mistake. Just like why many people avoid software written by LLMs, because it is much more likely to have bugs.
vidarh 6 hours ago|||
If Lionel submits junk from an AI, he can still be sanctioned, disbarred, sued, and thrown in jail, just as he could if he let some incompetent paralegal screw up and he submits the resulting documents without checking them.

It's ultimately his name on the documents submitted to the court.

onlyrealcuzzo 6 hours ago|||
> but spending years or decades in prison because Lionel Hutz, Esq. did something stupid at a prompt sounds unappealing to me.

In which case would this be the primary blame, and not the legal system itself, or you for actually doing the crime?

I fail to see how its your lawyers fault that you went to jail for a crime you didn't commit over the system as a whole. And I really fail to see how it's the lawyer's sole fault that you went to jail for a crime that you should - in fact - have went to jail for...

There are a lot of problems with the legal system (including with lawyers). This just doesn't seem like the hill to die on.

SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago|||
There are a lot of situations where my lawyer's mistake might cause me to go to jail for a crime I didn't commit. There could be some prejudicial evidence that he failed to get excluded, or exculpatory evidence that he failed to get included, or an incorrect ruling in the trial that wasn't properly preserved for appeal.
lenerdenator 6 hours ago||||
> In which case would this be the primary blame, and not the legal system itself, or you for actually doing the crime?

There are plenty of ways a lawyer can screw up procedurally that can drastically impact your case.

ReptileMan 6 hours ago|||
One of the nice quirks of USA justice system is that you don't have to be guilty of a crime to go to prison, just that the prosecution has to convince 12 people beyond reasonable doubt that you are guilty.

The sixth is taken seriously to the point that incompetent lawyer could be a valid reason for granting a retrial.

suburban_strike 5 hours ago||
An attorney I have retained from a large firm bills me $500 to send me one email update a month (minimum billable).

They are obviously AI-generated (but does not disclose such) and frequently misses or conflates key details the same way Gemma in particular does. They're also bizarrely positive when I correct them instead of pissy and arrogant like I'm used to.

Nobody should be paying these rates for legal "work" performed by a machine that poorly acts the part.

crossroadsguy 6 hours ago||
Lawyers, essentially the exorbitant and freeloading self-appointed gatekeepers of the deliberately arcane, unaffordable, inaccessible, and patently unequal legal systems all across the world, will now have even their routine/rote, repetitive, menial work done by cheaper LLMs for cheap.
Buttons840 6 hours ago||
Hopefully. Giving everyone cheap and equal access to the law cannot be a bad thing--well, it might feel bad to those who no longer have exclusive access to the law.

I think an under-appreciate way AIs might disrupt the world is by giving individuals an agent that will ruthlessly optimize for them.

Companies have entire departments that spend all their time ruthlessly optimizing so they can charge an extra fee here, or spin up a new shell company there. Meanwhile, here I am in our capitalist society and I just enjoy relaxing and spending time with my wife and kids instead of maximally exploiting the capital I possess at all times--like a fool.

It will be interesting if we ever integrate AI so fully in our lives that the AI can maximally exploit all our capital. My AI might check prices, and I will drive past your store to save 5 bucks at the next. My AI might help me manage 27 LLCs and shell companies of my own so that I too can just disappear in a poof of legal smoke if I ever need to. Etc.

seydor 4 hours ago|||
Correct. The power of lawyers lies in their being self-appointed and gatekeeping , which means they will be paid to be rubberstamp the work of even superior AI , and their payment is non-negotiable.
alansaber 5 hours ago||
This is why we see so many pro-se litigants. "Legalese" is no longer the barrier (not to nearly the same extent, anyway).
alexnewman 5 hours ago|
Why don’t I lose all legal privs when I hook up my email to these third party services
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