Unless you're using an ephemeral on-prem LLM that doesn't keep logs you should begin with an assumption that your AI chat transcripts will be available to your opponents in discovery. There isn't clear caselaw on this yet, but given that material you share with third parties other than your lawyers almost always is and sharing your strategy musing would probably be disastrous, you should plan accordingly.
Particularly, subpoena are quite powerful in the US and can be obtained quite easily and often without an adequate opportunity for the ultimate user to oppose them. The AI providers will comply with them as just a matter of process, and the first notice that an opponent is seeking your transcripts may be after they already have them. (And that's assuming your opposition doesn't have insiders at the AI company to begin with...)
That aside-- Having thoroughly dispatched an AI dependent opponent in court, uhh, well lets just say that I hope any future opponents read this article. ChatGPT outputs an astonishingly embarrassing amount of completely wrong pseudolegal nonsense and set him up for multiple case losing disasters.
There are also a number of advanced strategies available to an opponent who has realized you are using an LLM, as they now have oracle access to something similar to your own AI advice and can test their actions against the advice it will cause you to get from your AI. ... even so far as brute force searching rewrites of the language in their correspondence to increase the odds that you get disastrous advice.
US discovery law is wild.
There are legal research AI's and tools out there, which sophisticated non lawyers probably use. Discovery rules haven't been a deterrent because of the companion work product doctrine which is an adjuct to the American Rule-- you generally can't use discovery to extract legal research from the other side.
Even in most American jurisdictions, the losing party ends up paying many of the prevailing party's costs (deposition transcripts, expert costs, etc.).
- Delete that data as per your retention records
(there's also the fun alternative with feeding believable but slightly wrong info to the AIs and let the opposite council chase loose ends)
Wouldn't this have largely been settled already with cloud computing? If I use gmail to write an e-mail to my lawyer, then I can't imagine that e-mail is unprivileged because it's "shared" with Google.
Therefore I think the same things apply as in software development, when you start to think you can fire lawyers and replace them with AI: you will then bear the responsibility of the job they did before. That means it can go the right way, but it can also go the wrong, wrong way.
Although without the timing conflicts. :-)
(*) as a technical person too, but then the understanding part takes less effort and you can skip using AI to do it
I hope it spurs a larger "moral reckoning" movement of legal strategy among "big players" - the moral depravity or trying to abuse other innovators through deceptive legal gaming is an illness US corps should cure themselves of.
My advice to developers/engineers who start their own corps is: always read every contract, think through the implications, consider worst cases, and only sign ones you're comfortable with. If you don't like anything, push back and negotiate. How does the other side they come off in that process? Make note of who they show you they are and incorporate that knowledge into your ultimate decisions.
I guess if you're VC backed the calculation is different: let the advisors and LPs absorb the risk and handle it for you. But if not: you need to get involved deeply. AI is a superpower that hopefully stops the abuses that have been so rampant. You got this!
Given many countries share the same language, I am struggling to understand how he make sure chatGPT is not hallucinating and that he is basing his advice on the laws of the correct country.
A problem not so easily solved here is the difference between the law and reality. Where the LLM is completely blind to which laws are actually enforced in a proper manner.
IMHO hallucinations are not that bad when you have a human in the loop.
We're not there, yet, but we will be, probably within our lifetime.
With Google progressively replacing actual websites with AI-generated results, you might come full circle to having Gemini validate the same hallucinations the Gemini app produced in the first place.
The main observation is you 100% have to manage lawyers aggressively and understand and question what they are doing at literally every step or the budget will be out of control. Sounds like AI helped this guy but it’s more about your personality/approach than anything else.
Also don’t hire $1000 an hour lawyers for litigation unless you’re a major corporation in a complex case with a ton at stake.
When you are in litigation you are at war, embrace the suck.
I am all for using whatever tools we have at our disposal to get things done. I use GenAI to automate/speed up a few tasks in my personal and professional life as well. However, the danger is plain; if I didn't already know how to do those tasks, I'd be leaving myself in the dark as to how they actually got done. As you can imagine, this just furthers what I call Dependency Culture, where we are at the mercy of having our decisions made for us because we don't understand the process.
There's a lot of (perhaps unfair) poo-pooing on GenAi, and I am guilty of it myself, but the fact remains that while it does make certain things like navigating a complex legal contract accessible to someone who is unfamiliar, the aim should be to use it to get familiar with said subject, ultimately reaching a point where the GenAI is no longer needed.
I'm not even talking about lawsuits, but all the situations where you can report things to the government, but it's so much hassle that most people won't even bother. Things like labor / safety violations, violations of data protection and anti-spam laws, improper parking, that sort of thing. If reporting those could be as easy as complaining and posting a photo on Facebook or Instagram, a lot more people would do it.
