[HN Gopher] Better Call GPT: Comparing large language models aga...
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Better Call GPT: Comparing large language models against lawyers
[pdf]
Author : vinnyglennon
Score : 289 points
Date : 2024-02-06 15:04 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| crakenzak wrote:
| This is one of the domains I'm very very excited about for LLMs
| to help me with. In 5-10 years (even though this research paper
| makes me feel its already here), I would feel very confident
| chatting for a few hours with a "lawyer" LLM that has access to
| all my relevant taxes/medical/insurance/marriage documents and
| would be able to give me specialized advice and information
| without billing me $500 an hour.
|
| A wave of (better) legally informed common-person is coming, and
| I couldn't be more excited!
| OldOneEye wrote:
| I wouldn't blindly trust what the LLM says, but I take it that
| it would be mostly right, and that would give me at the very
| least explorable vocabulary that I can expand on my own, or
| keep grilling it about.
|
| I've already used some LLMs to ask questions about licenses and
| legal consequences for software related matters, and it gave me
| a base, without having to involve a very expensive professional
| into it for what are mostly questions for hobby things I'm
| doing.
|
| If there was a significant amount of money involved in the
| decision, though, I will of course use the services of a
| professional. These are the kinds of topics you can't be
| "mostly right".
| nprateem wrote:
| The only problems are it could be convincingly wrong about
| anything it tells you and isn't liable for its mistakes.
| sonofaragorn wrote:
| What if they were liable? Say the company that offers the
| LLM lawyer is liable. Would that make this feasible? In
| terms of being convincingly wrong, it's not like lawyers
| never make mistakes...
| giantg2 wrote:
| "What if they were liable?"
|
| They'd be sued out of existence.
|
| "In terms of being convincingly wrong, it's not like
| lawyers never make mistakes..."
|
| They have malpractice insurance, they can potentially
| defend their position if later sued, and most importantly
| they have the benefit of appeal to authority
| image/perception.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| All right, what if legal GPTs had to carry malpractice
| insurance? Either they give good advice, or the insurance
| rates will drive them out of business.
|
| I guess you'd have to have some way of knowing that the
| "malpractice insurance ID" that the GPT gave you at the
| start of the session was in fact valid, and with an
| insurance company that had the resources to actually
| cover if needed...
| kulikalov wrote:
| It's funny how any conversation ends with this question
| unanswered.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Weirdly HN is full of anti AI people who just refuses to
| discuss the point that is being discussed and goes into
| all the same argument of wrong answer that they got some
| time. And then they present anecdotal evidence as truth,
| while there is no clear evidence if AI lawyer has more or
| less chance to be wrong than human. Surely AI could
| remember more and has been shown to clear bar
| examination.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "while there is no clear evidence if AI lawyer has more
| or less chance to be wrong than human."
|
| In the tests they are shown to be pretty close. The point
| I made wasn't about more mistakes, but about other
| factors influencing liability and how it would be worse
| for AI than humans at this point.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| You'd require them to carry liability insurance (this is
| usually true for meat lawyers as well), which basically
| punts the problem up to "how good do they have to be to
| convince an insurer to offer them an appropriate amount
| of insurance at a price that leaves the service
| economically viable?"
| kulikalov wrote:
| Given orders of magnitude better cost efficiency, they
| will have plenty of funds to lure in any insurance firm
| in existence. And then replace insurance firms too.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| This is an area for further development and thought...
|
| If a LLM can pass the bar, and has a corpus of legal work
| instantly accessible, what prevents the deployment of the
| LLM (or other AI structure) to provide legitimate legal
| services?
|
| If the AI is providing legal services, how do we assign
| responsibility for the work (to the AI, or to its owner)?
| How to insure the work for Errors and Omissions?
|
| More practically, if willing to take on responsibility for
| yourself, is the use of AI going to save you money?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| A human that screws up either too often or too
| spectacularly can be disbarred, even if they passed the
| bar. They can also be sued. If a GPT screws up, it could
| in theory be disbarred. But you can't sue it for damages,
| and you can't tell whether the same model under a
| different name is the next legal GPT you consult.
| nprateem wrote:
| Re your first point: it's not conscious. It has no
| understanding. It's perfectly possible the model could
| successfully answer an exam question but fail to reach
| the same or similar conclusion when it has to reason it's
| own way there based on information provided.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Careful, there are plenty of True Believers on this
| website who really think that these "guess the next word"
| machines really do have consciousness and understanding.
| lewhoo wrote:
| I incline towards you on the subject but if you call it
| guessing you open yourself up to all sorts of rebuttals.
| boplicity wrote:
| The obvious intermediate step is that you add an actual
| expert into the workflow, in terms of using LLMs for this
| purpose.
|
| Basically, add a "validate" step. So, you'd first chat with
| the LLM, create conclusions, then vet those conclusions
| with an expert specially trained to be skeptical of LLM
| generated content.
|
| I would be shocked if there aren't law agencies that aren't
| already doing something exactly like this.
| thallium205 wrote:
| I wouldn't blindly trust what a lawyer says either so there's
| no difference there.
| brk wrote:
| Sure, but you have a lot less personal risk following
| advice from a lawyer vs. advice from an LLM.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| When your GPT is wrong, you will be laughed out of the
| room and sanctioned.
|
| When your attorney is wrong, you get to point at the
| attorney and show a good faith effort was made.
|
| Hacks are fun, just keep in mind the domain you're
| operating in.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "When your attorney is wrong, you get to point at the
| attorney and show a good faith effort was made."
|
| And possibly sue their insurance to correct their
| mistakes.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Indeed. People forget that the system is built around
| checks and balances as well as recourse. The real world
| is not a runtime running your code.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| But you'll have to find a lawyer that specializes in
| suing lawyers and their own malpractice plans.
|
| Maybe that's where legal AI will find the most demand.
| kulikalov wrote:
| Can't a tech firm running a "legal gpt" have an
| insurance?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Do they have a license to practice law?
| giantg2 wrote:
| No. Malpractice insurance would be at the professional
| level. There could be lawyers using a legal chatGTP, but
| the professional liabilities would still be with the
| licensed professional.
| kulikalov wrote:
| Well, I guess since it's not "practice" we gonna call it
| "mal-inference insurance".
| freejazz wrote:
| More legal malpractice? No, because they aren't attorneys
| and you cannot rely upon them for legal advice such that
| they'd be liable to you for providing subpar legal
| advice.
| kulikalov wrote:
| Why? Because there's no word for "insurance of AI advise
| accuracy"? The whole point of progress is that we create
| something that is not a thing at the moment.
| freejazz wrote:
| No, because, like I said, GPTs are not legally allowed to
| represent individuals, so they cannot obtain malpractice
| insurance. You can make up an entirely ancillary kind of
| insurance. It does not change the fact that GPTs are not
| legally allowed to represent clients, so they cannot be
| liable to clients for legal advice. Seeing as how you
| think GPTs are so useful here... why are you asking me
| these questions when a GPT should be perfectly capable of
| providing you with the policy considerations that
| underline attorney licensing procedures.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That was the point of my comment - no ability to collect
| the insurance.
| InsomniacL wrote:
| What about if your lawyer is using chatgpt? :D
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/06/08/law
| yer...
| mannykannot wrote:
| I like the term "explorable vocabulary." I can see using LLMs
| to get an idea of what the relevant issues are before I
| approach a professional, without assuming that any particular
| claim in the model's responses is correct.
| chaxor wrote:
| I don't understand how everyone keeps making this mistake
| over and over. They explicitly just said "in 5-10 years".
|
| So many people continually use arguments that revolve around
| 'I used it once and it wasn't the best and/or me things up',
| and imply that this will always be the case.
|
| There are many solutions already for knowledge editing, there
| are many solutions for improving performance, and there will
| very likely continue to be many improvements across the board
| for this.
|
| It took ~5 years from when people in the NLP literature
| noticed BERT and knew the powerful applications that were
| coming, until the public at large was aware of the
| developments via ChatGPT. It may take another 5 before the
| public sees the developments happening now in the literature
| hit something in a companies web UI.
| mjr00 wrote:
| on the other hand the rate of change isn't constant and
| there isn't a guarantee that the incredible progress in the
| past ~2 years in the LLM/diffusion/"AI" space will
| continue. As an example, take computer gaming graphics;
| compare the evolution between Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and
| Quake 3 Arena (1999), which is an absolute quantum leap.
| Now compare Resident Evil 7 (2017) and Alan Wake 2 (2023)
| and it's an improvement but nowhere near the same scale.
