I think this plan is really quite well-balanced and sane. Also kudos to UChicago Law School for including an actual implementation plan here, not just vague thoughts.
Some bits I found interesting:
[For required courses in year 1]
> Across all 1L sections, we will prohibit the use of electronic devices such as laptops, tablets, and phones in the classroom.
> Additionally, examinations will be in-class without access to the internet, electronic files, or apps. And most of all, we will continue our longstanding tradition of emphasizing the Socratic Method as part of these courses.
[For Legal Research & Writing year 1]
> Throughout the year, students will write without AI, while also using AI for research, revision, iterating on drafts, and preparation for oral argument. Students and their instructors will review together both their writing and their use of AI.
[Electives]
> For these courses, the use of the Socratic Method, no-device policies, and in-class, no-access exams will remain, but as default rules rather than required policies.
> In all elective courses, we will encourage instructors to experiment with pedagogy.
[Upper level writing]
> We will be adding one additional requirement, which is that all students will be required to engage in an oral discussion of their SRP with their supervising professor, in an in-person setting.
But the effect is to make success more dependent on networks. (If they are using AI as an excuse to make networks more relevant than skills, it relieves competitive pressure.)
First, a main draw of law journals is the filing cabinet of past exams as remembered by past students, available only to journal members i.e., friends of connected people. Reducing one's ability to remember what was in a lecture only increases the advantage insiders have.
Second, the "Socratic" Method for teaching law is nothing like it is in philosophy; it's more of a weird combination of hide-the-ball and distraction that again ensures people who can see through the clouds are using out-of-band information, and share it only with those they seek to enlist or join.
> all students will be required to engage in an oral discussion of their SRP with their supervising professor, in an in-person setting
I'm surprised anyone could get through otherwise. When did it become legitimate to dump your paper and not answer for it?
> Second, the "Socratic" Method for teaching law is nothing like it is in philosophy; it's more of a weird combination of hide-the-ball and distraction that again ensures people who can see through the clouds are using out-of-band information, and share it only with those they seek to enlist
How so? In my view, the socratic method is one of the few useful parts of law school. Most people, even quite smart people, think in a fuzzy way. Their ideas can seem superficially compelling in written form, but often fall apart when you start questioning their assumptions and chain of logical reasoning.
The biggest problem is that most law schools don’t use socratic method, because it’s a lot of work for teachers. Just cold calling a student and asking them to explain what happened in a case isn’t socratic method.
So, I graduated from law school 20 years ago, and -- given even the internet THEN, like, pdfs over mail -- that law journal filing cabinet thing was actually already dying; I had more than enough past history of outlines and stuff.
That all being said, I would be entirely unsurprised if the "mythology" of "YES the journals have the secret fancy sauce that no one else can get" lived on.
Also -- and I don't necessarily want to denigrate law school professors, it's another thing that's just gone on so long that "this is how we do it" -- yes, the law School "Socratic method" (at worst) is an effective form of possible professor laziness; they can just "ask questions about the cases" and not really teach.
Related to how law school "textbooks" aren't textbooks. They're literally just a bunch of cases slapped together with a tiny bit of commentary (unless that's maybe changed too, I hope?)
Again, not all professors, you CAN still teach very well under this framework. -- but it is an out for those fancy people who's forte isn't teaching.
All nice and all, but their grads will be wrecked by a street-wise guy with AI glasses (and eventually an implanted chip). There’s no competition in a machines vs humans match. It’s over. Of course these elite centers of knowledge want to keep the status quo, they base their entire existence on gate-keeping useful shit from the riff-raff. Well, fuck them.
A street wise moron used as a sort of meat puppet to carry a computer around that answers questions for him? What does that even mean practically? Won’t the graduates who learned how to think also have access, but then also be able to think for themselves too?
As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week and most of them have 10-20 serious drafting errors on them. The most common ones are of the order of defining the same concept like 'a working day' in various conflicting ways without every specifying when which of the conflicting definitions should be used. Lawyers still have something to add to process but for every time they catch AI out on them, the machine is usually already 10-1 ahead.
> As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible
This is many people at many jobs. We continue to see this weird thing when AI comes into an industry that suddenly the product being produced by the people was perfect/amazing/whatever. Maybe that's true for the majority of HN who are lucky enough to work with experts in every field, but in the general population that's simply not the case.
Many doctors, lawyers, and programmers are not very good at their jobs - I've seen it first hand. AI gives the general population a way to steer around these people a bit, and maybe ask the right questions. Is it perfect? Nope, but it's often better than the people someone has access to.
