Rethinking legal education in the AI era

These are the right bits to call out.

But the effect is to make success more dependent on networks. (If they are using AI as an excuse to make networks more relevant than skills, it relieves competitive pressure.)

First, a main draw of law journals is the filing cabinet of past exams as remembered by past students, available only to journal members i.e., friends of connected people. Reducing one's ability to remember what was in a lecture only increases the advantage insiders have.

Second, the "Socratic" Method for teaching law is nothing like it is in philosophy; it's more of a weird combination of hide-the-ball and distraction that again ensures people who can see through the clouds are using out-of-band information, and share it only with those they seek to enlist or join.

> all students will be required to engage in an oral discussion of their SRP with their supervising professor, in an in-person setting

I'm surprised anyone could get through otherwise. When did it become legitimate to dump your paper and not answer for it?

All nice and all, but their grads will be wrecked by a street-wise guy with AI glasses (and eventually an implanted chip). There’s no competition in a machines vs humans match. It’s over. Of course these elite centers of knowledge want to keep the status quo, they base their entire existence on gate-keeping useful shit from the riff-raff. Well, fuck them.

> As a CTO of an Ai first law firm I would like to add that most human lawyers are absolutely terrible

This is many people at many jobs. We continue to see this weird thing when AI comes into an industry that suddenly the product being produced by the people was perfect/amazing/whatever. Maybe that's true for the majority of HN who are lucky enough to work with experts in every field, but in the general population that's simply not the case.

Many doctors, lawyers, and programmers are not very good at their jobs - I've seen it first hand. AI gives the general population a way to steer around these people a bit, and maybe ask the right questions. Is it perfect? Nope, but it's often better than the people someone has access to.

> most human lawyers are absolutely terrible.

I think this extends to the other areas that AI is also disrupting.

Software engineers are also absolutely terrible: In being sloppy with handling errors, doing coercions, etc. All because always engineering after best practice simply takes too much time and mental load.

The real disruption from AI is likely that it does not get mentally fatigue. It can keep on, launch adversarial audits, make sure that everything is up to all standards.

But the real question is 1) whether other human lawyers would catch the error 2) in how much time 3) which of the errors introduced by AI vs. human would have bigger consequences. On 1 and 2 the answers are very likely to be "yes" and "it would take humans more time", but the question that really matters is 3.

Wonderful, I'm tired of lawyers. Happy to see that evolve and figure out how to provide actual value for its cost.

> most human lawyers are absolutely terrible. We review 100s of old contracts every week

I hope the irony is lost on no one that "Attention Is All You Need" was the paper that kicked the LLM boom off.

Part of the distinction between a how good one lawyer will be vs another is exactly that: attention to detail. And, as a trade, a practice, it seems like a skill that they try to hammer into the people who pursue this career (to varying degrees of success clearly).

It makes the last 20 years of leet code hiring look downright wrong. Your ability to recall what sorting algo to use, or solve some brain teaser conveys nothing about your ability to read (massive amounts) of code, and think critically about it.

Most people are terrible at what they do, period, regardless of profession.

I have the impression that most law firms consume and produce documentation by means of a cadre of paralegals who are minimally trained, minimally experienced, and maximally stressed by the pressure of deadlines and case loads. These paralegals are probably working to read hundreds of pages of legal filings and make sense out of them, and on the other end, they are working to produce as much documentation as possible and that's going to be by cut-and-paste assembly. So no, they are not going to understand stuff very well, and no, their output is not really going to be consistent or intelligible. But the managing attorneys depend on these paralegals to get anything done, just like Congresspeople rely on their staffers to actually read bills and draft legislation.

At the end of the day, I think these paralegals have been quite weak links, and nearly nobody will notice a difference in quality when it's all handed over to LLMs. But the paralegals will lose their jobs, and probably have nothing better to do than purchase angle grinders and cut down Flock camera poles, or crown the front hood of Waymos with a traffic pylon.