|
| We've already seen a fair bit of stagnation in the past
| year as ChatGPT gets progressively worse as the company is
| more focusing on neutering results to limit its exposure to
| legal liability.
| GaggiX wrote:
| >ChatGPT gets progressively worse
|
| https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmsys/chatbot-arena-
| leaderboar..., In blinded human comparisons, newer models
| perform better than older ones.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| That website doesn't load for me but anyone who uses
| ChatGPT semi regularly can see that it's getting steadily
| worse if you ever ask for anything that begins to border
| risque. It has even refused to provide me with things
| like bolt torque specs because of risk.
| GaggiX wrote:
| It could be a bias, that's why we do blinded comparisons
| for a more accurate rating. If we have to consider my
| opinion, since I use it often, then no, it hasn't gotten
| worse over time.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Well I can't load that website so I can't assess their
| methodology. But I am telling you it is objectively worse
| for me now. Many others report the same.
|
| Edit - the website finally loaded for me and while their
| methodology is listed, the actual prompts they use are
| not. The only example prompt is "correct grammar: I are
| happy". Which doesn't do anything at all to assess what
| we're talking about, which is ChatGPT's inability to deal
| with subjects which are "risky" (where "risky" is defined
| as "Americans think it's icky to talk about").
| GaggiX wrote:
| There is no selected prompt, humans ask the models
| (blindly) some questions in a chat and then select the
| best one for them.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Worse is really subjective. More limited functionality
| with a specific set of topics? Sure. More difficult to
| trick to get around said topic bans? Sure.
|
| Worse overall? You can use chatgpt 4 and 3.5 side by side
| and see an obvious difference.
|
| Your specific example seems fairly reasonable. Is there
| liability in saying x bolt can handle y torque if that
| ended up not being true? I don't know. What is that bolt
| causes an accident and someone dies? I'm sure a lawyer
| could argue that case if ChatGPT gave a bad answer.
| ufmace wrote:
| I'm not so sure that truth and trustability is something we
| can just hand-wave away as something they'll sort out in
| just a few more years. I don't think a complex concept like
| whether or not something is actually true can be just
| tacked onto models whose core function is to generate what
| they think the next word of a body of text is most likely
| to be.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| > It took ~5 years from when people in the NLP literature
| noticed BERT and knew the powerful applications that were
| coming, until the public at large was aware of the
| developments via ChatGPT. It may take another 5 before the
| public sees the developments happening now in the
| literature hit something in a companies web UI.
|
| It also may take 10, 20, 50, or 100 years. Or it may never
| actually happen. Or it may happen next month.
|
| The issue with predicting technological advances is that no
| one knows how long it'll take to solve a problem until it's
| actually solved. The tech world is full of seemingly
| promising technologies that never actually materialized.
|
| Which isn't to say that generative AI won't improve. It
| probably will. But until those improvements actually
| arrive, we don't know what those improvements will be, or
| how long it'll take. Which ultimately means that we can
| only judge generative AI based on what's actually
| available. Anything else is just guesswork.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I wonder could GPTs come up with legal loopholes. Like they
| are expected to come up with security vulnerabilities
| XCSme wrote:
| Or a LLM that helps you spend less. Imagine a LLM that goes
| over all your spending, knows all the current laws, benefits,
| organizations, promotional campaigns, and suggests (or even
| executes) things like changing electricity provider, insurance
| provider, buying stuff in bulk from a different shop that you
| get for 4x the price at your local store, etc.
| OldOneEye wrote:
| I love this idea. It would be incredibly useful!
|
| I feel LLMs are great at suggestions that you follow up
| yourself (if only for sanity checking, but nothing you
| wouldn't do with a human too).
| Solvency wrote:
| This does not make sense to me. ChatGPT is completely nerfed to
| the point where it's either been conditioned or trained to
| provide absolutely zero concrete responses to anything. All it
| does is provide the most baseline, generic possible response
| followed by some throwaway recommendation to seek the advice of
| an actual expert.
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| The way to get around this is to have it "quote" or at least
| try to quote from input documents. Which is why RAG became so
| popular. Sure, it won't right you a contract, but it will
| read one back to you if you've provided one in your prompt.
|
| In my experience, this does not get you close to what the
| top-level comment is describing. But it gets around the
| "nerfing" you describe
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| It's very easy to get ChatGPT to provide legal advice based
| on information fed in the prompt. OpenAI is not censoring
| legal advice anywhere near as hard as they are censoring
| politics or naughty talk.
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| I think a lot of startups are working on exactly what you are
| describing, and honestly, I wouldn't hold my breath. Everyone
| is still bound by token limits and the two best approaches for
| getting around them are RAG and Knowledge-Graphs, both of which
| could get you close to what you describe but not close enough
| to be useful (IMO).
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| We are literally building this today!
|
| Our core business is legal document generation (rule based
| logic, no AI). Since we already have the users' legal documents
| available to us as a result of our core business, we are
| perfectly positioned to build supplementary AI chat features
| related to legal documents.
|
| We recently deployed a product recommendation AI to prod
| (partially rule based, but personalized recommendation texts
| generated by GPT-4). We are currently building AI chat features
| to help users understand different legal documents and our
| services. We're intending to replace the first level of
| customer support with this AI chat (and before you get upset,
| know that the first level of customer support is currently a
| very bad rule-based AI).
|
| Main website in Finnish: https://aatos.app (also some services
| for SE and DK, plus we recently opened UK with just a e-sign
| service)
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Here's an example of what our product recommendations look
| like:
|
| _Given your ownership in a company and real estate, a
| lasting power of attorney is a prudent step. This allows you
| to appoint PARTNER_NAME or another trusted individual to
| manage your business and property affairs in the event of
| incapacitation. Additionally, it can also provide tax
| benefits by allowing tax-free gifts to your children, helping
| to avoid unnecessary inheritance taxes and secure the
| financial future of your large family._
| Closi wrote:
| > Since we already have the users' legal documents available
| to us as a result of our core business, we are perfectly
| positioned to build supplementary AI chat features related to
| legal documents.
|
| Uhh... What are the privacy implications here?!
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| If you look at the example I posted of our product
| recommendations, you will see that the GPT-4 generated text
| contains "PARTNER_NAME" instead of actual partner name.
| That's because we've created anonymized dataset from users
| in such a way that it's literally impossible for OpenAI to
| deanonymize users. Of course the same can not be done if we
| want to provide a service where users can, for example,
| chat with their legal documents. In that case we will have
| to send some private details to OpenAI. Not sure how that
| will pan out (what details we decide to send and what we
| decide not to send).
|
| In any case, all startups today are created on top of a
| mountain of cloud services. Any one of those services can
| leak private user data as a result of outsider hack or
| insider attack or accident. OpenAI is just one more cloud
| service on top of the mountain.
| nicce wrote:
| So, let's say that the chat will work as well as the real
| lawyer some day.
|
| If the current pricing would be $500 an hour for a real
| lawyer, and at some point your costs are just keeping
| services up and running, how big cut will you take? Because
| it is enough if you are only a little cheaper than the real
| lawyer to win customers.
|
| There is an upcoming monopoly problem, if the users get the
| best information from the service after they submit all their
| documents. And soon the normal lawyer might be competitive
| enough. I fear that the future is in the parent commenter's
| open platfrom with open models and the businesses should
| extract money from some other use cases, while for a while,
| you get money momentarily based on the typical "I am first, I
| have the user base" situation. It is interesting to see what
| will happen to lawyers.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > If the current pricing would be $500 an hour for a real
| lawyer, and at some point your costs are just keeping
| services up and running, how big cut will you take?
|
| Zero. We're providing the AI chat for free (or free for
| customers who purchase something from us, or some mix of
| those 2 choices). Our core business is generating documents
| for people, and the AI chat is supplementary to the core
| business.
|
| It sounds like you're approaching the topic with the
| mindset that lawyers might be entirely replaced by
| automation. That's not what we're trying to do. We can
| roughly divide legal work into 3 categories:
|
| 1. Difficult legal work which requires a human lawyer to
| spend time on a case by case basis (at least for now).
|
| 2. Cookie cutter legal work that is often done by a human
| in practice, but can be automated by products like ours.
|
| 3. Low value legal issues that people have and would like
| to resolve, but are not worth paying a lawyer for.
|
| We're trying to supply markets 2 and 3. We're not trying to
| supply market 1.
|
| For example, you might want a lawyer to explain to you what
| is the difference between a joint will and an individual
| will in a particular circumstance. But it might not be
| worth it to pay a lawyer to talk it through. This is
| exactly the type of scenario where an AI chat can resolve
| your legal question which might otherwise go unanswered.
| nicce wrote:
| > It sounds like you're approaching the topic with the
| mindset that lawyers might be entirely replaced by
| automation.
|
| That is the cynical future, however, and based on the
| evolution speed of the last year, it is not too far away.
| We humans are just interfaces for information and logic.
| If the chatbot has the same capabilities (both
| information and logic, and _natural language_ ), then
| they will provide full automation.
|
| The natural language aspect of AI is the revolutionary
| point, less about the actual information they provide.
| Quoting Bill Gates here, like the GUI was revolutionary.
| When everyone can interact and use something, it will
| remove all the experts that you needed before as middle
| man.
| nostromo wrote:
| And not just legal either.
|
| I uploaded all of my bloodwork tests and my 23andme data to
| Chat GPT and it was better at analyzing it than my doctor was.
| slingnow wrote:
| This is a really interesting use case for me. I've been
| envisioning a specially trained LLM that can give useful
| advice or insights that your average PCP might gloss over or
| not have the time to investigate.
|
| Did you do anything special to achieve this? What were the
| results like?