The problem is that a layman has no way to know if what the llm told them is better than experts around them, or even just remotely correct. A wrong response and a correct, informative, helpful response look exactly the same, the LLM will express the same level of confidence and will defend them in both cases.
So, on one hand you can get an expert take that might be wrong, but is linked to an actual person, with a reputation and some level of ownership. On the other hand you have an over confident LLM that might be wrong and has no reputation, no ownership. How does that actually improve things compared to the older status quo?
Remember the bell curve in grading? Yeah, most of the graduates from every school everywhere did NOT get straight A’s in their classes. On average, they are B students… at best. And half of them are worse than average.
I think this extends to the other areas that AI is also disrupting.
Software engineers are also absolutely terrible: In being sloppy with handling errors, doing coercions, etc. All because always engineering after best practice simply takes too much time and mental load.
The real disruption from AI is likely that it does not get mentally fatigue. It can keep on, launch adversarial audits, make sure that everything is up to all standards.
> The real disruption from AI is likely that it does not get mentally fatigue
It's worse than mental fatigue. A friend had GLM 5.2 suddenly become dumb for hours. It started forgetting instructions, randomly inserted some bits in simplified chinese... Apparently throttled due to demand. there was tons of tokens left. (btw when your llm runs out of tokens is another example that's worse than fatigue)
A tired programmer usually knows he's tired (and can take a break) and fucks up in more expected ways
But the real question is 1) whether other human lawyers would catch the error 2) in how much time 3) which of the errors introduced by AI vs. human would have bigger consequences. On 1 and 2 the answers are very likely to be "yes" and "it would take humans more time", but the question that really matters is 3.
> most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week
I hope the irony is lost on no one that "Attention Is All You Need" was the paper that kicked the LLM boom off.
Part of the distinction between a how good one lawyer will be vs another is exactly that: attention to detail. And, as a trade, a practice, it seems like a skill that they try to hammer into the people who pursue this career (to varying degrees of success clearly).
It makes the last 20 years of leet code hiring look downright wrong. Your ability to recall what sorting algo to use, or solve some brain teaser conveys nothing about your ability to read (massive amounts) of code, and think critically about it.
I have the impression that most law firms consume and produce documentation by means of a cadre of paralegals who are minimally trained, minimally experienced, and maximally stressed by the pressure of deadlines and case loads. These paralegals are probably working to read hundreds of pages of legal filings and make sense out of them, and on the other end, they are working to produce as much documentation as possible and that's going to be by cut-and-paste assembly. So no, they are not going to understand stuff very well, and no, their output is not really going to be consistent or intelligible. But the managing attorneys depend on these paralegals to get anything done, just like Congresspeople rely on their staffers to actually read bills and draft legislation.
At the end of the day, I think these paralegals have been quite weak links, and nearly nobody will notice a difference in quality when it's all handed over to LLMs. But the paralegals will lose their jobs, and probably have nothing better to do than purchase angle grinders and cut down Flock camera poles, or crown the front hood of Waymos with a traffic pylon.
It's really the junior associates doing most of that grunt work. Paralegals in most firms have more limited responsibilities. Some work has already been handed over to LLMs but the job market for graduates of first-tier law schools remains strong.
I recent beat an actual lawyer as a pro se plaintiff in a civil suit. It was all codex and claude, using the cli agents to write the "import docx" scripts that wrote all the filings, and scripts to assemble exhibits. I don't know how long the bars will be able to hold onto their monopoly powers when confronted with LLMs that are measurably superior.
I've seen lawyers lose to non-lawyers who didn't use all that, just because the lawyers didn't do their work, thinking, no doubt, "I'm a lawyer I will just win", at any rate there is a well known aphorism that a lawyer who represents themselves has a fool for a client.
finally, was this thing you beat the actual lawyer at in their specific specialty, since lawyers are often focused on particular aspects of the law?
That's cool, but bear in mind that courts in the United States are generally required to be a little more lax in their enforcement of procedural rules when a party is pro se. Not saying you did make mistakes, but if you did, you may have gotten a pass.
Additionally, you haven't given any of the details of your case, so I'm going to assume you were simply in a position where the facts of your case weighed heavily in your substantive favor, and no amount of legal maneuvers by the defendant would have made a difference.
There's nothing magical about lawyers. They are mostly just boring, studious people who excelled in non-STEM academics and were good at memorization and test taking. If you have a strong case, it won't matter very much who the lawyer is on the other side.
