[HN Gopher] Expert systems and the legal world
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Expert systems and the legal world
Author : rntn
Score : 75 points
Date : 2022-05-17 09:29 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (legaltechnology.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (legaltechnology.com)
| EarlKing wrote:
| Expert systems will be welcomed right up until the point where
| they start making the legal profession look incompetent. Vide
| what happened with MYCIN in the medical community if you need a
| refresher course on how this is going to go down.
| chartpath wrote:
| Maybe the new generation of young lawyers will be running
| virtual firms this way and serving a much higher volume of
| clients for cheaper. There is a huge untapped market of those
| who need services for black letter issues but can't afford it.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Expert systems tend not to scale very well. Once you get beyond
| $some_threshold rules, the decision algorithms get slow and the
| rules start conflicting with each other. What's needed is a meta-
| rule system that works during the knowledge capture phase to keep
| the rule set consistent.
|
| Lots of work was done on this problem in the late 80s/early 90s
| but I don't know what the current SOTA is since expert systems
| fell out of fashion. I'd expect it to be fairly straightforward
| to maintain a consistent rule base with modern computers that are
| 1000x bigger and faster than those of the 80s.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| The Rete algorithm used in OPS5 scales as O(N) where N is the
| number of rules - which is good.
|
| However, it scales as O(D^2) where D is the number of working
| memory facts.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > I'd expect it to be fairly straightforward to maintain a
| consistent rule base with modern computers that are 1000x
| bigger and faster than those of the 80s.
|
| Maybe not. Maybe they'll just be used to create a rule base
| that is 1000x bigger than those of the 80s, and you'll still
| have trouble maintaining consistency.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I think if the set of rules underpinning an expert system is
| explicitly written down and available to everyone, and if it is
| possible to appeal your decision and request a human review, I
| don't mind this.
| mannykannot wrote:
| That is a reasonable position, but I don't think things are
| likely to work out this way.
|
| Companies have various more-or-less self-serving reasons to
| keep their decision-making process hidden. They will persuade
| policy-makers that unless they are allowed to keep this
| information 'proprietary', then 'society' (read: themselves)
| will not be able to reap the benefits of this technology.
|
| The next step is that the cost of having humans resolve
| problems becomes 'prohibitive', so any meaningful process of
| redress is removed through the use of one-sided 'agreements.'
|
| Just look to the big social media companies and telcos to see
| what can happen when decision-making is automated.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'll trust expert systems when I have access to the documented
| source code of the decision making process after the fact. With
| modern AI, that's practically impossible because machine learning
| has replaced manual algorithms in this space ages ago.
|
| Even without AI, companies like these don't like to hand out
| their source code, so you wouldn't be able to trust them anyway.
| Programmers are not lawyers, no matter how hard we pretend to be
| sometimes, and unless every programmer on this project was also a
| judge I wouldn't trust it to advice or make any judgement. You're
| not going to find judges who happen to run a startup as a side-
| gig anyway, so let's just bin the idea.
|
| Automated systems are great at reducing the human factor in a lot
| of things. For stupid factory work where human minds can be put
| to much more useful tasks, that's great. For the legal system, no
| thank you.
| krageon wrote:
| > with modern AI
|
| Expert systems are classic AI, often with a rule engine
| underpinning it. It really could not be simpler in context and
| this is what makes them good. Everything is simple, the
| knowledge in it (i.e. the codified expert opinion) is what
| makes it what it is.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > I'll trust expert systems when I have access to the
| documented source code of the decision
|
| FWIW, that's precisely one of the things ES are designed to do,
| to backtrack and introspect, to explain their decision making.
|
| (I did a module on expert systems (blackboard models) back in
| 1988 when they were a hot topic)
| melony wrote:
| That only applies to tree search GOFAI expert systems. If
| somebody strings together one using for example a BERT model
| for the language generation and another neural network for
| the reasoning, then the guardrails are no longer in place.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If a neural network is doing the reasoning, is that still
| an "expert system" (as the term is used in AI)?