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| I will reserve judgment of the possibilities of LLMs as applied
| to the legal field until they are tested on something other than
| Document/ contract review. Contract review is, in the large
| business law case, often done by outsourcing to hundreds of
| recent graduates and act more like proof reading with minimal
| application of actual lawyering skills to increase a
| corporation's bottom line.
|
| The more common, for individual purchasers of legal services,
| lawyering is going to be family law matters, criminal law
| matters, and small claims court matters. I can not see a time in
| the near future where an LLM can handle the fact specific and
| circumstantial analysis required to handle felony criminal
| litigation, and I see nothing that would imply LLMs can even
| approach the individualized, case specific and convoluted family
| dynamics required for custody cases or contested divorces.
|
| I'm not unwilling to accept LLMs as a tool an attorney can use,
| but outside of more rote legal proof reading I don't think the
| technology is at all ready for adoption in actual practice.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "and I see nothing that would imply LLMs can even approach the
| individualized, case specific and convoluted family dynamics
| required for custody cases or contested divorces."
|
| Humans are pretty bad at this. Based on the results, it seems
| the judges' personal views and emotions are a large part of
| these cases. I'm not sure what they would look like without
| emotion, personal views, and the case law built off of those.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| The worse judges are at being perfectly removed arbiters of
| justice, the more room for lawyers to exploit things like
| emotions and humans connections with those judges, and thus
| the worse LLMs will be at doing that part of the job. A
| charismatic lawyer backed by an LLM will be much better than
| an LLM.
|
| At least until the LLMs surpass humans at being charismatic,
| but that would seem to be its own nightmare scenario.
| staunton wrote:
| > At least until the LLMs surpass humans at being
| charismatic
|
| Look into "virtual influencers". Sounds like you should
| find it interesting.
| staunton wrote:
| > judges' personal views and emotions are a large part of
| these cases
|
| That's a completely separate question. We're talking about
| automating lawyers, not judges. (to be a good lawyer in such
| a situation, you would need to model the judge's emotions and
| use them to your advantage. Probably AIs can do this
| eventually but it's not easy or likely to happen soon)
| giantg2 wrote:
| Well, judges are a subset of lawyers. And interactions with
| judges are a large part of being a successful lawyer, as
| you point out.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I wonder what the reach of a legal argument a bunch of lawyers
| are going to come up with in order to cripple the tech that
| threatens their industry?
| delichon wrote:
| Copyright appears to be the primary attack vector.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Are the arguments submitted to a court (and made publicly
| accessible) subject to copyright?
|
| I kind of assumed they were in the same space as government
| documents.
| delichon wrote:
| A legal LLM would be significantly crippled without the
| knowledge stored in the universe of non-legal documents.
| anotherhue wrote:
| You're probably right, but the law and reality often seem
| to be orthogonal.
| zugi wrote:
| Lawyers control government, at least in the U.S. Expect laws
| banning or severely restricting the use of AI in the legal
| field soon. I expect arguments will range from the dangers of
| ineffective counsel to "but think of the children" - whatever
| helps them protect their monopoly.
| axpy906 wrote:
| That's some cartel level action.
| DenisM wrote:
| I think it's more accurate to think of lawyers as a guild.
| Likewise doctors, accountants, plumbers, and electricians.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| A guild that has the inside track on changing the rules
| for itself.
| lewhoo wrote:
| > whatever helps them protect their monopoly
|
| Ah yes, the story of bad people not wanting their livelihoods
| taken from them by good tech giants. Seriously, is there no
| room for empathy in all of this ? If you went through law
| school and likely got yourself in debt in the process then
| you're not protecting any monopoly but your means to exist.
| There are people like that out there you know.
| pb7 wrote:
| In general, we should not stall technological progress just
| to protect jobs. They will find other jobs. This is the way
| throughout human history.
| lewhoo wrote:
| I'm not advocating anything of this sort. I only reject
| the typical framing of "bad guys" on one side.
| jjackson5324 wrote:
| > Seriously, is there no room for empathy in all of this ?
|
| Are you joking?
|
| Do you not empathize with the _far, far larger_ number of
| people who can 't afford adequate legal representation and
| have no legal recourse?
|
| There are people like that out there you know!!!!
| guluarte wrote:
| I think the other way is going to happen, being a lawyer will
| now be a lot more expensive requiring some servers doing AI
| inference, developers, and 3 party services..
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure. I've worked in the MSP space and law
| is the most tech averse industry I've ever come into contact
| with.
| phrz wrote:
| Not a reach, it's called "unlicensed practice of law" and it's
| a crime.
| vitiral wrote:
| It feels to me like the law is already a staggering heap of
| complexity. Isn't using technology going to just enable more of
| the same, making the situation worse?
| engineer_22 wrote:
| on the contrary, it may help to highlight incongruities in the
| legal domain and provide lawyers with compelling groundwork to
| make relevant claims
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Or you could take the view that, in fact, this is one of the
| things LLMs are very good at, ie making sense of complexity.
| vitiral wrote:
| But the lawyers reading the law won't be the only ones using
| LLMs. LLMs will also be used to write laws. Then lawmakers
| will use them to "check" that their 20,000 page law
| supposedly works. No human can understand the scope of
| today's laws: how much less when no LLMs can understand the
| laws created 20 years from now.
|
| I'd love to hear that LLMs can be used to trim and simplify
| complexity, but I don't believe it. They generate content,
| not reduce it.
| delichon wrote:
| In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right
| ... to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense -- 6th
| amendment to US Constitution
|
| When an LLM is more competent than an average human counsel, does
| this amendment still require assistance of a _human_ counsel?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Ironically you might be better asking GPT this question.
| District5524 wrote:
| All the governments in the world would do everything in their
| power to get people accept this suggestion as a truth and use
| LLMs instead of human lawyers especially in criminal defense.
| Now, why is that? Maybe it's not the technical knowledge that
| is the most important feature of a lawyer?
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| Yea it's their ability to manipulate language and people to
| bend the letter of the law to suit their specific cases
| regardless of any long term potential societal harm.
| AustinDev wrote:
| All governments of the world at least in the west appear to
| mostly consist of attorney's I doubt they'd let it happen.
| It'd be bad for their guild.
| Bud wrote:
| That's for a court to decide. It's certainly reasonable to
| guess that that court case is coming. The only question is how
| soon.
| guluarte wrote:
| yes because LLM are not free and still requires an expert to
| verify the output.
| ilc wrote:
| They serve different uses.
|
| A lawyer can handle the trial for you and things like that. The
| LLM can help you with issues of fact, etc. And could even make
| stronger privacy guarantees than a lawyer if setup right. (But
| I doubt that will ever happen.)
| hansonkd wrote:
| I run a startup that does legal contract generation (contracts
| written by lawyers turned into templates) and have done some work
| GPT analysis of the contract for laypersons to interact and ask
| questions about the contract they are getting.
|
| In terms of contract review, what I've found is that GPT is
| better at analysis of the document than generating the document,
| which is what this paper supports. However, I have used several
| startups options of AI document review and they all fall apart
| with any sort of prodding for specific answers. This paper looks
| like it just had to locate the section not necessarily have the
| back and forth conversation about the contract that a lawyer and
| client would have.
|
| There is also no legal liability for GPT for giving the wrong
| answer. So It works well for someone smart who is doing their own
| research. Just like if you are smart you could use google before
| to do your own research.