I did make one or two procedural mistakes, including sending an email to the bailiff without copying the opposing counsel (ex parte). in another instance, the opposing counsel made a mistake of their own in following the specific judge's rules for listing working copies. I agree, the facts of the case did seem strong, but there was a matter of interpretation of the statute that could have gone against me.
Is it perhaps possible that you won your case because you didn't break the law, or conversely because the other party did break the law? Unless ChatGPT persuaded a judge to side in your favor even though you were legally in the wrong, this really doesn't tell us anything at all. (And even in that circumstance, it might speak more to the complete incompetence of the other party's legal representation.)
In my case, the defendant was indeed breaking the law, but it was a "new" law untested by case law, so it was somewhat risky how a judge would interpret it. The counsel of record for the defendant was bringing "recycled briefs" energy, possibly out of overconfidence.
> I recent beat an actual lawyer as a pro se plaintiff in a civil suit.
So? I beat actual lawyers in trials and hearings five times between 2008 and 2019. That last one was actually a team of attorney + advocate (senior bar member).
You could always "beat" them just by reading and preparing. Now, you+AI beat a lawyer. Tomorrow, do you really think that you+AI will beat lawyer+AI?
And once we stop getting well-trained lawyers (because everyone is just a meatbag accessory to an AI), whether you win or not is likely to be a coin toss.
I would expect the future to be more like me+stockfish vs kasparov+stockfish, where the centaur part is completely superfluous. it would be a reverse centaur sort of thing where a human with legal personhood has to own the machine's output. The interesting question is whether judges or the bars manage to ban real time earpieces in lawyers that tell them exactly what to say. My case worked strictly by filings without a physical appearance, and I would have been quite disadvantage if it were otherwise.
I'm sorry that I created a new account to not doxx myself. The number of bits of entropy of court cases in the US, in which a pro se plaintiff won, and has obviously written-by-codex legal filings, is not one I would sacrifice to identify my main account.
I think more universities will follow. Every prof I speak to has noticed shorter attention spans, low effort LLM writing, and inability to assess competence.
It’s interesting to think that the “public speaking skills” aspect of some legal jobs will probably continue to be AI-proof for the indefinite future. No one is going to present ChatGPT on an iPad as their defense attorney.
On the other hand, the paperwork-first side of law is probably in for a tough future. Especially if your clients are not big corporations or rich celebrities.
In general I think my advice to young people is: focus on social skills, public speaking, etc. These are not going to be replaced by robots in your lifetime.
Even small corporations have a huge need for paperwork in terms of contract negotiation and redlining agreements. Some of this can be partially automated but the real value an experienced attorney brings is in knowing how those issues fit into the larger business context, and deciding what to press on or concede.
This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided.
Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree. But this is “just another an AI cycle” and if you’re a practitioner it does look different than the previous ones.
However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were massively impactful technologies.
What you are actively seeing happening now are institutions saying “we have to change the way that we practice” “the way that we did business before is no longer as applicable as it’s going to be changing very rapidly in the future and we’re going to have to deal with that.”
That is not coming from investors or technology companies. That is coming from people who are utilizing this stuff and being impacted by it
So it is absolutely the case that there’s going to be some kind of financial changes but just like every other AI cycle we are left with a aggressively more capable technology that is more pervasive.
AI is a real thing and it's the most significant development in the legal sector since the Internet. Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery, which before would've taken me the whole day. Even if it never gets any better it's a huge step forward. It's not only going to change legal education, it's going to change what the pipeline looks like in law firms. Similarly to the changes I expect to see in any kind of white collar job where AI replaces a lot of the data analysis/data transformation work, leaving people to do more human interaction.
> Similarly to the changes I expect to see in any kind of white collar job where AI replaces a lot of the data analysis/data transformation work, leaving people to do more human interaction.
Taking law as the example, I'm not sure I agree.
Legal is largely a distress purchase. Very few clients actually want to spend time interacting with outside corporate counsel, a divorce lawyer, a personal injury lawyer, etc.
The real value of an attorney is accountability. A person with a license and reputation who is on the hook for the advice they provide. But accountability is only worth buying if the judgment behind it is sound, and that judgment takes years to build.
The problem is that much of what makes a "good" lawyer comes from years of doing unglamorous work as a junior, financed by clients. If AI reduces the ability of firms to subsidize training the next generation of lawyers, you get fewer "good" lawyers and the whole market keeps eroding.