I've seen lawyers lose to non-lawyers who didn't use all that, just because the lawyers didn't do their work, thinking, no doubt, "I'm a lawyer I will just win", at any rate there is a well known aphorism that a lawyer who represents themselves has a fool for a client.

finally, was this thing you beat the actual lawyer at in their specific specialty, since lawyers are often focused on particular aspects of the law?

That's cool, but bear in mind that courts in the United States are generally required to be a little more lax in their enforcement of procedural rules when a party is pro se. Not saying you did make mistakes, but if you did, you may have gotten a pass.

Additionally, you haven't given any of the details of your case, so I'm going to assume you were simply in a position where the facts of your case weighed heavily in your substantive favor, and no amount of legal maneuvers by the defendant would have made a difference.

There's nothing magical about lawyers. They are mostly just boring, studious people who excelled in non-STEM academics and were good at memorization and test taking. If you have a strong case, it won't matter very much who the lawyer is on the other side.

Is it perhaps possible that you won your case because you didn't break the law, or conversely because the other party did break the law? Unless ChatGPT persuaded a judge to side in your favor even though you were legally in the wrong, this really doesn't tell us anything at all. (And even in that circumstance, it might speak more to the complete incompetence of the other party's legal representation.)

> I recent beat an actual lawyer as a pro se plaintiff in a civil suit.

So? I beat actual lawyers in trials and hearings five times between 2008 and 2019. That last one was actually a team of attorney + advocate (senior bar member).

You could always "beat" them just by reading and preparing. Now, you+AI beat a lawyer. Tomorrow, do you really think that you+AI will beat lawyer+AI?

And once we stop getting well-trained lawyers (because everyone is just a meatbag accessory to an AI), whether you win or not is likely to be a coin toss.

Even small corporations have a huge need for paperwork in terms of contract negotiation and redlining agreements. Some of this can be partially automated but the real value an experienced attorney brings is in knowing how those issues fit into the larger business context, and deciding what to press on or concede.

> No one is going to present ChatGPT on an iPad as their defense attorney.

That already happened! https://youtu.be/MkmfZPt-gaw?si=gk1k3sGsFq9npp0X

AI is a real thing and it's the most significant development in the legal sector since the Internet. Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery, which before would've taken me the whole day. Even if it never gets any better it's a huge step forward. It's not only going to change legal education, it's going to change what the pipeline looks like in law firms. Similarly to the changes I expect to see in any kind of white collar job where AI replaces a lot of the data analysis/data transformation work, leaving people to do more human interaction.

I am at a company that currently has a whole bunch of lawyers, because we are dealing with multi-year >100s million infra projects.

One of the things that AI has helped with is automatic breech notifications. They are largely proforma, but depending on which generation of contract they are notifying from, subtle changes are needed.

Law is mostly highly structured text, and you know what loves highly structured and documented text? LLMs.

Legal LLMs do share the same issue with coding LLMs, they tend to default to lazy/insecure. Its not the case where you as a non-lawyer can prompt it to make a "water tight" contract from scratch.

> However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were massively impactful technologies.

How has crypto been massively impactful?

> This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided.

A bubble doesn’t say anything about how useful the underlying technology is. We are in an AI bubble, in the sense that the allocated resources is completely out of line with the underlying businesses. AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble

> Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree.

This is what people mean when they say it's a bubble.

The bubble is about the market you wally not about whether statistical models are useful.

I wish people would stop being so dense.

> However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet.

Yes they were. Educators have been talking about how access to the internet has affected their students learning since forever. We were cautioned and had dedicated classes to teach us to be critical of different sources, teaching us what Wikipedia could and could not be used for. The internet was deliberately turned off for our exams.

Crypto too was seen as culturally important, papers were written by otherwise well respected authors. We were expected to read some whitepapers about crypto. Interestingly, reading those papers only made us more sure it was a scam.

You're rewriting history to make this moment seem different, it is not.