|
| My feelings on contract generation is that for the majority of
| cases, people are better served if there were simply better
| boilerplate contracts available. Laywers hoard their contracts
| and it was very difficult in our journey to find lawyers who
| would be willing to write contracts we would turn into templates
| because they are essentially putting themselves and their
| professional community out of income streams in the future. But
| people don't need a unique contract generated on the fly from GPT
| every time when a template of a well written and well reviewed
| contract does just fine. It cost hundreds of millions to train
| GPT4. If $10m was just spent building a repository of well
| reviewed contracts, it would be a more useful than spending the
| equivalent money training a GPT to generate them.
|
| People ask pretty wide range of questions about what they want to
| do with their documents and GPT didn't do a great job with it, so
| for the near future, it looks like lawyers still have a job.
| OldOneEye wrote:
| Which is mostly what I feel also happens with LLMs producing
| code. Useful to start with, but not more than that. We've still
| got a job us programmers. For the moment.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Producing code is like producing syntactically correct
| algebra. It has very little value on its own.
|
| I've been trying to pair system design with ChatGPT and it
| feels just like talking with a person who's confident and
| regurgitates trivia, but doesn't really understand. No sense
| of self-contradiction, doubt, curiosity.
|
| I'm very, very impressed with the language abilities and the
| regurgitation can be handy, but is there a single novel
| discovery by LLMs? Even a (semantic) simplification of a
| complicated theory would be valuable.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I recently used Willful to create a will and was pretty
| disappointed with the result. The template was extremely rigid
| on matters that I thought should have been no-brainers to be
| able to express (if X has happened, do Y, otherwise Z) and
| didn't allow for any kind of property division other than
| percentages of the total. It was also very consumed with
| several matters that I don't really feel that strongly about,
| like the fate of my pets.
|
| I was still able to rewrite the result into something that more
| suited me, but for a service with a $150 price tag I kind of
| hoped it would do more.
| hansonkd wrote:
| Our philosophy at GetDynasty is that the contract (in our
| case estate planning documents) itself is a commodity which
| is why we give it away for free. Charging $150 for a template
| doesn't make sense.
|
| Our solution like you point out is more rigid than having a
| lawyer write it, but for the majority of people having
| something that is accessible and free is worth it and then
| having services layer on top makes the most sense. It is
| easier to have a well written contract that you can "turn on
| and off" features or sections of the contract than to try to
| have GPT write a custom contract for you.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I applaud the efforts to give away free documents like
| this. That is actually what happens when you have a lawyer
| do it: you pay pretty much nothing for the actual contract
| clauses to be written (they start with a basic form and
| form language for all of the custom clauses you may want),
| but you pay a lot for them to be customized to fit your
| exact desires and to ensure that your custom choices all
| work.
|
| The idea of "legalzoom-style" businesses has always seemed
| like a bamboozle to me. You pay hundreds of dollars for
| essentially the form documents to fill in, and you don't
| get any of the flexibility that an actual lawyer gives you.
|
| As another example, Northwest Registered Agent gives you
| your corporate form docs for free with their registered
| agent services.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _like the fate of my pets_
|
| Pet trusts [1]! My lawyer literally used their existence,
| which I find adorable, to motivate me to read my paperwork.
|
| [1] https://www.aspca.org/pet-care/pet-planning/pet-trust-
| primer
| toss1 wrote:
| >>didn't allow for any kind of property division other than
| percentages of the total.
|
| Knowing someone who works in Trusts & Estates, that is
| terrible. I've often heard complaints about drafting by
| percentages of anything but straight financial assets which
| have an easily determined value, because that requires an
| appraisal(s). Yes, there are mechanisms to work it out in the
| end, but it is definitely better to be able to say $X to
| Alice, $Y to Bob and the remainder to Claire.
|
| You have to think of not only what you want, but how the
| executors will need to handle it. We all love complex
| formulae, but we should use our ability to handle complexity
| to simplify things for the heirs - it's a real gift in a bad
| time.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Heh, okay I guess what I wanted was going to end up as the
| worst of both-- fixed amounts off the top to some
| particular people/causes, and then the remainder divided
| into shares for my kids.
|
| I guess there's an understanding the being an executor is a
| best-effort role, but maybe you could specifically codify
| that +/-5% on the individual shares is fine, just to take
| off some of the burden of needing it to be perfect,
| particularly if there are payouts occurring at different
| times and therefore some NPV stuff going on.
| jassyr wrote:
| I'm in the energy sector and have been thinking of fine tuning
| a local llm on energy-specific legal documents, court cases,
| and other industry documents. Would this solve some of the
| problems you mention about producing specific answers? Have you
| tried something like that?
| hansonkd wrote:
| Your welcome to try, but we had mixed results.
|
| Law in general is interpretation. The most "lawyerese" answer
| you can expect is "It depends". Technically in the US
| everything is legal unless it is restricted and then there
| are interpretations about what those restrictions are.
|
| If you ask a lawyer if you can do something novel, chances
| are they will give a risk assessment as opposed to a yes or
| no answer. Their answer typically depends on how well _they_
| think they can defend it in the court of law.
|
| I have received answers from lawyers before that were
| essentially "Well, its a gray area. However if you get sued
| we have high confidence that we will prevail in court".
|
| So outside of the more obvious cases, the actual function of
| law is less binary but more a function of a gradient of
| defensibility and the confidence of the individual lawyer.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| I spent a lot of time with M&A lawyers and this is 100%
| true. The other answer is "that's a business decision".
|
| So much of contract law boils down to confidence in winning
| a case, or it's a business issue that just looks like a
| legal issue because of legalese.
| jerf wrote:
| As I've said before, one of my biggest concerns with LLMs is
| that they somehow manage to concentrate their errors in
| precisely the places we are least likely to notice:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39178183
|
| If this is dangerous with normal English, how much more so with
| legal text.
|
| At least if a lawyer drafts the text, there is at least one
| human with some sort of intentionality and some idea of what
| they're trying to say when they draft the text. With LLMs there
| isn't.
|
| (And as I say in the linked post, I don't think that is
| fundamental to AI. It is only fundamental to LLMs, which
| despite the frenzy, are not the sum totality of AI. I expect
| "LLMs can generate legal documents on their own!" to be one of
| those things the future looks back on our era and finds simply
| laughable.)
| andrewla wrote:
| > There is also no legal liability for GPT for giving the wrong
| answer
|
| It was my understanding that there is also no legal liability
| for a lawyer for giving the wrong answer. In extreme cases
| there might be ethical issues that result in sanctions by the
| bar, but in most cases the only consequences would be
| reputational.
|
| Are there cricumstances where you can hold an attorney legally
| liable for a badly written contract?
| gymbeaux wrote:
| I believe all practicing attorneys carry malpractice
| insurance as well as E&O (errors and omissions) insurance. I
| think one of those would "cover" the attorney in your
| example, but obviously insurance doesn't prevent poor Google
| reviews, nor would it protect the attorney from anything done
| in bad-faith (ethical violations), or anything else that
| could land an attorney before the state bar association for a
| disciplinary hearing.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _I believe all practicing attorneys carry malpractice
| insurance as well as E &O (errors and omissions)
| insurance._
|
| Nit: Malpractice insurance is (a species of) E&O insurance.
| kayfox wrote:
| > It was my understanding that there is also no legal
| liability for a lawyer for giving the wrong answer.
|
| There is plenty of legal, ethical and professional liability
| for a lawyer giving the wrong answer, we don't often see the
| outcome of these things because like everything in the courts
| they take a long time to get resolved and also some answers
| are not wrong just "less right" or "not really that wrong."
| trogdor wrote:
| I think the reason you rarely see the outcomes is because
| those disputes are typically resolved through mediation
| and/or binding arbitration, not in the courts.
|
| Look at your most recent engagement letter with an
| attorney. I'd bet that you agreed to arbitrate all fee
| disputes, and depending on your state you might have also
| agreed to arbitrate malpractice claims.
| Digory wrote:
| Yes. If the drafted language falls below reasonable care and
| damages the client, absolutely you can be sued for
| malpractice.
|
| Wrong Word in Contract Leads to $2M Malpractice Suit[1].
|
| [1]https://lawyersinsurer.com/legal-malpractice/legal-
| malpracti...
