Astra for Law

[delayed]

What model did you use?

Max Junestrand has consistently said Legora treats the model layer as swappable, selecting across frontier providers rather than building the product around one.

OpenAI didn't need to name Legora and Harvey in the second paragraph of the launch post.

They are pre-empting the obvious interpretation of Astra for Law: that moving this far up the legal stack puts them in direct competition with their biggest legal AI customers.

“Don't worry, they can build on us” is a pretty conspicuous message to include on launch day.

They have clearly thought about some pessimistic outcomes.

"We are also expanding our work on privacy and governance to give law firms specific controls for confidential client work"

This is everything OpenAI have to say about privacy in this announcement. No guarantees. No promises. Just a pinky-swear promise.

Anyone trusting them–or a lawyer who relies on them–for legal work deserves what they get.

If there is any cartel that deserves to be broken its legal search. May they die a miserable death.

I find the idea that people can use LLMs to exercise their rights as citizens appealing however. Many people aren't aware of the rights they have, and LLMs are pretty good at surfacing some stuff without having to pay lawyers. Having to hire a lawyer is imo actually a huge way of gatekeeping people from exercising their rights. I heard a lot of local German public institutions are currently being flooded with people arguing their case with the help of LLM that they previously weren't really realistically able to do. So I don't see it all as bad.

The legal system, which is a machine/technology by itself, will be eaten out. I wonder what will replace it. Botnet law arbitrage? – Personal assistants constantly negotiating with each other to avoid permanent civil lawsuits?

the cost of making a legal argument can collapse while the cost of reaching an enforceable, legitimate decision may go higher, which will gate the "justice" system even more.

you could probably write a cool little gotcha of an SF short story about a barren wasteland of a planet that keeps broadcasting out legalese that's revealed to just be LLM chatbot lawyers pedantically arguing with one another about xeno legal doctrine

They seem unaccountable. Every other profession has increased their productivity.

Don’t you have fee when initiating a lawsuit ?

I don’t know in the USA but in France, if it’s deemed that you launched a lawsuit knowing very well it wouldn’t succeed, you are susceptible to get a 10k€ fine. Even jail in serious cases.

Why the hell are they not fighting fire with fire? This is not sustainable. But it is annoying that the AI labs get to play arms dealer, selling to both sides.

Not like common law doesnt already have a lot of hallucination going on.

Does hallucination matter for this application? We've moved beyond raw recall being that important, it seems like for law specifically all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans.

The benchmark you linked to shows GPT-6 Astra having the lowest hallucination rate of all tested models.

I’m sure there are a wide variety of experiences out there, but here’s my perspective as a former biglaw associate and current solo litigator:

I have had some success using frontier models from the last 6ish months, but only when I can break up my work into discrete and verifiable tasks. For example, I had ~15k pages of discovery I needed to dig through for a summary judgment motion. Instead of just asking Claude to find the best evidence, I asked it first to run a clean, high quality OCR pass (it was almost entirely PDFs). Then I had it generate embeddings and write some reusable python scripts to make keyword and semantic searching easy for agents. While I was writing the brief, I would routinely ask my agent (Claude Code) to use both keyword and semantic searching to find the best evidence supporting whatever assertion I was trying to make. I trusted it because there were traces I could follow.

In other cases/situations, I’ve tried just giving a model access to all the docs and saying “write a brief arguing X,” but it’s always terrible at this. It writes briefs with lots of evocative jargon and rhetorical flourish, but a low signal-to-noise ratio.

Again, I’m sure others’ experiences differ based on workflow, legal area, etc.

They are excellent, especially the latest models. That said, (a) I wouldn't feel safe filing something without a real lawyer looking at it; (b) it can't (easily? legally?) do oral arguments for you; and (c) a lot can happen in the hallways outside the courtroom to move a case forward that the AI can't easily do.

Probably because the AI was also trained on HN comments.

We do and it saves so much time. Of course human judgment is needed but it’s like cooking with someone else doing the mise en place.

Truncating the Y axis or cropping the Y axis

The product isn’t meant for you or me it is for lawyers. If you can’t take personal liability for a badly written contract then you shouldn’t be using it.

> who is getting sued when it is wrong?

You. Don't take legal advice from a word calculator.

Solved without AI https://commonpaper.com

https://commonpaper.com/standards

Same for SWE when pushing code they don't understand.

> can you use this to create legitimate terms

I don't think you can. What I get from this article is that this is not a product they're going to sell to average consumers.

when you shoot someone with a gun, who gets sued? you? or the gun manufacturer?