| eikenberry wrote:
| Then that is no longer an expert system. Expert systems are
| systems that capture the expertise of people in rule form,
| they are GOFAI by nature. If it is using neural networks
| instead it is not an expert system.
| posterboy wrote:
| uhm, there is source code to the networks, or where else do
| they come from?
|
| The problem is not the logic, but the shear size of it. That is
| not at all different from any sufficiently complex piece of
| software that allows side effects. And the comments can be
| totally useless or downright misleading anyway.
|
| Also, there may be persons who are professional in both
| programming and lawyering.
| t_mann wrote:
| Sounds like a mundane way of saying "let's create more templates
| so we can direct customer requests to callcenter agents who don't
| know anything about the enquiries they're dealing with (and
| probably even try to replace those humans with chat bots / online
| forms)". Perhaps being a bit cynical here, but I'm not really
| optimistic about the UX that's going to create for regular
| customers.
| netfl0 wrote:
| This is the current reality, except the templates are generated
| by ML, and they are impossible to debug or explain.
|
| The UX opportunity is how you apply information from the
| system. You can't just accept the output as it is.
| t_mann wrote:
| Templates generated by ML? Do you have any links to
| examples/explanations of how that works? I'm incredulous, why
| would one even think of doing that? The high frequency task
| is whatever the template is supposed to solve, not creating
| it. What would you even use to train the model (unless it's
| an OpenAI/DeepMind-level of general language model that can
| create a form from your verbal instructions, but talk about
| cracking nuts with sledgehammers)?
| igorkraw wrote:
| Might be a European perspective, but I wonder how much a "right
| to speak to a human" would improve Bit UX as a 2nd order
| effect. Like, after a certain amount of revenue, your 1st level
| support needs to be able to be able to( or forward you to
| someone who can) do every possible interaction that is possible
| on your system, within 5 or 10 minutes median waiting time,
| with some simplicity constraints on basic things like
| cancellation (including a ban on upselling, delays etc),
| written with a "spirit not letter" style like GDPR. Either make
| a very expensive callcenter or a good UX
| t_mann wrote:
| I think the problem there is that talking to a human per se
| doesn't help much, if said human isn't qualified (and that
| might be for reasons as simple as not speaking/understanding
| your language sufficiently). I've had interactions with human
| call center agents for things as simple as rebooking a flight
| that could have been taken straight out of a Kafka piece.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Yeah, first the human have to understand the problem. Then
| they must have capability and rights to solve it. Want to
| solve it might be less important. But the metrics driven
| environment we are means they sometimes aim is not to fix
| issue, just have it look right in metrics.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I watched documentary not so long ago, 500 years from now those
| systems will fire 100% of the soft drink company employees
| after the stock dropped to almost zero because some idiot
| decided that water is better for, well, watering plants. So as
| a society we can get quite some mileage out of them!
|
| Edit: Spelling, I suffer from severe fat finger syndrom which
| is compounded by typing specific legastenie.
| rmellow wrote:
| "documentary" is an interesting way to describe the plot of
| Idiocracy (2006)...
| aaron695 wrote:
| soapdog wrote:
| christkv wrote:
| Completely agree, hard no
| eru wrote:
| Any comment on why?
| coldtea wrote:
| Our experience with expert AI in other fields, from the
| Clippy to modern social media and government applications?
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Here's a question: instead of using expert systems to write a
| contract, could you just write a contract that refers to a form
| that can be filled out by someone without legal expertise?
|
| For instance, instead of using an expert system to generate a
| contract that says "Alice will pay Bob $2000 a month in rent,
| plus utilities," you could write a contract that says "The party
| listed on line 1 of the attached form will pay the party listed
| on line 2 of the form the amount listed on line 3 of the form; if
| the checkbox on line 4 of the form is checked, then the first
| party will also pay for utilities."
