How the hell did these lawyers do their jobs before?
Dump the work on your underlings, but now they are dumping it on AI. Whoops.
Cocaine
And paralegals, I would bet the paralegals are the ones useing AI, but telling a judge “hey I didn’t check anything I just submitted what the paralegals gave me” could be worse for the career.
I miss integrity.
I know how this is going to sound but during college I thought I was going to go to law school and I had a cute little part-time job with the smallest local law firm. It was just the lawyer who had been doing it for ages and another part-time lawyer, so pretty much a one-man firm, and I would draft briefs for him that were absolutely ridiculous in their acerbity. He would then edit them and call me into his office and show me his edits and tell me I needed to tone it down. It was social security disability law, so there were a lot of people with debilitating diseases, some of whom didn’t receive benefits for YEARS until after their deaths (benefits went to widow/ers). It shook me and the scales fell from my eyes, but we actually worked on these things. He was a smart guy and could have done a different field of law but he genuinely wanted to do this, and the college students he employed cared too, and we crafted our own words.
I really miss that man.
Anyway, all of that to say even if paralegals were drafting the lawyers’ statements, there is no reason for them to not look over them and properly edit before they submit. Because some of my first drafts were wildddd lol
Part of the problem these days is people have slowly stopped mentoring young professionals like that. Yes it takes time, but it’s either paying it forward or leaving the world better than you found it. As a professional I have obligations to society, and I believe those include the integrity to review everything I professionally endorse to a reasonable degree, and to help guide and instruct younger members of my career when given opportunities. It’s important to say “hey, here’s what you did wrong, here’s why it’s wrong, here’s how you should do it.”
Hey, as a man on ssdi I honestly appreciate you. And I honestly feel most lawyers and their employees are dedicated and work hard to get things right, that’s why when stupid shit happens it makes the news, noone wants to read "normal decent guy, dedicated to their profession, once again does an outstanding job.
I realy do appreciate your work, I’m a bit odd about words and love clear exact terminology, some leagal briefs I’ve read are fucking poetry.
You are talking about lawyers? Nice and decent? Wow.
Oh sorry I kinda went off on my own tangent but I’m glad you have people looking out for you. We had to file and file and file and kept bouncing to different courts and going to the 7th circuit etc and it was crazy how much work they put in to try to block it. Imagine if they just gave you benefits straight away, since they definitely wasted more money with the denials and appeals. What a wonderful world. I really hope you’re doing well (clearly I’m not the terminology guy)
Nah your good man, it truly is insane watching how much money gets wasted by trying to catch cheats. Just have Dr’s submit shit and get it done, then if someone does cheat go after the Dr’s and the cheaters.
I’m not a lawyer, path diverged, but it was both hilarious and devastating what went on in that office. I’d turn in initial briefs (my job way back then was to read through all their medical notes and then turn them into something readable for the law types) and it was just like “this guy has needed a new wheelchair for 2 fuckin years, assholes,” and then I’d find the specs of the different wheelchairs that would be more suitable, and then my lovely old boss would call me into the office and say “hey, that’s not how we word things, let’s have you go over my edits” and we’d trade back and forth until my vitriol married his professionalism.
A scathing legal brief is so exciting to read. You’re on the edge of your seat like it’s a final match in [insert your preferred sport] like GET EM!" Good times.
I hope you’re doing okay, message me if you want to vent about the SSDI process or anything! I’m not in it now tho
Meanwhile the legislators are writing laws with AI, so it’s fucked before it gets to the courts
“I get you’re frustrated 🧨. That’s perfectly legitimate. 👍 Here are five ways to make your concerns heard: …”
should follow up with general bar reviews, need to hammer out this behavior.
We have a pedophile for president, the entire legal system is a joke anyway.
let’s execute people or jail them for 10000 year. MURICA 🤡
DOGE and Stephen Miller considered declaring over 2.7 million living people as dead to deny them benefits and deport them and deprive them of all other rights. MURICA 🤡
Accountwall
This is disappointing. I would not want to be the judge on a case that nobody respects.
Should’ve fined both lawyers for this bullshit.
Nah, better to disbar them
That’s not a decision a judge can make in this context.
Nah, they can drink alcohol if they want to.
There were actually 4 lawyers, and all 4 were fined and 2 of them barred from presenting to the Court for several years.
Judge wasn’t fucking around.
My fear is that we may lose the older judges to the people who pull stunts like this, and then it’ll be an unqualified and ignorant judge listening to lawyers citing imaginary evidence
Judge wasn’t fucking around.
Just one of many such stories, and yet more lawyers keep thinking it’s a good idea to bring unverified AI into a courtroom…
Sure, use AI to generate your documents and filings … but then take the time to verify it manually! Make sure the cited cases and laws actually exist and are actually relevant. Scan it for errors or ‘AI speak’. At least fucking read it.
I have no idea how people can be so confident in a LLM that they’d use it for something so high-stakes without checking its work!
