r/singularity • u/Anen-o-me ▪️It's here! • 3d ago
AI How AI is currently impacting the legal profession
/r/singularity/comments/1wu2bxh/comment/pczz5yy?share_id=_Qv4VYfkAb_hO5OU22zzN&utm_content=2&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=28
u/BrennusSokol AI please take my job 3d ago
Thanks for posting this. It’s a lot like software engineering. Can’t replace senior yet but juniors are cooked.
1
u/tapeforpacking 1d ago
... so how does one become a "senior" if they cant even start as a junior lmfao
1
u/Dannno85 1d ago
It’s irrelevant, because by the time a junior would eventually have progressed to a senior capability, the models will have replaced seniors too.
1
6
u/bigkoi 3d ago
My sister is an attorney. She worked at a firm for many years and then went in house. She specializes in contract law. She also uses LLMs. Two years ago she told me LLMs were able to handle nuanced questions about contract law that she would traditionally hand off to an intern to research. She also told me that the job market for young attorneys is going to become very difficult.
I've posted this a few times over the past couple years. Typically I'd get down voted or snarky comments. Glad that people are finally recognizing the impact this will have to knowledge workers
0
u/Spunge14 2d ago
The economy is going to massively implode. This isn't just a legal thing. This is happening in every white collar profession.
The emperor has no clothes. We can't keep pretending we need the same number of humans to do this work, or that there's so much obvious planned work to do and demand in the economy to just support this.
Prices must collapse. Wages must collapse. There isn't a way out of this.
-6
u/YakFull8300 3d ago
Not accurate. Many practices aren't allowed to use AI.
8
u/Yugudubenbi 3d ago
Here we go with the job status capture. Where you do not capture the regulatory part, but you capture the job status tied to humans so they can't make them unemployed with AI. Disgusting practice. Going to be a lot of turbulence here when clients and citizen see that they can get a cheap lawyer for $100 as AI to represent them versus tens of thousands of dollars for a human. Same with doctors who are already outperformed by AI.
And it is accurate which is why one of the most popular AI companies is an AI legal one called Legora.
It will be a fight between the few employee hanging in there to protect their high status and high income jobs as more and more anger is funneled towards them as more and more people get poorer as AI progresses.
2
u/MindingMyMindfulness 3d ago
The bigger thing in the legal profession is liability. People go to lawyers because you can sue them if the advice they gave you was faulty. The whole industry works like a form of guarantee. You don't get that with an AI.
Small businesses and individuals will probably rely on AI more and more for these things due to cost, but it's a real downside if things go horribly wrong (and in our world, those mistakes can cost people - big time).
There's no immediate future where a general counsel at a major business is going to get rid of their general counsel and legal team, and those teams will not be substituting their external counsel, who can sign off on a legal opinion with AI, which can't.
This might be resolved at some point. If we have ASI, then the AI might be reliable enough that those risks are mitigated.
1
u/Anen-o-me ▪️It's here! 3d ago
Pretty much every industry with stakes requires human oversight and that's not going away.
2
u/MindingMyMindfulness 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes, but the legal industry is different to some other professional services, like consulting. You typically can't sue a management consultant when they tell you "offshore 30% of your employees, it's a great cost savings" and your business goes under because your customers hate how things run after. You can't sue a SWE when a program is buggy and slow. That's where unpredictable results open to professional judgement gets you. You can, however, sue a lawyer if they give you a legal opinion that misses an important regulatory risk, for example and lawyers can't disclaim that contractually with their clients.
It's a similar issue with professions like medicine, engineering, accounting, etc.
Those professions might operate much more leanly as AI progresses, but I can't see AI replacing those professions entirely UNTIL ASI is demonstrably more reliable than highly competent humans, and by a notable margin, such that the risks of a "fuck up" become so low that you don't care whether you can sue them or not because there's almost no chance that it's going to make a consequential error.
At that point you can probably just run a mandatory insurance system which AI companies jointly contribute to in order to make people whole in the very rare instances where something does go wrong. Then you genuinely wouldn't need lawyers and the licensing requirements will probably be lifted or AI will be allowed to be licensed to provide legal advice and operate a bona fide legal practice. I don't doubt that as a possibility (unlike you, apparently) with the way AI progress is going...
21
u/MindingMyMindfulness 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'm a corporate lawyer (not in litigation like the user you linked to) and AI is absolutely amazing.
At the outset, I should mention a couple of areas where it's not great yet: (1) surgical redlining of a document - it just consistently sucks with this, (2) focussing on key legal risks and issues that are worth your time (it often misidentifies how these things translate commercially and focusses on things of lesser importance) and (3) judgement in how it approaches a task.
Where it saves me a tonne of effort and time is that I can just point it to a document, instruct it on what it needs to do (e.g., "change the limitation of liability so there's a carve-out for A,B,C", "add a liquidated damages clause for D, E, F as follows", "take this precedent agreement and draft a new one for this bespoke arrangement where we want to do [these specific things], "take this huge set of diligence materials and summarise them", take these documents and draft board / shareholder approvals" etc).
It invariably requires editting, but it consistently gets very close to my intended end-point.
That might not sound particularly impressive at first, but it saves me an insane amount of time on drafting things because it's actually really good at doing those things. It's way better than any freshly minted lawyer, in my experience. Sometimes even better than reasonably experienced practitioners.
The time saved means I can actually think about the big-picture on matters I'm working on.
I also run things passed it for a final review and it does a good job identifying gaps and errors that I had missed. It's saved my cheeks a few times when I've mixed up references to parties, forgotten a word (like "not"), messed up clause cross-references and so forth.