I'd correct this to "The need for actual GOOD lawyers will persist I think from my own experience."

I have worked with many lawyers in my career. The bad ones will look at a contract and tell you fifty things that can be improved. Meanwhile, you take the same contract to a really great lawyer and they tell you that's it's not worth fighting over the changes and to just keep it as is. It's kind of like how a beginner or intermediate software engineer might tell you how you can build out a k8s or auto-scaling fargate cluster for your project and a really senior engineer might look at the same thing and explain that it's not worth worrying about scalability right now.

I find that when I feed contracts to ChatGPT (which I do all the time) it will try to find 50 things wrong with it. For example, as a test, i fed chatgpt an employment offer from a US government agency. It came back with 1152 words and 14 recommended (some of them substantial) changes. Meanwhile, any half-decent employment attorney would probably laugh at me if I asked them to redline an employment offer from the State Department.

In my recent experience, it seems like LLMs may even increase need/demand for actual lawyers (more ideas + more words = more lawyer time). I expect lawyers will generally adopt the technologies that will benefit them, rather than the technologies that would increase standardization and trust

The same has happened with modern finance. Despite more technology that has power to drive more transparent/efficient markets, we have less perfect information sharing and a larger group of middlemen capturing a growing share of profits of the economy

you can't in imagine the same way you couldn't imagine generating the text from your initial prompt. when will the hubris end?

some variant of "oh i am capable of generating text i know nothing about, but it helps to have a human i can rely on to tell me more about the text i know nothing about."

pick up a bachelors degree worth of books to humble yourself

I want to take a step back and observe that you're saying expensive specialists will continue to be required if two parties want to make an agreement. That seems like something worth fixing rather than just accepting.

Not trying to be dismissive here but a lawyer will always edit your proposal. I do think lawyers will persist but not as many. And they will work very differently, much like we already use claude / codex to code - a big part of the contract probably won't be read by the lawyer.

LLMs are the first genuinely useful legal tech since the Internet. I'm pretty shocked, though, at the delta between how competent Claude is on code versus legal work. It's good for research and data organization, but terrible for drafting. I wonder if this is a structural problem with the lack of feedback loops. In law, there's no compiler to check for logical or continuity errors in your brief, and there's no unit tests to check for correctness or performance.

Even without that, I think it'll be extremely valuable to clients to allow them to answer simple questions without a lawyer, figure out the lay of the land so they can supervise their counsel, etc.

Also, unlike SW engineers, lawyers control their industry and will quickly circle the wagons to protect themselves. Paralegals are probably screwed, but lawyers will do fine. I'm considering law as my post-ai-SWE-apocolypse career path.

Human professionals put their reputation and finances at risk when performing their work. This risk functions as a guarantee.

I was in a similar situation and tried a different approach.

I had start with asking for a contact with some details I provided. But then I ask the model to be an experienced corporate lawyer and ask me a series of questions to gather the details it needed and then write the contract. The result covered a lot of details that were highly relevant but were absent from the original attempt.

The key insight is that you can lean on the model to cover your unknown unknowns.

> The need for actual lawyers will persist..

I agree. But, we will need a lot fewer of them. My small company called our lawyer a lot more before the advent of AI. Mostly to clarify a few things or review simpler contracts. Now, for simple things, we do not call them at all.

> One big thing was the overly excessive protective clauses which didn't make sense for reality or conflicted with another.

I'm currently negotiating with someone who I feel is clearly using AI and this is EXACTLY what has been happening

> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think

But will their glamorous salaries persist? That is the question that matters.

AI doesn't need to wipe out lawyers. If they just depress salaries enough, virtually nobody is going to want to be a lawyer anymore.

> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience

This doesn’t replace lawyers, but paralegals surely will be affected. A good enough model could shrink the number of paralegals needed in a firm.

The best writer I know of was an associate attorney. He didn't have the technical background nor the in depth computer related knowledge, and relying on the information I fed him. But man the briefs he filed to the court were amazingly good. Reading them I would have been convinced his side was right if I were in the jury.

Law LLM will surely help competent lawyers in their fields with greater sources of knowledge not in their core area of expertise.

And to add to your last point yes it should also be like code: where the costs of development are coming down. Legal costs should trend down if law firms are effectively leveraging LLMs to accellerate their procedures (though I won't hold my breath)

I got the exact opposite. A contract from a lawyer passed through ai found so many flaws.

> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience.

The outcome of a case shouldn't depend on someone's fallible ability to recall facts or convince other people or point their index finger*

Law should generally be deterministic. One's CHA stat should have no bearing on justice.

There should still be human judges, but the middleman between the judge and petitioner could easily be removed, and have generally been seen as leeches since forever anyway.

Though, like how the USA opts to remain in the Stone Age with regard to tax filing because of lobbying by tax software companies, this faction of society will flail the hardest before they admit they're obsolete.

----

* What's a lawyer's favorite programming language? Objection C.

Lawyers sure. Paralegals and assistants are cooked in the way typist and secretaries were back in the day.

The typical pattern is called “deskilling”. It doesn’t usually mean a skilled profession will disappear overnight. Instead, the job might be done by less expensive folks like paralegals.

An example is in the banking industry, where making a loan used to require deep analysis of a person’s credit worthiness. Now they use an algorithm (credit scores) which means someone with less experience can do it.

If law follows the same pattern, a job done by someone making $500/hour might be done by someone making $50/hour.

"law" and those who pratice "law" have managed to place itself largly in a monopoly. This is a huge drain on the economy. Law is expensive and irrational.

He just gad better prompt

What model did you use?

It's worth noting that the announcement seems to aim the product at lawyers or students rather than laymen.

Our entire world is about reducing the friction of conducting a transaction

How to fix the lack of trust which is needed to conduct a transaction

Contracts affix a moment of trust in time, so even when trust is lost between parties the contract has guardrails for behavior and consequences for acting outside those rails

There are many transactions that are completely inaccessible to most people because the need for a contract or lawyer is too high

LLM use allows for those inaccessible transactions to decrease, and get people further along to the point where a lawyer is accessible as well, and economically viable to use

> One big thing was the overly excessive protective clauses which didn't make sense for reality or conflicted with another.

>Its just like code I suppose, if you can read and understand and validate

I share this, when I asked an attorney for a contract, they were much simpler when compared to self redacted or AI redacted contract, it was as if I were rediscovering lots of concepts and I HAD to put them in paper, even if they were defaults and were essentially no-ops.

Comparable to:

> Mkdir $PWD/path

instead of

> mkdir path

or conditions so rare that they don't merit including.

> x = 0

> if x!=0:

> raise Exception("Bit flip by solar rays or otherwise")

>The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience

At the very least because the attorney monopoly assigns a 5ish year of training as PoW and natural personhood as Identity as protection for Sybil Attacks.

If anything, the exclusive right of attorneys to represent clients in court, file motions, and enjoy professional secret, is more valuable, as it's not something AI can ever compete at. (Barring a wild recognition of machines as humans, or an overturn of the impossibility of companies to appear in court.)

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