|
| Then the attached form could look something like this:
|
| 1. Name of tenant: _______
|
| 2. Name of landlord: ______
|
| 3. Amount of rent: $_____
|
| 4. [ ] Check here if tenant pays for utilities
|
| That solution would seem to be much more efficient and
| transparent than using an expert system; essentially, the
| "templating" is being done by the judges and/or lawyers _reading_
| the contract, not by an expert system _writing_ one.
|
| Edit: of course any such contract might contain a lot of
| "conditional logic" that would only apply in very specific
| circumstances and thus would prove irrelevant for most users. But
| although the contract would be long, you'd only need to write it
| once, and there would only be one copy to maintain.
| citizenkeen wrote:
| This is why I left the legal profession. I was working for the
| in-house legal department for a very, very large athletic shoe
| company, and they had a team working downstairs on automated
| contract drafting. The company is big enough that they wanted
| managers to be able to do things like leases without consulting
| the lawyers. Some sales person would go to a factory outlet
| mall outside of Cleveland, negotiate for a lease, and rather
| than run the lease by legal or get legal to draft it, they'd
| just use a giant web form to generate the lease. The software
| would be able to parse terms added by the other party and
| associate a "risk" that may or may not necessitate the
| involvement of a human.
|
| Since writing contracts was my favorite part of practicing law,
| I saw that staring at me for a year and noped out. I'm a
| software developer now, and so much happier.
| allan_s wrote:
| You've described exactly what the company where I was
| previously working was doing in france for small company owners
| legalstart.fr
|
| basically you answers a questionnaire (with conditions betweens
| questions like "ask this question only if A and B are both
| physical person with revenue < 20000 euros a years")
|
| and at the end these answers are used to generate a template
| (with things like "put this paragraph as many times as they are
| people involved" )
|
| the templates and questionnaires were made once (and updated
| every once in a while when law changed) by a specialist.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Instead of using templates to generate a contract based on
| questionnaire answers, my idea is to use a _single_ unaltered
| contract that refers to the questionnaire answers provided as
| a separate document.
|
| One could even imagine those "universal contracts" being
| open-source, if you could find a business model.
| sithadmin wrote:
| IANAL (but spend a lot more time than I would prefer
| writing and reviewing contracts)...but I don't think your
| proposal would work in the US. I believe your additional
| 'document' would have to be structured as an addendum,
| which in itself is a sort of contract and technically free-
| standing from the main/original document. But in this case
| the original contract wouldn't be valid, because it
| wouldn't have any specific terms relevant to an agreement
| between parties, and AFAIK you can't render an invalid or
| unenforceable contract valid through addendum.
|
| What you're proposing also bucks 100+ years of legal
| writing tradition (both in US and Europe), which itself is
| _very_ poorly received by attorneys and judges.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Lawyer here.
|
| I've seen B2B contracts like the kind proposed above (the
| terms as a form attached to a pre-existing contract).
| They've been a thing for decades; they're just very
| uncommon and usually aren't used until the businesses
| already have a pre-existing contractual relationship.
|
| Generally, the integration clause is uncommon in the
| contracts I've seen; it's used in big-ticket contracts
| (like M&A) but not so much in day-to-day contracts where
| friction can kill a transaction.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| IANAL also, but: IIRC contracts typically have an
| "integration clause" that specifies that the contract
| constitutes the entirety of the agreement between the two
| parties. Couldn't the integration clause instead specify
| that the contract, _as combined with_ the additional
| document into a single whole, constitute the agreement?
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integration_clause
| dctoedt wrote:
| See my comment just above yours, concerning
| "incorporation by reference" (with a link).
| calny wrote:
| Lawyer here also (though not actively practicing) and I
| agree with your thoughtful comment about. I've negotiated
| lots of commercial agreements, and it's surprising that
| lawyers still spend time redlining basic things like
| severance clauses, integration clauses, etc. There's no
| real benefit from much of the back-and-forth. It'd be
| great to have trusted, open source "standard legalese"
| terms. That way the parties could focus on the contract's
| meaningful parts and say something like "This Agreement
| incorporates by reference the Standard Legal Terms at
| xyzterms.org." And of course you could have different
| versions for various states and industries.
