AI is going to start replacing most lawyers in 2/3 years

Honestly don’t know because my experience with lawyers is buying a house. How much does demand go up if cost goes down by 5x? Do prosecutors now prosecute more cases are there more appeals from cases because it makes more sense financially? I suspect fewer people go into law and low performs cannot find work. In my field, The current trips to the moon are probably using 2-3x more man hours despite technology and tooling being significantly better.

What happened to the number of lawyers after the advent of computers? What about the Internet? It went up both times. Those inventions greatly increased productivity.

What people have always missed about tech innovation, since the days of the Luddites, is the number of new jobs that get created around entirely new fields. For example: think of all the new legal problems that are going to pop up due to AI Deepfake and data privacy issues. That’s a whole new specialty of lawyer that will be very important in 10 years.

Will affect less the jobs where interpersonal relationships are important - banking will remain the same, same with consulting

This is paranoia over AI. It’s going to replace stuff like cashiers and possibly fast food workers , and that’s still a stretch. There’s not going to be a robot that acts like a human to do surgery or an AI that acts like a personal lawyer. There’s going to be humans using robots for surgery , there already is, and lawyers may consult AI for certain cases. But Ai will never understand that human sense of cooperation , especially for stuff like greed, and all that shady and flawed stuff humans do. Just imagine to OJ Simpson case working with an Ai. The Ai would be like “not even a moron Will believe the glove don’t fit” let’s just negotiate for 10 years, but the Ai doesn’t understand societal tensions and stuff like biased juries.

What about mortgage/real estate? Although interpersonal relationships are big there AI could help with some of the technicalities of buying/closing homes (loan processors and loan officers, for instance).

AI is the new Y2K. The same level of hysteria from people.

This is silly. As a lawyer who has worked at a number of AI/NLP/LLM startups, there's a certain amount of fearmongering here.

Lawyers are already being cited for malpractice for copy-pasting ChatGPT inputs that cite to cases that don't actually exist. These hallucinations aren't quick fixes and require specific training on legal data.

The state of the art for legal case/precedent prediction is here, but still has a bit of a way to go:

arxiv.org

AutoLAW: Augmented Legal Reasoning through Legal Precedent Prediction

This paper demonstrate how NLP can be used to address an unmet need of the legal community and increase access to justice. The paper introduces Legal Precedent Prediction (LPP), the task of predicting relevant passages from p...

Open link

Research shows that defendants don't feel comfortable receiving rulings or judgments from inanimate objects.

I've been watching closely the divorce of a couple I know. The briefs submitted by the lawyers are all (and I mean all) slightly revised versions of briefs from earlier cases - a few minutes of work by clerks. And even then, they get the names of the parties to the case wrong. This is low level lawyering from the bottom half of the law school class. Yes the parties occasionally go to court - but these court appearances take 10 - 20 minutes. After a year and a half in a very run-of-the-mill proceeding, the legal bills for the divorcing couple are at $60,000 and counting. For the last few months all (and i mean all) of the legal wrangling has been about who pays the wife's much larger legal fees. The clock has been running for 18 months as the lawyers knowingly stretch out the process. It's impossible that whateverGPTChat would do worse than this.

Lol. Good! Have you seen the left wing psychos being pumped out by law schools these days?? Hope they all stay unemployed and still have to pay back their six-figure student loans. Hahaha.

I'm a lawyer. I think AI will make certain legal jobs easier and more efficient, and will reduce the need for human lawyers. But I think your prediction that "most" will be replaced is wrong.

I'm not worried either way as I am 71.

I have a feeling that if instead of training on the whole internet, you only trained on your states case laws most of the issues would go away.

But the big thing isn't replacing all lawyers. It is as someone else said making them 10x better. If that results in 10x less lawyers or 10x more cases is unknowable.

That's not how LLMs like ChatGPT work. You would get an even stupider ChatGPT without all the stolen copyrighted text it was trained on because it wouldn't be enough material. And even if you did only use state law as the training material, LLMs like ChatGPT inherently fabricate fake things because they don't actually have any concept of understanding. They are just advanced autocomplete with random number generators thrown in for variety.

As for the article I linked to earlier before about the lawyers using ChatGPT to fabricate fake citations and court cases, more details have now come out where the lawyers actually doubled down and notarized the fake citations they made with ChatGPT when the judge and opposing lawyers said they are fake. Hence why the judge is so mad and is sanctioning the lawyers that used ChatGPT

arstechnica.com

Lawyer cited 6 fake cases made up by ChatGPT; judge calls it “unprecedented”

@JBrodkin

Judge weighs punishment for lawyer who didn't bother to verify ChatGPT output.

Open link

Do you have a study showing there is a high percentage of 'left wing psychos being pumped out by law schools"? I only see the law grads who clerk and interview with us or that I deal with on my transactions, so I won't pretend to know what the majority of the grads are like. But how are you in a position to be knowledgeable enough to make your claim?

Who’s al? Like al bundy? Shoe sales men are going to replace lawyers?

I've seen that firsthand! Their job is to win, not to be correct.

Some of the nonsense they come up with gets accepted by the courts and decides cases for years with nobody noticing. The system is a bureaucracy, nobody will fix things until some effort is made to make them do it.

78 percent of litigants in court are self-represented, so I think AI can be very useful for them to get help with minor legal tasks to make the judicial process much easier.

I work in a court system and am pretty excited about the possibilities. We’re looking to help people who don’t have access to lawyers, not replace them. This also addresses our staffing issues, as everyone wants a fully remote job or jumped ship for bigger salaries.

Former BigLaw lawyer here. I can't wait to see this happen. Law has resisted change for so long and there is so much graft and fee padding in the industry. I think that there will always be space for the art of arguing cases in court (unless we get to the point where a ChatGPT powered plaintiff and defense are presenting to a ChatGPT powered judge), but the herd of 25 year old associates who have zero practical experience and are paid $215k to start can and should be culled.

This might even bring much needed reforms to the education system, such as reducing the number of law schools and shortening the curriculum to 2 years. The displaced will figure out more productive uses of their brainpower and we will all benefit from this in the long run.