Comment by gamblor956
1 day ago
Lawyer, accountants, doctors, architects, and engineers won't be replaced.
We're not paid just for what we do, we get paid because we accept liability for our mistakes. Professional liability insurance is a large part of why licensed professionals charge so much money for their services.
If a lawyer can just sign off of a lot of basic inquries with just reading and approving, you will need less.
If a lawyer needs less people preparing everything, the industry will also shrink.
Lawyer as SaaS companies will just introduce some insurance and will clean up from the bottom until AI can do all of it.
We will see if we will have one expert ai lawyer per topic or type of lawsuite or if they will get generic good enough that it will not matter.
Even people defending or suing by (successful) themselves became a thing already last year.
A lawyer can't just sign off on basic inquiring with "just reading". They're legally obligated to actually review the response and verify the answer (including any citations or references).
Lawyers already need less people to prepare things. That revolution happened several decades ago when computers and word processors became normal.
Lawyers as SaaS companies has been a thing for 2 decades, and remains a tiny niche of the market because it's not the kind of lawyering most clients need. A lawyer SaaS is basically just the equivalent of an underpaid, underresourced public defender and will yield about the same quality of work and results.
We will see if we will have one expert ai lawyer per topic or type of lawsuite or if they will get generic good enough that it will not matter
LLMs are only as good as their training set. In order to be a topic expert, they'd have to be retrained at least every week to account for changes in statutory law and case law. It would be trivial for a human lawyer to outmanuever an outdated LLM when the laws changed...and in the real world this happens all the time between human lawyers when one side hasn't done its research on changes to the applicable laws.
Even people defending or suing by (successful) themselves became a thing already last year.
People successfully defending or suing without a lawyer has been a thing for over a century. It's fewer than 0.1% of legal proceedings. Most people don't handle their own legal cases for the same reason most people hire a plumber, or electrician, or order DoorDash instead of cooking their own dinner. Also...almost all of the people using LLMs in the past 2 years lost their cases, because their LLMs hallucinated laws or facts and they didn't know enough to catch it. Even lawyers dumb enough to use LLMs to draft their documents got caught because they were too lazy to review the output. Courts were willing to forgive those mistakes a few years ago before it was common knowledge that LLMs make things up, but now they're no longer willing to give the benefit of the doubt.
The biggest advantage of an LLM is the interface and reading text.
Whatever we had before on full text search, LLMs are a lot better. And i'm not just feeling this, i read plenty of articles about exactly this.
A LLM doesn't need to be retrained every week, it needs to have a base corpus of the field and strategies on how to find current text. They will load it into context and argue.
Then another LLM will take this and formats it for the court.
We will see but i think you overestimate how much automatisation and co current lawyers have and use.
... accountants ... won't be replaced.
Mine already has been.
You'll be going back to a human when the IRS audits you and you owe them a few thousand in back taxes.
When's the last time someone making this sort of argument turned out to be right?