| freejazz wrote:
| It's called malpractice
| HillRat wrote:
| I mean, sure, if the attorney is operating below the usual
| standards of care -- it's exceptionally uncommon in the
| corporate world, but not unheard of. In the case of AI
| assistance, you run into situations where a company offering
| AI legal advice direct to end-users is either operating as an
| attorney without licensing, or, if an attorney is on the
| nameplate, they're violating basic legal professional
| responsibilities by not reviewing the output of the AI (if
| you do legal process outsourcing -- LPO -- there's a US-based
| attorney somewhere in the loop who's taking responsibility
| for the output).
|
| About the only case where this works in practice is someone
| going pro se and using their own toolset to gin up a legal AI
| model. There's arguably a case for acting as an accelerator
| for attorneys, but the problem is that if you've got an AI
| doing, say, doc review, you still need lawyers to review not
| just the output for correctness, but also go through the
| source docs to make sure nothing was missed, so you're not
| saving much in the way of bodies or time.
| jannw wrote:
| You said: "However, I have used several startups options of AI
| document review and they all fall apart with any sort of
| prodding for specific answers. "
|
| I think you will find that this is because they "outsource" the
| AI contract document review "final check" to real lawyers based
| in Utah ... so, it's actually a person, not really a wholy-AI
| based solution (which is what the company I am thinking of
| suggests in their marketing material)
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I think you will find that this is because they "outsource"
| the AI contract document review "final check" to real lawyers
| based in Utah ... so, it's actually a person, not really a
| wholy-AI based solution (which is what the company I am
| thinking of suggests in their marketing material)
|
| Which company is that? I don't see any point in obfuscating
| the name on a forum like this.
| verelo wrote:
| "There is also no legal liability for GPT for giving the wrong
| answer."
|
| I mean, i get your point but lets be real: I cannot count the
| number of times I sat in a meeting and looked back at a
| contract and wished some element had a different structure to
| it. In law there are a lot of "wrong answers" someone could
| foolishly provide, but its way more often something more
| variable as to how "wrong" the answer is, than it is a binary
| bad/good piece of advice.
|
| I personally feel the ability to have more discussion about a
| clause is extremely helpful, v's getting the a hopefully "right
| answer" from a lawyer, and counting the clock / $ as you try
| wrap your head around the advice you're being given. If you
| have deep pockets, you invite your lawyer to a lot of meetings,
| they have context and away you go....but for a lot of people,
| you're just involving the lawyer briefly and trying to avoid
| billable hours. That's been me at the early stage of
| everything, and it's a very tricky balance.
|
| If you're a startup trying to use GPT, i say do it, but also
| use a lawyer. Augmenting the lawyer with GPT to save billable
| hours so you can turn up to a meeting with your lawyer and
| extract the most value in the shortest time period seems like
| the best play to me.
| hansonkd wrote:
| You can read my other reply which agrees with you that law is
| a spectrum rather than a binary.
|
| > I cannot count the number of times I sat in a meeting and
| looked back at a contract and wished some element had a
| different structure to it.
|
| The only way to have something "bullet proof" is to have
| experience in ways in which something can go wrong. Its just
| like writing a program in which the "happy path" is rather
| obvious but then you have to come up with all the different
| attack vectors and use cases in which the program can fail.
|
| The same is with lawyers. Lawyers at big firms have the
| experience of the firm to guide them on what to do and what
| they should include in a contract. A small town family lawyer
| might have no experience in what you ask them to do.
|
| Which is why I advocate for more standardized agreements as
| opposed to one off generated agreements (with GPT or a
| lawyer). Think of the YCombinator SAFE, it made a huge impact
| on financing because it was standardized and there were
| really no terms to negotiate compared to the world before
| which the terms Notes were complex had to be scrutinized and
| negotiated.
|
| > Augmenting the lawyer with GPT to save billable hours so
| you can turn up to a meeting with your lawyer and extract the
| most value in the shortest time period seems like the best
| play to me.
|
| The issue is that a lot of lawyers have a conflict of
| interest and a "Not invented here" way of doing business. If
| you have a Trust for instance written by one lawyer and bring
| it to another lawyer, the majority of lawyers we talked to
| actually prefer to throw out the document and use their own.
| This method works well if you are a smart savvy person, but
| for the population at large, people have some crazy and weird
| ideas about how the law works and need to be talked out of
| what they want into something more sane.
|
| Another common lawyer response besides "It depends" is "Well
| you can, but why would you want to?" So many people of a
| skewed view on what they want and part of a lawyers job is
| interpreting what they really want and guiding them on the
| path of that.
|
| So the hybrid method really only works if you find a lawyer
| that accepts whatever crazy terms you came up with and are
| willing to work with what you generated.
| verelo wrote:
| Thats all very reasonable, thanks for taking the time to
| reply!
|
| When i suggest going down a hybrid path, I mostly mean use
| GPT on your own (disclose this to your lawyer at your own
| risk) as a means to understand what they're proposing. I've
| spent so many hours asking questions clarifying why
| something is done a certain way, and most of that is about
| understanding the language and trying to rationalize the
| perspective the lawyer has taken. I feel I could probably
| have done a lot of that on my own time, just as fast, if
| GPT had been around during these moments. And then of
| course, confirmed my understanding aligns with the lawyer
| at the end.
|
| I need to be upfront, I really don't know I'm right
| here....its just a hunch and gut reaction to how I'd behave
| in the present moment, but I find myself using AI more and
| more to get myself up to speed on issues that are beyond my
| current skill level. This makes me think law is probably
| another good way to augment my own disadvantages in that I
| have a very limited understanding of the rules and
| exceptional scenarios that might come up. I also find
| myself often on the edge of new issues, trying to structure
| solutions that don't exist or are intentionally different
| to present solutions...so that means a lot of explaining to
| the lawyer and subsequently a fair bit of back and forward
| on the best way to progress.
|
| It's a fun time to be in tech, I'm hoping things like GPT
| turn out to be a long term efficiency driver, but I'm
| fearful about the future monetization path and how it'll
| change the way we live/work.
| freejazz wrote:
| If you need a GPT to explain your lawyer's explanations
| to you, you need a new attorney.
| verelo wrote:
| Eh, no...i mean, maybe...I honestly feel the issue is me.
| I always want a lot of detail, and that can become
| expensive. Sometimes the detail I want is more than I
| needed, but I don't know that until after I've asked the
| question.
| freejazz wrote:
| If your attorney is not adequately explaining things to
| you or providing you with resources to understand things
| he does not need to spend his time explaining to you,
| then you need a new attorney.
| onetimeuse92304 wrote:
| > Laywers hoard their contracts and it was very difficult in
| our journey to find lawyers who would be willing to write
| contracts we would turn into templates because they are
| essentially putting themselves and their professional community
| out of income streams in the future.
|
| I notice same things in other professions, especially where it
| requires a huge upfront investment in education.
|
| For example (at least where I live), there was a time about 20
| years ago where architects also didn't want to produce designs
| that would be then sold to multiple people for cheap. The
| thinking was that this reduces market for architecture output.
| But of course it is easy to see that most people do not really
| need a unique design.
|
| So the problem solved itself because the market does not really
| care and the moment somebody is able to compile a small library
| of usable designs and a usable business model, as an architect,
| you can either cooperate to salvage what you can or lose.
|
| I believe the same comes for lawyers. Lawyers will live through
| some harsh time while their easiest and most lucrative work
| gets automated and the market for their services is going to
| shrink and whatever work is left for them will be of the more
| complex kind that the automation can't handle.
| adra wrote:
| I think you greatly underestimate this group to retain their
| position as a monopoly. A huge chunk of politicians are
| lawyers, and most legal jurisdictions have hard requirements
| around what work you must have a lawyer to perform. These
| tools may make their practices more efficient internally, but
| it doesn't mean that value is being passed on to the consumer
| of the service in any way. They're a cartel and one with very
| close relationships with country leadership. I don't see this
| golden goose souring any time soon.
| onetimeuse92304 wrote:
| I think what you are missing is businesses doing what
| businesses have always been doing: finding a niche for
| themselves to make a good profit.
|
| When you can hire less lawyers and get more work done and
| cheaper and at the same (or better) quality, you are going
| to upend the market for lawyering services.
|
| And this does not require to _replace_ lawyers. It is just
| enough to equip a lawyer with a set of tools to help them
| quickly do the typical tasks they are doing.
|
| I work a lot with lawyers and a lot of what they are doing
| is going to be stupidly easily optimised with AI tools.
| d0odk wrote:
| Please elaborate with some examples of what legal work
| you think will be optimized with AI tools.