| szermer wrote:
| When I did paralegal work in NY, we often used Blumberg
| Forms and just assumed that it covered our needs.
|
| https://www.blumberg.com/forms/
| dctoedt wrote:
| > * It'd be great to have trusted, open source "standard
| legalese" terms.*
|
| Working on it :)
| dctoedt wrote:
| Lawyer here: It's not unusual to have "master agreements"
| -- either negotiated between two specific parties OR
| agreed to as industry standards -- that are "customized"
| by agreeing to a schedule, a purchase order, or a work
| order. Technically, the schedule/PO/WO is the contract,
| and it incorporates the master agreement by reference.
|
| Example: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/isda-
| master-agreement.a... (master agreement for derivatives
| trading)
|
| More discussion of two-party master agreements:
| https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-
| Draftin... (my course materials)
|
| Incorporation by reference:
| https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-
| Draftin... (ditto)
| codatory wrote:
| Yeah; IANAL but I've spent a lot of time writing
| contracts for a specific vertical that have been reviewed
| by several lawyers, and I always built my contracts in
| this same structure. There would be a MSA that governs
| the overall relationship -- sets a baseline for what
| things cost and what their conditions are, and then there
| would be various contracts that would include the MSA by
| reference for enhanced or fixed-rate services.
|
| Everyone preferred this structure that I dealt with,
| because the total length of the contracts were
| dramatically shorter and the structure was much easier to
| read and comprehend.
| sithadmin wrote:
| What's being proposed here seemed so odd, structurally
| speaking, that I didn't even consider it analogous to a
| master agreement + follow-on contract structure. I'm not
| sure the analogy is totally a fit - a master agreement
| should itself be a freestanding, valid contract, no? But
| in this case the 'base' document is incomplete and
| invalid.
|
| I suppose one could just add the addendum of specific
| terms at the end of the document and both parties sign
| off on everything in one go, but I certainly wouldn't
| want to test it in court.
| krageon wrote:
| > 100+ years of legal writing tradition
|
| If tradition keeps us from inventing something better for
| normal human beings, it's called oppression and/or rent-
| seeking.
| sithadmin wrote:
| The issue here is that jurisprudence heavily depends upon
| established precedents that hinge on particular logical
| and semantic structures present in legal texts. The more
| you deviate from the norm, the more likely you are to end
| up in court due to disagreements over interpretation.
| Safer to stick to what has already has a consensus behind
| it.
| gadders wrote:
| Maybe in the case where one party has more power than the
| other EG If you want to rent this house, take it or leave
| it.
|
| Having been involved in Legal blacklining pissing matches
| before, probably not between two equal parties. I think the
| legal terms are as much as a part of the negotiation as the
| price - "If you want to be indemnified against X, we will
| have to hire a team to do Y and that will cost an extra $Z"
| "You want to use our name in publicity, that means we pay
| Q% less" etc etc.
| [deleted]
| jonas21 wrote:
| Isn't this basically how every lease is already written?
| Nobody's writing a new contract for each tenant - you just fill
| in the blanks.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Aren't most residential real estate contracts already done this
| way? There are standardized forms that are recognized as legal
| within your state (or maybe within all states). This lets an
| agent draw up a legally binding contract for a transaction
| that's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, without needing
| lawyers.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| You might enjoy the writings of /dev/lawer
| https://writing.kemitchell.com/
|
| He wishes to create such forms, and created PolyForm to try and
| do so.
|
| https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/06/23/PolyForm-Commercia...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| When I worked for the Danish and Swedish division of Thompson
| Reuters WestLaw we had a product named Pacta that lawyers used
| to generate all sorts of contracts that operated on this
| principle. I have to assume that other parts of the WestLaw
| platform internationally, and other services like Lexis-Nexis,
| must provide similar functionality. It is, after all, not too
| difficult a thing to do.
|
| When I left (2013) a project was underway to add lots of
| functionality to it. Not sure what the current status is if
| any.