I litteraly just went through this shit about 3hrs ago. I needed to install a flange gasket for a 2.5" pipe flange hydraulic return. A.I tells me I can’t use this particular multi layer gasket type I have because I have a flat flange.
Lo and behold I find the the manufacturer data sheet. Perfectly suitable for my application.
Like it’s one thing for a.i to fail at making shit up. But it’s a hole other fuck up when it can’t even regurgitate information correctly.
Why did you try to use AI for that in the first place? Are you not part of the problem? Glad you figured it out
Isn’t the rule of thumb that you can use it for things you can verify? They were able to verify.
It gave them bad advice
Never, ever use AI for legal review for a client.
Inviting an AI into the threads removes privilege.
lol, that too. Who knows what kind of private legal information you’re freely feeding to the AI company.
It’s worse than that. The AI isn’t part of the attorney/client relationship, so anything shared with it isn’t covered by privilege and is discoverable.
Disbarment should follow after the leak soon, for violating privilege
Enterprise usage of AI tools, at least those I have seen, is entirely private
Supposedly.
I wouldn’t trust anything to be truly private in the hands of these AI companies, though – they’re always scraping training data from wherever they can get it (legality be damned), and requests from enterprise clients are extremely valuable training data. They’ll make promises about how everything stays in-house … but then your chat history gets integrated into the new public model through its training, and maybe it’s now able to reproduce your private information when asked.
That would be a massive legal dispute that would probably end up sinking them. There’s legal agreements they can’t train or use the data. Would blow reputation and be legal volcano
The barring part makes me happy. The fining might make me happy…how much was the fine? Do you know?
Between 1100 and 3500. It’s in the artiblcle before the paywall kicks in.
Ok. Given Lawyers general salaries, that’s really not that much. That’s like a slap on the wrist. I was hoping it was like $20,000.
But the barring still makes me happy.
It’s more about the barring and the official censure. A couple grand doesn’t mean much A judicial beatdown is professionally damaging.
And since it’s federal court, being barred from that courtroom is a real blow. It’s not like they can just focus on the next city or county over.
Couldn’t they just go to other courtrooms in that courthouse? There’s going to be a few to a few dozen
They’re barred from presenting federal cases in the Northern District of Mississippi. That covers all federal cases for 36 counties - half the state.
If the other room is not federal maybe? They mean being barred from the federal courtroom the lawyers can’t practice law in federal court.
I mean, he was sort of fucking around. A lawyer that is fine using AI for a case should never be allowed to work as a lawyer after that. That’s a gigantic moral flaw.
How ? Typically the law society is the group to remove a lawyers license to practice. He could perhaps refer them but this is different the world over.
A judge can’t revoke a law license. But they can issue a fine and bar them from their courtroom.
The judge’s action in this case was brutal. It’s the legal equivalent of a public caning.
That was the only logical thing to do
So if bots talking to bots is the dead internet, does AI arguing in court against other AI means that we are now seeing the beginning of dead law?
Not in that judge’s courtroom 👨⚖️
Wait till you learn that the lobbyists that wrote the laws for the legislators used AI.
So it’s still AI in that judge’s courtroom.
The well is poisoned
I, <insert name here>, congressional representative for <insert state here>, hereby attest to the matters herein.
The well was poisoned long before LLMs existed. AI just takes it up yet one more notch, but it seems to me to be merely increased quantity not new quality of fuck-uppery. We shall see.
No. Dead law began with the supreme court (which I shall no longer capitalise) hand-waving presidential crime. Law has been broken ever since in the US, and it’s been getting worse.
“you get what you pay for” is not even a thing anymore. Lazy people will just use an LLM and charge you as if they did the actual thinking.
No thinking was involved then
Thinking they can get away with it was involved.
Yes, that was the implication.
Unpopular opinion, but I can see the utility of well-trained LLMs in legal preparation.
Not for writing arguments, obviously, but preliminary searches are one of the best uses I’ve found for AI. It could be pretty effective to sift through mountains of case law for relevant precedent, granted that you actually evaluate your results manually.
There are explicit published guidelines for using AI in the legal field.
No court is actually against the use of LLM-generated text.
The problem is lazy lawyers. They just accept what is written on the screen in front of them. They do not rewrite it. They do not verify any quotes or legal briefs or opinions that it spits out at them.
And that is expressly forbidden. Everything that is submitted under a lawyer’s name has to be either written by or directly reviewed and approved by that lawyer.
Even lawyers know 80% of any legal brief is just stuff put in there to meet the text requirements for review.
If you use an LLM to fill in that 80% with some manual guidance, then it can allow you to focus on the 20% of the legal brief that actually matters.
Less unpopular than you might think.
LLMs are an interesting and potentially useful tool; however, as it does with most things, capitalism is ruining it for everyone.
I also use it for writing arguments, as it can come up with some creative ideas. However, they do not just blindly end up in the final document. In every letter, there is at least one major mistake, probably due to the token limit.