Maybe you pay those costs before you sign a contract, and avoid a jurisdiction in a contract that you have no connection to (if you can). But you will definitely pay these costs when you have to litigate. If you think Claude or ChatGPT is the best answer to this, and all you need to know is using advanced voice and upload documents, I believe that's not that useful piece of advice.
Please bear in mind that it's not just particular case law that these tools hallucinate. They give incorrect advice in very different ways how humans do. If you can find a lawyer you can trust in a jurisdiction you're interested in, and you got along with him/her quite well, you can trust them for as long as they're in business, even if you never pay them once again. And they might even give you referrals or point to other professionals, understanding your budget and situation. Of course, they can still give you bad advice, they can become gambling-addicted, and run away with your money. It happens, even if very rarely.
But with LLMs, you won't know when they hallucinate, and what they get wrong. Even if you have the full statutes and case law uploaded and updated, it will give you wrong answers as well, but they're not working in the same way as humans do.
All we know that it's more likely to give you incorrect advice in jurisdictions not being covered by their training data (like outside New York or Delaware), and it will draw incorrect inferences in other cases from materials it has seen. Usually only lazy lawyers not reading the output will face the problem of incorrect case law.
But legal advice is not like coding where you can filter out most of the incorrect answers with tests and compilers. The author have happened to chose the wrong lawyers for the first time. I accept that not everybody has reliable lawyer friends qualified in Delaware, but in terms of advice, it would have been more practical to discuss the possible directories to use, beginner's methods to select lawyers, warning signs to look out for etc. It's sad that many lawyers act for trolls and do bad faith litigation. It's even worse that bars have no methods to exclude and disbar such guys. But you cannot avoid these problems by trusting a cheap AI tool instead, that's just wishful thinking.
I trust my doctor, and if it's a minor issue like needing antibiotics for something I just accept whatever they prescribe. But if it was a life or death situation I am not going to blindly follow their advice without any questions. I ask my doctor for their recommendations but I make the final decision. They may disagree with that decision but ultimately it's my life at risk and I'm the one who suffers the consequences. As long as you are reasonable and not trying to cure cancer with fruit I hope that the majority of doctors are going to support this.
When it comes to drafting contracts or other minor issues you should just trust your lawyer. But if the lawsuit has the ability to completely end your company I think it would be a mistake to do the same. But I'm not a founder so maybe my opinion isn't worth anything here. I've only hired a lawyer once for a landlord-tenant dispute, my lawyer gave their recommendations, I disagreed with it, and they said alright it's your money, but it ultimately worked out so we were both happy. I find it interesting that the author had trouble at first finding a lawyer who would agree to this arrangement because that wasn't my experience.
If you're going to do this, you need to do your own research beforehand. In my case I read all the relevant tenant laws before I even met with the lawyer. Today I might use AI to help with that, but I would be wary of hallucinations. I think the majority of the article is about this: just using AI to help with research before meetings with your lawyer.
At the end of the article the author says they are now using AI to draft legal documents and I don't agree with that but that's just me.
This is (unintentionally) hilarious. The drafting of a contract is hardly minor in many, if not most, situations.
[1] https://www.floridabar.org/the-florida-bar-journal/the-work-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-product_doctrine
[3] https://coxlawflorida.com/florida-rules-of-civil-procedure/r...
[4] https://tenthings.blog/2019/06/05/ten-things-a-primer-on-the...
It’s super interesting to think about though! Imagine if your Google Doc said something like “The stolen cash is hidden in these six places, but the prosecutors don’t seem to have anything linking me to some of those areas, so I should point that out at trial.” If the government didn’t already know where the cash was hidden, it seems implausible to me that any judge wouldn’t let them have that information. It likewise seems implausible that the judge would let the prosecutors know what the defendant thinks would be good or bad to emphasize at trial. So I’m guessing it’d be an in-camera review resulting in a redacted document just disclosing the places where the cash was hidden, but not the subsequent mental impressions. But the real question, as you asked, is whether you can actually put that in front of a jury to show guilt. And I’m afraid I’m going to have to plead ignorance here (but hope there are some criminal attorneys lurking on HN that could speak to this).
It also doesn't help when your opponent hit the provider ex parte with a subpoena and they just served it up which I can speak from experience many providers are pretty eager to do. Maybe after the fact you get an order for your opponent to destroy and not use the material but if you're dealing with a party that was dishonest enough to bring a frivolous claim in the first place that may not be that comforting.
If I were a lawyer I would be even more scared.
As one grows, so too the other.
> When working with paid professionals, I think people tend to put them into one of two categories: doctors or general contractors.
> With doctors, if your oncologist says you have a lump that needs to come out, you pretty much do whatever they say. You’re the patient; they’re the expert leading the charge.
> With general contractors doing home renovations, most people intuitively know that’s not the right approach. You stay on top of them, give clear instructions, try to understand the issues yourself, and assume you need to provide lots of direction and monitoring to get what you want done.