| bob1029 wrote:
| In banking, this is pretty much how everything works.
|
| There are vendors who took this one step further. They define a
| document "contract" which is populated with the raw business
| data and other important facts regarding the context of the
| transaction. You send this XML into their system and it will
| dynamically construct the required document based upon the
| inputs and send back the final PDF. Documents produced in this
| manner usually require far fewer printed/imaged pages,
| especially when working with business customers and complex
| retirement accounts that require volumes of potentially
| inapplicable disclosures.
|
| We have also hand-rolled a lot of this kind of stuff in-house
| for our customers using HTML templating and PDF conversion.
| That said, anything that needs to stand up in court comes from
| one of 2 legal document vendors and we are required to use it
| pretty much as-is.
| sithadmin wrote:
| In the US, what you're suggesting is more or less how the
| majority contracts are written, but rather than using a
| separate form, specific parties, objects, etc. are defined and
| indicated by a generic term used for the remainder of the text.
| Law firms and corporations generally maintain a library of
| templates for use.
| jasonhansel wrote:
| Indeed. What I'm suggesting just amounts to taking that
| approach to its limits, by putting the "definitions" into a
| separate document and having the contract contain
| conditionals that depend on that document.
| PatentlyDC123 wrote:
| +1. Many times the real value an attorney brings is working
| with the client to tailor the template to their situation and
| needs. Most parties try to mainly use standard terms, e.g.,
| shipping Incoterms, and language that has been litigated in
| case law (if in the US) so that the parties can better
| understand and estimate the likely outcome of any dispute.
| However, each situation is usually slightly different. Even
| if we ignored any unique aspects of each contract, each
| template would have to be tweaked to reflect the unique and
| changing case law (if in the US) of the jurisdiction
| governing the contract.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| So in other words, you just want to use a standardized legal
| template?
|
| Yes, you can do that. People have been doing that for decades.
| Pretty much every major lease or purchase agreement you or your
| parents have made in the past 4 or 5 decades has used a
| standardized legal template.
|
| Note that these templates have the variable fields in-line; if
| you want to do it as a separate document as proposed, you would
| need to do that as an attachment or exhibit to the original
| underlying contract. The former is generally required for
| contracts between businesses and individuals; the latter is
| uncommon but is used for B2B contracts.
|
| Generally, if there is a significant amount of conditional
| logic, you would need/want to split that out as a separate
| (possibly standardized) contract addressing those particular
| logical conditions. But note that plenty of standardized
| contracts have conditional blocks that affect the selection of
| a particular term of the contract (i.e., amount of monthly
| payment, points paid, choice of extended warranty, etc.).
| rmellow wrote:
| Ontario uses exactly this system in it's standard rental
| agreement contracts.
| z3c0 wrote:
| They do exist already, just not as widespread as I imagine the
| author is hoping to see. I work for one of the only software
| vendors in the space. One place where I've seen an expert system
| excel greatly is in automated billing resolution. Legal bills are
| often handled by third parties who maintain the billing contracts
| between a law firm and it's hiring party (who are often just
| other lawyers). What can and can't be billed for is usually
| determined by an exhaustive set of rules defined in the contract,
| and invoices are usually fed into a variety of out-of-date web
| forms. The task isn't cut-and-dry enough to automate via ML,
| other than small NLP tasks, so the system relies on a long list
| of hard-coded conditions managed by a swarm of bots that fail
| quickly and loudly to call out entry errors.
|
| It sounds messy, but it works very well, and the errors aren't
| muddied by a black box.
| jansommer wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, may I ask what language/system those
| rules are written in?
| [deleted]
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I was disappointed that the article didn't mention which tools
| were used. In the 1980s I did a lot of hacking on OPS5,
| specifically modifying the Rete Network for multiple data worlds,
| etc. I really enjoyed that but in present time most of my work
| experience is in deep learning. I am keenly interested in hybrid
| AI.
| coldtea wrote:
| Let's not.
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