| __loam wrote:
| Sometimes it feels like people look at GPT and think
| "This thing does words! Law is words! I should start a
| company!" but they actually haven't worked in legal tech
| at all and don't know anything about the vertical.
| d0odk wrote:
| It's a logical reaction, at least superficially, to the
| touted capabilities of Gen AI and LLMs. But once you
| start trying to use the tech for actual legal
| applications, it doesn't do anything useful. It would be
| great if some mundane legal tasks could be automated away
| --for example negotiation of confidentiality agreements.
| One would think that if LLMs are capable of replacing
| lawyers, they could do something along those lines. But I
| have not seen any evidence that they can do so
| effectively, and I have been actively looking into it.
|
| One of the top comments on this thread says that LLMs are
| going to better at summarizing contracts than generating
| them. I've heard this in legal tech product demos as
| well. I can see some utility to that--for example,
| automatically generating abstracts of key terms (like
| term, expiration, etc.) for high-level visibility. That
| said, I've been told by legal tech providers that LLMs
| don't do a great job with some basic things like total
| contract value.
|
| I question how the document summarizing capabilities of
| LLMs will impact the way lawyers serve business
| organizations. Smart businesspeople already know how to
| read contracts. They don't need lawyers to identify /
| highlight basic terms. They come to lawyers for advice on
| close calls--situations where the contract is unclear or
| contradictory, or where there is a need for guidance on
| applying the contract in a real-world scenario and
| assessing risk.
|
| Overall I'm less enthusiastic about the potential for
| LLMs in the legal space than I was six months ago. But I
| continue to keep an eye on developments and experiment
| with new tools. I'd love to get some feedback from others
| on this board who are knowledgeable.
|
| As a side note, I'm curious if anyone knows about the
| impact of context window on contract interpretation a lot
| of contracts are quite long and have sections that are
| separated by a lot of text that nonetheless interact with
| each other for purposes of a correct interpretation.
| __loam wrote:
| I think one of the biggest problems with LLMs is the
| accountibility problem. When a lawyer tells you
| something, their reputation and career are on the line.
| There's a large incentive to get things right. LLMs will
| happily spread believable bullshit.
| d0odk wrote:
| In fairness some lawyers will too, haha. I take your
| point, though. Good lawyers care about their reputation
| and strive to protect it.
| freejazz wrote:
| Lawyers are legally liable to their clients for their
| advice, it's a lot more than just reputation and career.
| treprinum wrote:
| A friend of mine is a highly ranked lawyer, a past
| general consul of multiple large enterprises. I sent him
| this paper, he played with ChatGPT-3.5 (not even GPT-4)
| and contract creation, he said it was 99% fine and then
| told me he's glad he is slowly retiring from law and is
| not envious of any up-and-coming lawyers entering the
| profession. One voice from the vertical.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| IIRC about 40% of us politicians are lawyers, unfortunately
| I'm sure they will find a way to gatekeep these revenue
| streams for their peers.
| pugworthy wrote:
| I'm assuming by the use of "us" and "they" you meant US -
| not that you are a politician.
| adrianN wrote:
| Lawyers seem to be the prime group to prevent this outcome
| using some kind regulation. Many politicians are lawyers.
| freejazz wrote:
| They _were_ lawyers, they aren 't still practicing
| attorneys representing clients.
| jacquesm wrote:
| So, you will get the template for free. And then a lawyer has
| to put it on their letterhead and they charge you the exact
| same as they do right now for that because that will be made
| a requirement.
| onetimeuse92304 wrote:
| No. As a business owner you will hire couple lawyers, give
| them a bunch of programs to automate searching through
| texts, answering questions and writing legalese based on
| human description of what is the text supposed to do. These
| three are from my experience great majority of the work.
| The 2 people you hire will now perform like 10 people
| without tools. Then you will use part of that saved money
| to reduce prices and if you are business savvy, you will
| use the rest to research the automation further.
|
| Then another business that wants to compete with you will
| no longer have an option, they will have to do this or more
| to be able to stay in the business at all.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Lawyers are uniquely well equipped to legislate their
| continued employment into existence.
| taneq wrote:
| > I notice same things in other professions, especially where
| it requires a huge upfront investment in education.
|
| Doctors, for instance. You hear no end of stories about how
| incredibly high pressure medicine is with insane hours and
| stress, but will they increase university placements so they
| can actually hire enough trained staff to meet the workload?
| Absolutely fkn not, that would impact salaries.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| "easiest and most lucrative work"
|
| I think this overlooks a big part of how the legal market
| works. Our easiest work is only lucrative because we use it
| to train new lawyers, who bill at a lower rate. To the extent
| the easy stuff gets automated, 1) it's going to be impossible
| to find work as a junior associate and 2) senior attorneys
| will do the same stuff they did last year. If there's a
| decrease in prices for a while, great, but a generation from
| now it's going to be a lot harder to find someone
| knowledgeable because the training pathway will have been
| destroyed.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Just like if you are smart you could use google before to do
| your own research.
|
| Unfortunately people stop at step #1, they use Google and that
| _is_ their research. I don 't think ChatGPT is going to be
| treated any different. It will be used as an oracle, whether
| that's wise or not doesn't matter. That's the price of
| marketing something as artificial intelligence: the general
| public believes it.
| jonnycoder wrote:
| "So It works well for someone smart who is doing their own
| research."
|
| That's a concise explanation that also applies to GPTs and
| software engineering. GPT4 boosts my productivity as a software
| engineer because it helps me travel the path quicker. Most
| generated code snippets need a lot of work because I'm prodding
| it for specific use cases and it fails. It's perfect as an
| assistant though.
| freejazz wrote:
| >There is also no legal liability for GPT for giving the wrong
| answer. So It works well for someone smart who is doing their
| own research. Just like if you are smart you could use google
| before to do your own research.
|
| How is that good for the end user? Malpractice claims are often
| all that is left for a client after the attorney messes up
| their case. If you use a GPT, you wouldn't have that option.
| wow_its_tru wrote:
| We're building exactly this for contract analysis: upload a
| contract, review the common "levers to pull", make sure there's
| nothing unique/exceptional, and escalate to a real lawyer if
| you have complex questions you don't trust with an LLM.
|
| In our research, we found out that most everyone has the same
| questions: (1) "what does my contract say?", (2) "is that
| standard?", and (3) "is there anything I can/should negotiate
| here?"
|
| Most people don't want an intense, detailed negotiation over a
| lease, or a SaaS agreement, or an employment contract... they
| just want a normal contract that says normal things, and maybe
| it would be nice if 1 or 2 of the common levers were pulled in
| their direction.
|
| Between the structure of the document and the overlap in
| language between iterations of the same document (i.e. literal
| copy/pasting for 99% of the document), contracts are almost an
| ideal use-case for LLMs! (The exception is directionality -
| LLMs are great at learning correlations like "company,
| employee, paid biweekly," but bad at discerning that it's super
| weird if the _employee_ is paying the _company_)
| bkang97 wrote:
| That makes sense, how are you guys approaching breaking down
| what should be present and what is expected in contracts?
| I've seen a lot of chatbot-based apps that just don't cut it
| for my use case.
| nwiswell wrote:
| > If $10m was just spent building a repository of well reviewed
| contracts
|
| What's your objection to Nolo Press? They seem to have already
| done that.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| In other words, LLM's are great examples of the 80/20 rule.
|
| They're going to be great for a lot of stuff. But when it comes
| to things like the law the other 20% is not optional.
| asah wrote:
| So the world needs 1/5 as many attorneys ? or 1/100 ? How
| will 6-figure attorneys replace that income?
| gkk wrote:
| Hi hansonkd,
|
| I'm working on Hotseat - a legal Q&A service where we put
| regulations in a hot seat and let people ask sophisticated
| questions. My experience aligns with your comment that vanilla
| GPT often performs poorly when answering questions about
| documents. However, if you combine focused effort on squeezing
| GPT's performance with product design, you can go pretty far.
|
| I wonder if you have written about specific failure modes
| you've seen in answering qs from documents? I'd love to check
| whether Hotseat is handling them well.
|
| If you'r curious, I've written about some of the design choices
| we've made on our way to creating a compelling product
| experience: https://gkk.dev/posts/the-anatomy-of-hotseats-ai/
| DanielSantos wrote:
| Your post is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
|
| If your focus is narrow enough the vanilla gpt can still
| provide good enough results. We narrow down the scope for the
| gpt and ask it to answer binary questions. With that we get
| good results.
|
| Your approach is better for supporting broader questions. We
| support that as well and there the results aren't as good.