I'd expect they could indemnify you against hallucinations or similar if this gets good enough for that to be a very rare occurrence? Or you could buy insurance on it that's cheaper than hiring a lawyer (not a high bar to clear). I wouldn't rely on it currently, though.

You can create terms and contracts even if you're a 7 year old with no AI.

And yes, even contracts drafted for millions of $ have oversights and unlawful or unenforceable terms.

You will be the one getting sued. It's just a tool.

I already use them for that, they are pretty excellent at it. Much better than the terms of use generator products that used to exist. That said, nobody cares to sue your business for the most part until you're big enough to be worth it. By that time, you'll have a team of legal analyst to assist you... or agents should I say.

Then again, nobody will have money to buy anything at this rate, so in all liklihood, this is a total non-issue.

You are.

What do you mean by “lawslop”?

Slawp?

law-bearing

i hope that someone can come up with something catchier than "thing-slop" or "slop-thing". the word has become basically meaningless from overuse.

Slop?

They have a lot of compute, so I think it makes sense to spray and see what works. Anthropic is limited in that regard, and focused in coding/tech, but OpenAI don't need to do the same. They even got the lead without having to focus in coding only, which is remarkable.

Do they still do Atlas, the web browser? They are indeed throwing shit at the wall, seeing what stick.

Enterprise is eventually get caught (if it isn't already) by the Microsoft/Google. Because with office/teams/suite they were already in every enterprise, and that just added a new tool to existing offerings.

Provisioning and contracts and data retention was just an extension to review of existing ones.

Nobody serious is going to risk sending sensible data to OpenAI/Anthropic, etc because "the benchmarks have shown +8% performance there and +2% there". Irrelevant.

> The biggest wallet wins

This was already always the case. If anything, making this more accessible will reduce the barrier to entry for whether or not it's worth your time to take on a case. Instead of 50 lawyers spending 100s of hours on a case, you can have 1 or 2 lawyers + Astra working on it and if there's a case you can add more real lawyers.

That’s how the legal system in the US has always worked though

With regard to certain legal questions this has always been the case. AT&T Fought the US Government for 20 years and eventually won because the government gave up. Without some kind of national anti-SLAPP law we're all one irritated oligarch away from having our lives financially ruined.

I am curious what level of trust established law firms treat LLMs with.

That's already the case in law because you could just hire the best or most lawyers.

Do you really think the law isn't already horribly abused? Democratization of law has been needed for a thousand years.

That’s a great question for Astra for Law.

Perhaps, but then someone would do the same but bill you for 7 hours, someone else would undercut them again, until the price reaches a lower equilibrium.

That is an ethics violation. Even in the pre-AI era, getting caught billing for hours not worked was seriously punished.

Most HNers are clueless that if you have Top Talent + Capital you already have an insurmountable moat. OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic all have that and none of the regular guys can compete against them (if they choose to attack that industry)

I'd kill for an AI that can tell me how to fix shit on my own, with proper permitting and building codes factored in.

I think the future is going to look pretty boring, we are all going to review and put our signature below LLM generated output...

> We have big problems for humanity.

The biggest problem is that we're conditioned by a paradigm that frames these as problems.

As one wise man said - the oldest profession will also be the last to go.

> Will these models eventually replace all knowledge work, leaving lawyers, doctors, product managers, software developers, and others out of a job?

Effectively yes, in the current forms. Those professions will likely evolve, but the traditional forms (ie writing code by hand, writing law filings by hand etc) are all dead.

Just a few years ago people were paying 400k for pictures of apes. We always make up new stuff to spend money on.

If we have enough energy and raw materials to keep building, yes, it will be an utopia made real. But if there is energy scarcity, then other two outcomes can arise.

No, it will only leave those without a professional license jobless. Like software developers.

True, unless you're a surgeon.

I mean that's what all of these execs are openly telling everyone: they want you out of work, they want their ai to be the one to bring the world to it's knees, they want to surveille every second of your day, they want killer drones to use, they want to lay all of your cities to rubble and build "paradises" on top of them like in gaza.

They also openly tell you what they are afraid of btw: collective worker power. something that is massively lacking in our industry, although i feel like it would be one of the easiest industries to unionize in terms of # of workers.

Interesting interview I just watched about how powerful and dangerous these "wishes" or "prophecies" are especially in the hands of the ultra-wealthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7grHa1NR0