From what I've seen, the top AI models can now produce contracts that are on par with what I would have had to pay thousands of dollars for a decade ago, and the agents/chatbots are capable of collaborating with you to address fairly complex issues. If you have the money, you still run everything by a real attorney of course for the accountability piece, but the future is not bright for contract attorneys because people know even they're probably using AI to do half their work.
> Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery
It might be worth distinguishing between LLMs as tools for fuzzy-searching hard facts, versus using them to craft logical arguments. [0] The risk-profile and verification difficulty are rather different.
[0] Or, more-precisely, using them to craft a pattern-fitting text artifact, which hopefully maps onto a sane concept when reinterpreted by a human.
Indeed - it helps people become much more efficient. When it comes to law, that includes criminals as well. Whatever gains in efficiency happen on one side, they happen on the other too. Yes, everyone loves to say how they coded a cool side project in a day instead of a week, but what of the situation where AI is placed in a situation with two sides going against each other. The same old fight, but with better weapons.
I am at a company that currently has a whole bunch of lawyers, because we are dealing with multi-year >100s million infra projects.
One of the things that AI has helped with is automatic breech notifications. They are largely proforma, but depending on which generation of contract they are notifying from, subtle changes are needed.
Law is mostly highly structured text, and you know what loves highly structured and documented text? LLMs.
Legal LLMs do share the same issue with coding LLMs, they tend to default to lazy/insecure. Its not the case where you as a non-lawyer can prompt it to make a "water tight" contract from scratch.
> However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet.
Yes they were. Educators have been talking about how access to the internet has affected their students learning since forever. We were cautioned and had dedicated classes to teach us to be critical of different sources, teaching us what Wikipedia could and could not be used for. The internet was deliberately turned off for our exams.
Crypto too was seen as culturally important, papers were written by otherwise well respected authors. We were expected to read some whitepapers about crypto. Interestingly, reading those papers only made us more sure it was a scam.
You're rewriting history to make this moment seem different, it is not.
> This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided.
A bubble doesn’t say anything about how useful the underlying technology is. We are in an AI bubble, in the sense that the allocated resources is completely out of line with the underlying businesses. AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble
> AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble
That’s not true. Apple alone is valued higher than the largest three AI companies combined.
This is a more reasoned take than most reactions to AI. But nobody wants to consider the possibility that maybe we won't actually need what was traditionally called lawyers in the mid/near term future; certainly before the new grad's careers are up.
I would never expect Harvard Law school to admit this, their hands are tied by many interests, but IMO they still aren't being pragmatic enough to evolve.
I would make the courses 50% AI based immediately, the other 50% being based on validating and applying the AI's work with traditional rigorous work. Anyone who rejects this should drop out, because they won't have a career anyway. And if Harvard Law disagrees then they can find out how meaningful their degrees are going to be in 10 years.
The posted article is about law school, but the comments are focusing on practice. These overlap but are not the same.
“Lawyer” is one of many possible career paths. Law graduates are uniquely qualified as premium law-aware generalists. In my opinion, there is no better education to prepare for future business uncertainty.
> our graduates will be expected to be prepared to use them in legal practice.
But then why do I need a lawyer?
I do watch Travis's videos. Ever since he integrated AI,
the video quality dropped immensely and it became really
stupid, compared to his older videos. AI degraded the
quality and discussions he used to have with law enforcement
too, it's quite sad actually.
Problem is. The law isn't actually what is written. Lawyers aren't truthful or honest. Being a lawyer is just getting a licence to lie in court, and for some reason the judge takes it seriously.
Lawyers are going to use ai, because it's easy. The only time they won't is when the AI won't come up with a plausible enough excuse. The lawyer will always have a job, because a non lawyer using the same arguments will be ignored.
So these are rules to maintain the appearance that the system has integrity.
And that's the annoying thing. They know what integrity and justice and fairness look like, just as the rest of the justice system does, but they ignore it all.
At this point, it would be preferable for both sides to put their argument to an AI and let the AI decide what is fair. Wouldn't be any worse than judges who were themselves lawyers looking after their own.
Sorry for the rant, I've had experience of the 'justice' system.
I think this plan is really quite well-balanced and sane. Also kudos to UChicago Law School for including an actual implementation plan here, not just vague thoughts.
Some bits I found interesting:
[For required courses in year 1]
[For Legal Research & Writing year 1]
[Electives]
[Upper level writing]
These are the right bits to call out.
But the effect is to make success more dependent on networks. (If they are using AI as an excuse to make networks more relevant than skills, it relieves competitive pressure.)