> Most people—entrepreneurs included, certainly myself—put lawyers in the doctor category when they should really treat them more like general contractors.
Except... I think if one has enough time, it's better to treat everyone like general contractors. Doctors make mistakes, often. You can and should challenge them.
People tend to skip the googling and verification process only if the problem is something simple or if the treatment is simple... eg. broken outlet, for legal reasons can't replace yoursefl, call contractor, outlet replaced... or in case of doctors, fever, infection, blood test, it's bacterial, antibiotics, two pills per day for 10 days, done.
Also, just an FYI for anyone in here, there are people that call themselves doctors who will diagnose and cure cancer using magic. Any "clinic" that staffs a number of naturopathic doctors (NDs) and suggests that you can treat cancer with dietary changes is a grift that should be illegal.
I'm dealing with cancer in my family and one such clinic was the first suggestion by family members. This isn't the place, but it what to watch out for [1]. Always be leery when you see clinics downplaying traditional medicine. Notice on their staffing page that they have exactly 1 doctor on staff (not even a nurse practitioner) and that this doctor doesn't have any credentials in oncology. And if you check out the billing section, notice that they instruct you on how to commit insurance fraud. There's a reason they don't take medicare/medicaid and it's because committing fraud there is a jail sentence for them and you. For a large insurance company, it's a lawsuit to you.
Edit: Ah, found the actual place suggested to us [2]. You can see a lot of the same hallmarks on it vs the first link.
We had a doctor that had prescribed us a dangerous amount of medicine (we didn't know) without running any tests. The doctor was also doing procedures he didn't need to do and ultimately recommended a surgery that has been stopped since the 90s.
We caught him because of the surgery. We sought a second opinion about it because the google was telling me "This surgery is no longer performed because it has serious negative consequences, and it rarely treats the symptom it's done for". I even double checked with the quack that it's the surgery he wanted to do because I was a bit flabbergasted he was suggested it (he was, of course, annoyed that I looked it up).
We sought a second opinion and I've never seen a doctor angrier. First, he was livid that the doc had us on such a mega dose of the drug and wasn't doing bloodwork to confirm we even needed it. But also, he was furious the doctor wanted to do the surgery. I'm 90% sure he got the docs' license pulled because the quack sent out a sad "Sorry to inform everyone but we'll be closing up shop".
Needless to say, always always look up the procedures and medications doctors want. Second opinions are also a good thing and good doctors will respond with "The more the merrier". And don't be like us, you should be thinking at all times "what test did the doctor do to determine we should be doing X". If a doctor is freeballing shit, you should be leery. Except maybe if they are throwing Tylenol at you for pain. [1]
“try to understand the issues yourself”
Your contractor is a skilled professional, not a drone. You need to exercise good judgment if you’re going to make decisions.
But that’s easy with a doctor you have a long term relationship with. I imagine it’s different eg. if you get cancer it’s probably going to just be a part time job to keep informed on all the doctor’s recommendations, and getting second opinions sounds like it would be time prohibitive. I don’t know of an easy way around this though.
> Some lawyers bristle at clients setting strategic direction. They believe there’s a “correct way” to do things, they know it, and they’ll fight you if you disagree. In that case, get different lawyers.
The thing is -- there are correct ways to do things in the legal sphere. Litigation is highly professional and highly formal, and has only become more so. While sub rosa it's fine to ask an AI for advice, and to engage it in draft brief writing, summarization to bullets, etc., it's wild not to realize how much of litigation and the law is wrapped up in people and experience and intricate formal processes. Such as this court has local rules, and this judge likes his briefs this length and the arguments just so, this needs to be filed here, stamped by the clerk, and filed again over there.
AIs may be exceptionally clever, but they may misunderstand the theatre of a trial. They may overweight the importance of the law and then underweight human factors, like the importance of assigning blame, or the lack of credibility of certain witnesses, or the bad faith of certain actors. AIs may fail to give credence to the ordinary meaning of terms, or fail to emphasize that these are two sophisticated businesses which understand the technical terms. AIs are still very poor at actual "reasoning", that is, a deep consideration of the multitude of ways of looking at any one set of facts and/or words on the page.
One area in which this article is entirely right is -- one must manage attorneys, and you must make certain that legal costs don't become leverage against you. But there are points at which you say: Can this guy keep it all straight? Does he know how to be useful to his own defense and then does he know how to get out of his own way?
CPAs shouldn’t set the direction because they tend to want to structure your business in ways that save taxes, at the expense of everything else.
If you’re the CEO/President of your company, you should set the direction, using lawyers to know what the liabilities of the different options are and using accountants to know what the different tax implications are. Lawyers and accountants help you make informed decisions, but they should not be deciding the strategy.
