Comment by chadash
11 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.
> Meanwhile, any half-decent employment attorney would probably laugh at me if I asked them to redline an employment offer from the State Department.
That might not be due to the contents but rather due to the fact that they won't negotiate I'd presume
"the hierarchy of knowledge", right. A bad or insecure speaker will ramble about insubstantial minutae whilst a good one will get straight to the key points that form an argument. Basically the confidence to prioritise information.
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).
YAGNI isn't just for software.