First, a main draw of law journals is the filing cabinet of past exams as remembered by past students, available only to journal members i.e., friends of connected people. Reducing one's ability to remember what was in a lecture only increases the advantage insiders have.
Second, the "Socratic" Method for teaching law is nothing like it is in philosophy; it's more of a weird combination of hide-the-ball and distraction that again ensures people who can see through the clouds are using out-of-band information, and share it only with those they seek to enlist or join.
> all students will be required to engage in an oral discussion of their SRP with their supervising professor, in an in-person setting
I'm surprised anyone could get through otherwise. When did it become legitimate to dump your paper and not answer for it?
> Second, the "Socratic" Method for teaching law is nothing like it is in philosophy; it's more of a weird combination of hide-the-ball and distraction that again ensures people who can see through the clouds are using out-of-band information, and share it only with those they seek to enlist
How so? In my view, the socratic method is one of the few useful parts of law school. Most people, even quite smart people, think in a fuzzy way. Their ideas can seem superficially compelling in written form, but often fall apart when you start questioning their assumptions and chain of logical reasoning.
The biggest problem is that most law schools don’t use socratic method, because it’s a lot of work for teachers. Just cold calling a student and asking them to explain what happened in a case isn’t socratic method.
So, I graduated from law school 20 years ago, and -- given even the internet THEN, like, pdfs over mail -- that law journal filing cabinet thing was actually already dying; I had more than enough past history of outlines and stuff.
That all being said, I would be entirely unsurprised if the "mythology" of "YES the journals have the secret fancy sauce that no one else can get" lived on.
Also -- and I don't necessarily want to denigrate law school professors, it's another thing that's just gone on so long that "this is how we do it" -- yes, the law School "Socratic method" (at worst) is an effective form of possible professor laziness; they can just "ask questions about the cases" and not really teach.
Related to how law school "textbooks" aren't textbooks. They're literally just a bunch of cases slapped together with a tiny bit of commentary (unless that's maybe changed too, I hope?)
Again, not all professors, you CAN still teach very well under this framework. -- but it is an out for those fancy people who's forte isn't teaching.
All nice and all, but their grads will be wrecked by a street-wise guy with AI glasses (and eventually an implanted chip). There’s no competition in a machines vs humans match. It’s over. Of course these elite centers of knowledge want to keep the status quo, they base their entire existence on gate-keeping useful shit from the riff-raff. Well, fuck them.
Why would anyone hire an implanted chip that requires life support instead of just using the AI without the human middleman?
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A street wise moron used as a sort of meat puppet to carry a computer around that answers questions for him? What does that even mean practically? Won’t the graduates who learned how to think also have access, but then also be able to think for themselves too?
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As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week and most of them have 10-20 serious drafting errors on them. The most common ones are of the order of defining the same concept like 'a working day' in various conflicting ways without every specifying when which of the conflicting definitions should be used. Lawyers still have something to add to process but for every time they catch AI out on them, the machine is usually already 10-1 ahead.
> As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible
This is many people at many jobs. We continue to see this weird thing when AI comes into an industry that suddenly the product being produced by the people was perfect/amazing/whatever. Maybe that's true for the majority of HN who are lucky enough to work with experts in every field, but in the general population that's simply not the case.
Many doctors, lawyers, and programmers are not very good at their jobs - I've seen it first hand. AI gives the general population a way to steer around these people a bit, and maybe ask the right questions. Is it perfect? Nope, but it's often better than the people someone has access to.
The problem is that a layman has no way to know if what the llm told them is better than experts around them, or even just remotely correct. A wrong response and a correct, informative, helpful response look exactly the same, the LLM will express the same level of confidence and will defend them in both cases.
So, on one hand you can get an expert take that might be wrong, but is linked to an actual person, with a reputation and some level of ownership. On the other hand you have an over confident LLM that might be wrong and has no reputation, no ownership. How does that actually improve things compared to the older status quo?
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Remember the bell curve in grading? Yeah, most of the graduates from every school everywhere did NOT get straight A’s in their classes. On average, they are B students… at best. And half of them are worse than average.
> most human lawyers are absolutely terrible.
I think this extends to the other areas that AI is also disrupting.
Software engineers are also absolutely terrible: In being sloppy with handling errors, doing coercions, etc. All because always engineering after best practice simply takes too much time and mental load.
The real disruption from AI is likely that it does not get mentally fatigue. It can keep on, launch adversarial audits, make sure that everything is up to all standards.