| DanielSantos wrote:
| I launched a contract review tool about year ago[1].
|
| The legal liability is an issue in several countries but
| contract generation can also be. If you are providing whatever
| is defined as legal services and are not a law firm, you will
| have issues.
|
| [1]legalreview.ai
| d0odk wrote:
| How do you think organizations can best use the contractual
| interpretations provided by LLMs? To expand on that, good
| lawyers don't just provide contractual interpretations, they
| provide advice on actions to take, putting the legal
| interpretation into the context of their client's business
| objectives and risk profile. Do you see LLMs / tools based on
| LLMs evolving to "contextualize" and "operationalize" legal
| advice?
|
| Do you have any views on whether context window limits the
| ability of LLMs to provide sound contractual interpretations of
| longer contracts that have interdependent sections that are far
| apart in the document?
|
| Has your level of optimism for the capabilities of LLMs in the
| legal space changed at all over the past year?
|
| You mentioned that lawyers hoard templates. Most organizations
| you would have as clients (law firms or businesses) have a ton
| of contracts that could be used to fine tune LLMs. There are
| also a ton of freely available contracts on the SEC's website.
| There are also companies like PLC, Matthew Boender, etc., that
| create form contracts and license access to them as a business.
| Presumably some sort of commercial arrangement could be worked
| out with them. I assume you are aware of all of these potential
| training sources, and am curious why they were unsatisfactory.
|
| Thanks for any response you can offer.
| DanielSantos wrote:
| Not op but someone that currently runs an ai contract review
| tool.
|
| To answer some of your questions:
|
| - contract review works very well for high volume low risk
| contract types . Think slas, SaaS... these are contracts
| comercial legal teams need to review for compliance reasons
| but hate it.
|
| - it's less good for custom contracts
|
| - what law firms would benefit from is just natural language
| search on their own contracts.
|
| - it also works well for due diligence. Normally lawyers
| can't review all contracts a company has. With a contract
| review tool they can extract all the key data/risks
|
| - LLM doesn't need to provide advice. LLM can just identify
| if x or y is in the contract. This improving the process of
| review.
|
| - context windows keep increasing but you don't need to send
| the whole contract to the LLM . You can just identify the
| right paragraphs and send that.
|
| - things changes a lot in the past year. It would cost us $2
| to review a contract now it's $0.2 . Responses are more
| accurate and faster
|
| - I don't do contract generation but have explored this. I
| think the biggest benefit isn't generating the whole contract
| but to help the lawyer rewrite a clause for a specific need.
| The standard CLM already have contract templates that can be
| easily filled in. However after the template is filled the
| lawyer needs to add one or two clauses . Having a model
| trained on the companies documents would be enough.
|
| Hope this helps
| d0odk wrote:
| Thanks. Appreciate your feedback.
|
| Do you think LLMs have meaningfully greater capabilities
| than existing tools (like Kira)?
|
| I take your point on low stakes contracts vs. sophisticated
| work. There has been automation at the "low end" of the
| legal totem pole for a while. I recall even ten years ago
| banks were able to replace attorneys with automations for
| standard form contracts. Perhaps this is the next step on
| that front.
|
| I agree that rewriting existing contracts is more useful
| than generating new ones--that is what most attorneys do.
| That said, I haven't been very impressed by the drafting
| capabilities of the LLM legal tools I have seen. They tend
| to replicate instructions almost word for word (plain
| English) rather than draw upon precedent to produce quality
| legal language. That might be enough if the provisions in
| question are term/termination, governing law, etc. But it's
| inadequate for more sophisticiated revisions.
| williamcotton wrote:
| Lexis has some AI feature built into it:
|
| https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis-plus-ai.page
|
| I haven't had a chance to test it out as anyone should be a bit
| weary to add more paid features to an already insanely expensive
| software product!
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Theoretically. The language in laws should be structured similar
| to code. It has some logical structure. Thus should be more
| easily adopted to LLMs than other 'natural language'.
|
| So despite the early news about lawyers submitting 'fake' cases,
| it is only a matter of time before the legal profession is up-
| ended. There are a ton of paralegals, etc.. doing 'grunt' work in
| firms, that an LLM can do. These are considered white color, and
| will be gone.
|
| It will progress in a similar fashion to coding.
|
| It will be like having a junior partner that you have to double
| check, or that can do some boiler plate for you.
|
| You can't trust completely, but you don't trust your junior devs
| do you, but it gets you 80% there.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > It will progress in a similar fashion to coding.
|
| I kind of agree with this, but this is why I am confused that I
| only ever see people (at least on HN) talk about AI up-ending
| the legal profession and putting droves of lawyers out of work
| --I never see the same talk about the coding industry being
| transformed in this way.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I've heard it discussed. A lot more a few months ago when GPT
| first blew up.
|
| Maybe HN is full of coders that still think themselves
| 'special' and can't be replaced.
|
| Or maybe, the law profession has a lot more boilerplate than
| the coding profession?
|
| So legal profession has more that can be replaced?
|
| Coders will be replaced, but maybe not at same rate as
| paralegals.
| ulrischa wrote:
| Lawyers have been resisting technological advances for years. No
| industry rejects technological tools as vehemently as the legal
| industry, arguing that everything has to be judged by people.
| Even laws that are available online do not even link to the
| paragraphs that are referenced. All in all, progress is
| institutionally suppressed here in order to preserve jobs.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| > Even laws that are available online do not even link to the
| paragraphs that are referenced.
|
| It's not lawyers' job to publish the laws online. Lawyers are
| the ones who would benefit from more easily searchable online
| laws, as they are the ones whose job is actually to read the
| laws. That is why there are various commercial tools that
| provide this functionality, that lawyers pay for. You need to
| ask your government why public online legal databases are so
| poor, not your lawyer.
| ulrischa wrote:
| Right. 70% of governmental staff are people with a law
| education. So I mean lawyer in a broader sense
| DanielSantos wrote:
| I also built an AI contract review ai tool and talked to > 100
| lawyers. What I found is that lawyers want technological
| advances but only if they work 100% of the time.
|
| Also helped lawyers looking for a CLM, and they rejected
| something if it caused any inconvenience.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| Talk about a conflict of interest. A company that pushes llms for
| legal work says they work better.
|
| This isn't worth the pdf it wasn't printed on.
| carstenhag wrote:
| I disagree. The company is mentioned multiple times, a conflict
| of interest is clearly visible. We also don't complain about
| Google et al publishing papers about some of their internal
| systems and why it helps, I hope?
| drewdevault wrote:
| Google isn't trying to sell you their internal systems. This
| is a bullshit AI hype bubble advert masquerading as an
| academic paper. Bet you 10 bucks it doesn't get through peer
| review (or isn't even _submitted_ for peer review).
| og_kalu wrote:
| >Google isn't trying to sell you their internal systems.
|
| They sometimes are.
|
| If you have an issue with the methodology of paper then all
| well and good but "conflict of interest" is pretty weak.
|
| Yes, Google and Microsoft et al regularly publish papers
| describing Sota performance they sometimes use internally
| and even sell. I didn't have to think much before wavenet
| came to mind.
|
| Besides, the best performing models here are all Open AI.
| vibeproaaaac21 wrote:
| Agreed. That's most AI research though. They are a mechanism
| whose entire value proposition lies in laundering
| externalities.
|
| Not that this isn't exactly what all the big "tech innovation"
| of the last decade were either. It's depressing and everyone
| involved should be ashamed of themselves.
| oldgregg wrote:
| Interesting problem space-- I have a culture jamming legal theory
| this might work for:
|
| What if you had a $99/mo pro-se legal service that does two
| things, 1) teaches you how to move all of your assets into secure
| vehicles. 2) At the same time it lets you conduct your own
| defense pro-se-- but the point is not to win, it's just to jam
| the system. If you signal to the opposing party that you're
| legally bankrupt and then you just file motion after motion and
| make it as excruciating as possible for them they might just say
| nevermind when they realize it's gonna take them 5 years to get
| through appeals process.
|
| It's true lawyers don't want to give up their legal documents for
| a template service-- but honestly just going to the court house
| and ingesting tons of filings might do the trick. With that
| strategy in mind you don't really need GREAT documents or legal
| theory anyway. Just docs that comply with court filing
| requirements. Yeah we're def gonna need to deposition your
| housekeepers daughters at $400/h and if you have a problem with
| that I would be happy to have a hearing about it. If enough
| people did this is would basically bring the legal system to a
| standstill and give power back to the people.