> The real disruption from AI is likely that it does not get mentally fatigue
It's worse than mental fatigue. A friend had GLM 5.2 suddenly become dumb for hours. It started forgetting instructions, randomly inserted some bits in simplified chinese... Apparently throttled due to demand. there was tons of tokens left. (btw when your llm runs out of tokens is another example that's worse than fatigue)
A tired programmer usually knows he's tired (and can take a break) and fucks up in more expected ways
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But the real question is 1) whether other human lawyers would catch the error 2) in how much time 3) which of the errors introduced by AI vs. human would have bigger consequences. On 1 and 2 the answers are very likely to be "yes" and "it would take humans more time", but the question that really matters is 3.
Adversarial agents and reviews means 3 is very clearly giving the benefit to AI.
Let's face it, only thing lawyers are there for right now is to take liability. And even that may not be needed 5 years from now.
Middlemen that can be automated will be automated.
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Wonderful, I'm tired of lawyers. Happy to see that evolve and figure out how to provide actual value for its cost.
> most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week
I hope the irony is lost on no one that "Attention Is All You Need" was the paper that kicked the LLM boom off.
Part of the distinction between a how good one lawyer will be vs another is exactly that: attention to detail. And, as a trade, a practice, it seems like a skill that they try to hammer into the people who pursue this career (to varying degrees of success clearly).
It makes the last 20 years of leet code hiring look downright wrong. Your ability to recall what sorting algo to use, or solve some brain teaser conveys nothing about your ability to read (massive amounts) of code, and think critically about it.
Most people are terrible at what they do, period, regardless of profession.
I have the impression that most law firms consume and produce documentation by means of a cadre of paralegals who are minimally trained, minimally experienced, and maximally stressed by the pressure of deadlines and case loads. These paralegals are probably working to read hundreds of pages of legal filings and make sense out of them, and on the other end, they are working to produce as much documentation as possible and that's going to be by cut-and-paste assembly. So no, they are not going to understand stuff very well, and no, their output is not really going to be consistent or intelligible. But the managing attorneys depend on these paralegals to get anything done, just like Congresspeople rely on their staffers to actually read bills and draft legislation.
At the end of the day, I think these paralegals have been quite weak links, and nearly nobody will notice a difference in quality when it's all handed over to LLMs. But the paralegals will lose their jobs, and probably have nothing better to do than purchase angle grinders and cut down Flock camera poles, or crown the front hood of Waymos with a traffic pylon.
It's really the junior associates doing most of that grunt work. Paralegals in most firms have more limited responsibilities. Some work has already been handed over to LLMs but the job market for graduates of first-tier law schools remains strong.
I recent beat an actual lawyer as a pro se plaintiff in a civil suit. It was all codex and claude, using the cli agents to write the "import docx" scripts that wrote all the filings, and scripts to assemble exhibits. I don't know how long the bars will be able to hold onto their monopoly powers when confronted with LLMs that are measurably superior.
I've seen lawyers lose to non-lawyers who didn't use all that, just because the lawyers didn't do their work, thinking, no doubt, "I'm a lawyer I will just win", at any rate there is a well known aphorism that a lawyer who represents themselves has a fool for a client.
finally, was this thing you beat the actual lawyer at in their specific specialty, since lawyers are often focused on particular aspects of the law?
It was a condominium law specialized attorney representing a condominium association on a matter of condominium law.
> at any rate there is a well known aphorism that a lawyer who represents themselves has a fool for a client.
IME, many lawyers who represent others also have fools for clients.
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That's cool, but bear in mind that courts in the United States are generally required to be a little more lax in their enforcement of procedural rules when a party is pro se. Not saying you did make mistakes, but if you did, you may have gotten a pass.
Additionally, you haven't given any of the details of your case, so I'm going to assume you were simply in a position where the facts of your case weighed heavily in your substantive favor, and no amount of legal maneuvers by the defendant would have made a difference.
There's nothing magical about lawyers. They are mostly just boring, studious people who excelled in non-STEM academics and were good at memorization and test taking. If you have a strong case, it won't matter very much who the lawyer is on the other side.
I did make one or two procedural mistakes, including sending an email to the bailiff without copying the opposing counsel (ex parte). in another instance, the opposing counsel made a mistake of their own in following the specific judge's rules for listing working copies. I agree, the facts of the case did seem strong, but there was a matter of interpretation of the statute that could have gone against me.
Is it perhaps possible that you won your case because you didn't break the law, or conversely because the other party did break the law? Unless ChatGPT persuaded a judge to side in your favor even though you were legally in the wrong, this really doesn't tell us anything at all. (And even in that circumstance, it might speak more to the complete incompetence of the other party's legal representation.)
In my case, the defendant was indeed breaking the law, but it was a "new" law untested by case law, so it was somewhat risky how a judge would interpret it. The counsel of record for the defendant was bringing "recycled briefs" energy, possibly out of overconfidence.
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> I recent beat an actual lawyer as a pro se plaintiff in a civil suit.
So? I beat actual lawyers in trials and hearings five times between 2008 and 2019. That last one was actually a team of attorney + advocate (senior bar member).
You could always "beat" them just by reading and preparing. Now, you+AI beat a lawyer. Tomorrow, do you really think that you+AI will beat lawyer+AI?
And once we stop getting well-trained lawyers (because everyone is just a meatbag accessory to an AI), whether you win or not is likely to be a coin toss.
I would expect the future to be more like me+stockfish vs kasparov+stockfish, where the centaur part is completely superfluous. it would be a reverse centaur sort of thing where a human with legal personhood has to own the machine's output. The interesting question is whether judges or the bars manage to ban real time earpieces in lawyers that tell them exactly what to say. My case worked strictly by filings without a physical appearance, and I would have been quite disadvantage if it were otherwise.
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I'm sorry that I created a new account to not doxx myself. The number of bits of entropy of court cases in the US, in which a pro se plaintiff won, and has obviously written-by-codex legal filings, is not one I would sacrifice to identify my main account.
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I think more universities will follow. Every prof I speak to has noticed shorter attention spans, low effort LLM writing, and inability to assess competence.
It’s interesting to think that the “public speaking skills” aspect of some legal jobs will probably continue to be AI-proof for the indefinite future. No one is going to present ChatGPT on an iPad as their defense attorney.
On the other hand, the paperwork-first side of law is probably in for a tough future. Especially if your clients are not big corporations or rich celebrities.
In general I think my advice to young people is: focus on social skills, public speaking, etc. These are not going to be replaced by robots in your lifetime.
Even small corporations have a huge need for paperwork in terms of contract negotiation and redlining agreements. Some of this can be partially automated but the real value an experienced attorney brings is in knowing how those issues fit into the larger business context, and deciding what to press on or concede.
> No one is going to present ChatGPT on an iPad as their defense attorney.
That already happened! https://youtu.be/MkmfZPt-gaw?si=gk1k3sGsFq9npp0X
This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided.
Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree. But this is “just another an AI cycle” and if you’re a practitioner it does look different than the previous ones.
However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were massively impactful technologies.
What you are actively seeing happening now are institutions saying “we have to change the way that we practice” “the way that we did business before is no longer as applicable as it’s going to be changing very rapidly in the future and we’re going to have to deal with that.”
That is not coming from investors or technology companies. That is coming from people who are utilizing this stuff and being impacted by it
So it is absolutely the case that there’s going to be some kind of financial changes but just like every other AI cycle we are left with a aggressively more capable technology that is more pervasive.
Everybody needs to be taking that seriously.
AI is a real thing and it's the most significant development in the legal sector since the Internet. Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery, which before would've taken me the whole day. Even if it never gets any better it's a huge step forward. It's not only going to change legal education, it's going to change what the pipeline looks like in law firms. Similarly to the changes I expect to see in any kind of white collar job where AI replaces a lot of the data analysis/data transformation work, leaving people to do more human interaction.
> Similarly to the changes I expect to see in any kind of white collar job where AI replaces a lot of the data analysis/data transformation work, leaving people to do more human interaction.
Taking law as the example, I'm not sure I agree.
Legal is largely a distress purchase. Very few clients actually want to spend time interacting with outside corporate counsel, a divorce lawyer, a personal injury lawyer, etc.
The real value of an attorney is accountability. A person with a license and reputation who is on the hook for the advice they provide. But accountability is only worth buying if the judgment behind it is sound, and that judgment takes years to build.
The problem is that much of what makes a "good" lawyer comes from years of doing unglamorous work as a junior, financed by clients. If AI reduces the ability of firms to subsidize training the next generation of lawyers, you get fewer "good" lawyers and the whole market keeps eroding.
From what I've seen, the top AI models can now produce contracts that are on par with what I would have had to pay thousands of dollars for a decade ago, and the agents/chatbots are capable of collaborating with you to address fairly complex issues. If you have the money, you still run everything by a real attorney of course for the accountability piece, but the future is not bright for contract attorneys because people know even they're probably using AI to do half their work.