|
| RIP Aaron Swartz who died fighting for these issues :'(
| gee_totes wrote:
| What you're describing in 2) sounds a lot like paper
| terrorism[0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_terrorism
| oldgregg wrote:
| So what do you call it when the wealthy and corporations
| exploit their opponent's inability to afford legal
| representation? A normal Tuesday in Amerika. Yes, the
| banality of tuesday terrorism.
| trevithick wrote:
| You would be a vexatious litigant.
|
| https://www.courts.ca.gov/12272.htm
| oldgregg wrote:
| That's different. I'm talking about using it as a defensive
| mechanism against wealthy individuals and corporations who
| bully (relatively) poor people knowing they can't afford
| years of litigation. In theory if you had an AI system like
| what I'm talking about it could be used the other way though.
| Honestly if every individual had the ability to go after
| corporations in the same manner it would even the playing
| field. Still wouldn't necessarily be vexatious.
| zehaeva wrote:
| Given the recent legal cases where lawyers did use Chat GPT to do
| research and help write their brief did not go very well I'm not
| sold that on all the optimism that's here in the comments.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The technology is fine, the education and literacy about its
| flaws and limitations among typical nontechnical users is
| another story.
| frankfrank13 wrote:
| That was rookie level mistakes though. Not checking a *case*
| exists? Building a small pipeline of generation->validation
| isn't trivial, but it isn't impossible. The cases you describe
| seem to me like very lazy associates matched with a very poor
| understanding of what LLMs do.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| They were all idiots too cheap to pay for GPT-4. Got caught by
| hallucinations.
| cwoolfe wrote:
| Where can someone upload a contract and ask the AI questions
| about it in a secure and private way? It's my understanding that
| most people and organizations aren't able to do this because it
| isn't private.
| btbuildem wrote:
| You can host your own LLM - something like Mixtral for example
| - then you have full control over the information you submit to
| it.
| kveton wrote:
| We do this today (securely upload a file and ask questions or
| summarize) and part of our promise, and why we're having early
| success, is because we promise not to train with customer data
| and we don't run directly on top of OpenAI.
|
| https://casemark.ai
| kulikalov wrote:
| ChatGPT enterprise? Or over API. They state that those
| offerings data is not used for training. I'm not a lawyer but
| afaik illegally retrieved evidence cannot be used -
| "exclusionary rule".
| DanielSantos wrote:
| You can try us [1] . During the upload process you can enable
| data anonymization. It's not perfect though.
|
| We use open ai but they only get segments of a contract. Not
| the full one and can't connect them.
|
| You get the review via email and after you can delete the
| document and keep the review.
|
| [1] legalreview.ai
| adastra22 wrote:
| Nice title!
| advael wrote:
| It's bizarre how easily we got to the Goodhart's Law event
| horizon in our comparisons of complex fields to AI models
|
| But this is what happens when industries spend a decade brain-
| draining academia with offers researchers would be insane to
| refuse
| District5524 wrote:
| While this paper is clearly not without merits, it intends to be
| more like an excuse to make a bombastic statements about a whole
| profession or "industry" (perhaps to raise their visibility and
| try to sell something later on?). The worst part is that they
| have actually referenced a single preprint document as "previous
| art" - and that document itself is not related to contract
| review, but to legal reasoning in general. (A part of LegalBench
| is of course "interpretation", and that is built on existing
| contract review benchmarks, but they could've found more relevant
| papers). Automating legal document review has been a very active
| field in NLP for twenty years or so (including in QA tasks) and
| became a lot more active since 2017. At least e.g. Kira (and
| Luminance etc., none of which is LLM-based) are already used
| quite widely in legal departments/firms around the world. So
| lawyers do have practical experience in their limitations... But
| Kira & co. are not measuring the performance of the latest and
| greatest models and they do not use transparent benchmarks etc.
| So the benchmark results in this paper are indeed a welcome
| addition in terms of using LLMs. But also considering its limited
| scope of reviewing 10 (!) documents based on a single review
| playbook, they should not have written about "implications for
| the industry". It is very much pretentious and shows more of the
| lack of knowledge of the authors of the very same industry than
| about the future of the legal services industry.
|
| If you're interested in the capabilities and limitations, I
| suggest these informative, but still light reads as well:
| https://kirasystems.com/science/ https://zuva.ai/blog/
| https://www.atticusprojectai.org/cuad
| very_good_man wrote:
| We may finally again get affordable access to the rule of law in
| the United States.
| gogogo_allday wrote:
| I must not be reading this paper correctly because it appears
| that they only used 10 procurement contracts to do this study.
|
| If so, the abstract and title feels misleading.
|
| I'd be more interested in a study done on thousands of contracts
| of different types. I also have my doubts it would perform well
| on novel clauses or contracts.
| gumby wrote:
| I would not want an transformer-generated contract but I would be
| delighted if a transformer-generated contract were used as input
| by an actual lawyer and it saved me money.
|
| In my experience current practice (unchanged for the decades I've
| been using lawyers) is that associates start with an existing
| contract that's pretty similar to what's needed and just update
| it as necessary.
|
| Also in my experience, a contract of any length ends up with
| overlooked bugs (changed sections II(a) and IV(c) for the new
| terms but forgot to update IX(h)) and I doubt this would be any
| better with a machine-generated first draft.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Does LPO (Legal Process Outsourcing) mean a paralegal?
| graphe wrote:
| Law is very specific. BERT was sufficient for law even before
| chatGPT. https://towardsdatascience.com/lawbert-towards-a-legal-
| domai...
|
| https://huggingface.co/nlpaueb/legal-bert-base-uncased
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I wonder if this could help regular (non-lawyer) people
| understand legal documents they run into in everyday life. Things
| like software license agreements, terms of service, privacy
| policies, release of liability forms, deposit agreements,
| apartment leases, and rental car agreements.
|
| Many people don't even try to read these because they're too long
| and you wouldn't necessarily understand what it means even if you
| did read it.
|
| What if, before you signed something, you could have an LLM
| review it, summarize the key points, and flag anything unusual
| about it compared to similar kinds of documents? That seems
| better than not reading it at all.
| wow_its_tru wrote:
| We're building exactly this today, for common business
| contracts.
|
| We're not building for consumers today, because I think it's
| vanishingly unlikely that you'll, like, pick a different car
| rental company once you read their contract :) but leases,
| employment contracts, options agreements, SaaS agreements...
| all common, all boilerplate with 5-10 areas to focus on, all
| ready for LLMs!
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Honestly, that type of consumer use case might actually be
| relevant once LLM's can do this sort of thing. Certainly,
| nobody is going to contact their attorney before renting a
| car, but if this could be integrated into a travel site or
| something...
|
| You never know how consumer behavior may change when
| something that was either impossible or impractical becomes
| very easy b
| DanielSantos wrote:
| We have also have been building this[1] but struggled to
| monetize even with 100s of users and 1000s of contracts
| review. We are live for about 1 year.
|
| If you want to share experience feel free to reach out [1]
| legalreview.ai
| adi4213 wrote:
| For the auditory learners, here is this paper in a summarized
| Audiobook format :
| https://player.oration.app/1960399e-ccb0-44f6-81f0-870ef7600...
| visarga wrote:
| Two reasons why it's a bad idea:
|
| 1. ChatGPT can't be held responsible, it has no body, like
| summoning the genie from the lamp, and about as sneaky with its
| hard to detect errors
|
| 2. ChatGPT is not autonomous, not even a little, these models
| can't recover from error on their own. And their input buffers
| are limited in size, and don't work all that well when stretched
| at maximum
|
| Especially the autonomy part is hard. Very hard in general. LLMs
| need to become agents to collect experience and learn, just
| training on human text is not good enough, it's our experience
| not theirs. They need to make their own mistakes to learn how to
| correct themselves.
| itissid wrote:
| GPTs only generate specific answers if they are trained using
| RHLF to prefer certain answers to others. Won't this mean that
| coming up with a contract that meets a special individual's case
| will require that much more fine-tuning?
|
| Also how do you reconcile several logical arguments without a
| solver? Like "If all tweedles must tweed", "If X is a tweedle,
| therefore it must tweed unless it can meet conditions in para
| 12". How can it possibly learn to solve many such conjunctions
| that are staple in legal language?
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| This is apples and bowling balls. You also probably could replace
| the CEO and entire executive team with LLMs. And cheaper! Much
| cheaper!
|
| But, if the stochastic analysis was ... wrong ... who would be
| left to correct it?
| sandbx wrote:
| I like that they incl the prompt in the paper
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