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> Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery
It might be worth distinguishing between LLMs as tools for fuzzy-searching hard facts, versus using them to craft logical arguments. [0] The risk-profile and verification difficulty are rather different.
[0] Or, more-precisely, using them to craft a pattern-fitting text artifact, which hopefully maps onto a sane concept when reinterpreted by a human.
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Indeed - it helps people become much more efficient. When it comes to law, that includes criminals as well. Whatever gains in efficiency happen on one side, they happen on the other too. Yes, everyone loves to say how they coded a cool side project in a day instead of a week, but what of the situation where AI is placed in a situation with two sides going against each other. The same old fight, but with better weapons.
I am at a company that currently has a whole bunch of lawyers, because we are dealing with multi-year >100s million infra projects.
One of the things that AI has helped with is automatic breech notifications. They are largely proforma, but depending on which generation of contract they are notifying from, subtle changes are needed.
Law is mostly highly structured text, and you know what loves highly structured and documented text? LLMs.
Legal LLMs do share the same issue with coding LLMs, they tend to default to lazy/insecure. Its not the case where you as a non-lawyer can prompt it to make a "water tight" contract from scratch.
> However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were massively impactful technologies.
How has crypto been massively impactful?
The only way crypto touches lawyers that I can think of is smart contracts, and that's been.. minimally impactful at most.
Crytobros gave us ransomware, industrialized pig butchering scams, billion-dollar heists, and arguably the second Trump presidency.
I'd say it's pretty impactful.
I should have used a different example there for sure. Cryptocurrency was impactful but not in the same way
The point I’m making is a financial bubble can burst while also massively changing the world
> However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet.
Yes they were. Educators have been talking about how access to the internet has affected their students learning since forever. We were cautioned and had dedicated classes to teach us to be critical of different sources, teaching us what Wikipedia could and could not be used for. The internet was deliberately turned off for our exams.
Crypto too was seen as culturally important, papers were written by otherwise well respected authors. We were expected to read some whitepapers about crypto. Interestingly, reading those papers only made us more sure it was a scam.
You're rewriting history to make this moment seem different, it is not.
Nobody uses crypto everyday
The bubble is about the market you wally not about whether statistical models are useful.
I wish people would stop being so dense.
> This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided.
A bubble doesn’t say anything about how useful the underlying technology is. We are in an AI bubble, in the sense that the allocated resources is completely out of line with the underlying businesses. AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble
> AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble
That’s not true. Apple alone is valued higher than the largest three AI companies combined.
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> Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree.
This is what people mean when they say it's a bubble.
This is a more reasoned take than most reactions to AI. But nobody wants to consider the possibility that maybe we won't actually need what was traditionally called lawyers in the mid/near term future; certainly before the new grad's careers are up.
I would never expect Harvard Law school to admit this, their hands are tied by many interests, but IMO they still aren't being pragmatic enough to evolve.
I would make the courses 50% AI based immediately, the other 50% being based on validating and applying the AI's work with traditional rigorous work. Anyone who rejects this should drop out, because they won't have a career anyway. And if Harvard Law disagrees then they can find out how meaningful their degrees are going to be in 10 years.
A related question for me is to ask when will lawmakers begin using AI to better integrate new law into the existing framework?
The posted article is about law school, but the comments are focusing on practice. These overlap but are not the same.
“Lawyer” is one of many possible career paths. Law graduates are uniquely qualified as premium law-aware generalists. In my opinion, there is no better education to prepare for future business uncertainty.
> our graduates will be expected to be prepared to use them in legal practice.
But then why do I need a lawyer?
I do watch Travis's videos. Ever since he integrated AI, the video quality dropped immensely and it became really stupid, compared to his older videos. AI degraded the quality and discussions he used to have with law enforcement too, it's quite sad actually.
https://www.youtube.com/@Exchange_IDs/videos
Problem is. The law isn't actually what is written. Lawyers aren't truthful or honest. Being a lawyer is just getting a licence to lie in court, and for some reason the judge takes it seriously.
Lawyers are going to use ai, because it's easy. The only time they won't is when the AI won't come up with a plausible enough excuse. The lawyer will always have a job, because a non lawyer using the same arguments will be ignored.
So these are rules to maintain the appearance that the system has integrity.
And that's the annoying thing. They know what integrity and justice and fairness look like, just as the rest of the justice system does, but they ignore it all.
At this point, it would be preferable for both sides to put their argument to an AI and let the AI decide what is fair. Wouldn't be any worse than judges who were themselves lawyers looking after their own.
Sorry for the rant, I've had experience of the 'justice' system.
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