In some ways. OTOH, my wife works in the legal sphere, and after spending most of her career at a small boutique firm before being subsumed by a larger one, she was kinda dismayed to discover that there’s no singular “right way” to do things, and that different lawyers kind all do their own thing in a multitude of different ways.
Agreed. There is no formal processes to the inner workings of firms (but perhaps there should be).
What I think the author is saying is: There is no single way to conduct the lawyer-client relationship. Agreed, as well. But what I am saying is: There are certain areas in which the client can be a detriment to himself by ignoring the ways legal processes function.
Like -- "I am certain if the judge only hears what I have to say re: X, she will immediately dismiss this frivolous suit. You must tell her about this now. You must file something now." Okay, lawsuits are governed by highly formal processes, and there may be a time and a place for such merits arguments, at certain points in the suit, but this may not be that time. This is the time we talk about process, like jurisdiction, etc.
"The court" generally just means stuff that involves a judge. Not the actual trial. There is no "pre-court" really.
Whenever you and the opposing side have a disagreement, a judge will be involved to determine who should do what. That's what filing motions are all about.
For example, in a deposition, your lawyer is going to ask the opposing side 1 million questions. While asking those questions their council will pretty frequently say "objection". Each time they do that, they can go back to the judge (court) and fight over whether or not that line of questioning will be admissible into evidence in the trial.
The guys strategy is around the motions and briefs filed. It's not infrequent that a judge will ask each side for a brief about the current legal state and why their motion should be granted. That's where mountains of lawyer money can be spent. Every hour they spend researching the caselaw around a motion they get to bill you.
But further, strategy involves how often you fight the other side. There is an endless amount of stuff lawyers can argue over which ultimately does not (or barely does) affect the final outcomes. Being able to tell your lawyer "No, don't fight this motion it won't really matter" is where money can be saved.
Strategic direction, though, isn't something that has a correct mechanism. That strategic direction can include things like how hard you want to fight on each motion and if/when you want to try and settle and for how much.
Said another way, if you approach a plumber with "I need more hot water" they'll probably try and sell you an industrial tankless water heater with a nice markup. However, if you tell them "I want you to install this water heater that I purchased" then they'll do the work to get it fit in and setup. 1 option will cost you $1000s of dollars more. There is still a correct way to install water heaters, but the stuff related to whether or not you need a new water heater and what kind shouldn't be left up to the plumber.
The law is the same way. If you just tell a lawyer "I'm being sued, help me" they can justify putting any amount of time researching case law for your case. Taking a more active role, though, and saying "this is how I want you to respond to that motion" will shortcut a lot of that research time. They'll still have to do some work to validate you aren't giving them garbage to file. And of course they are still expected to follow all the local rules. But the actual billable hours will be massively reduced because they aren't doing nearly as much research.
Taken literally however "this is how I want you to respond to that motion" could be wildly reckless. I think your discussion above amounts to equivocation on the word "strategy". It's fine to set business "strategy". Telling an attorney what should literally be in his response to a motion, ignores all his/her knowledge about motion practice, the law, and evidence which will be relevant to the question. Like -- this is a 12(b)(6) motion, not a motion for summary judgment. We are questioning the sufficiency of the claim on the page, not whether there are genuine issues of material fact.
Business strategy is "don't spend gobs of money on this motion" not "file what I tell you."
Could be, which is why you have a lawyer to put guiderails on and give a "are you sure you want to go down this path?".
> Telling an attorney what should literally be in his response to a motion, ignores all his/her knowledge about motion practice, the law, and evidence which will be relevant to the question.
No, because before a lawyer files the response they have to (well, they should) both read, understand, and verify that it is in fact a valid response to file. Not doing so can get them sanctioned.
It's also their job to bring up to the client "Look, I know you want to file this but in my experience you'd really be better served if you did this instead".
Guardrails are the wrong way to think about the relationship. The attorney is not your mother and you are not a toddler. The attorney is not there to figure out the 1000s of different ways for you not to get hurt, when you present them with a bogus response. Why? Because verifying the 1000s of ways for you not to get hurt is often a waste of time which will cost you time and money itself.
A better way to think of the relationship is a partnership. A: I feel business needs to do X. B: I think X with a few addendums stands a better chance of success, but will cost a few dozen deep research hours, which likely can't be handled by AI. A: Can you cap my cost at $Z? B: Done.
> No, because before a lawyer files the response they have to (well, they should) both read, understand, and verify that it is in fact a valid response to file. Not doing so can get them sanctioned.
Simply being formally valid is not enough. Most clients want to have a reasonable chance of success?
Moreover, attorneys like doctors, shouldn't simply be considered instruments of your desires. Especially in litigation contexts where they have other independent duties to fulfill. Attorneys, for instance, are not allowed to simply ignore adverse precedent.
A: The AI said X and Y and Z. B: That's fine, but we need to be sure we have addressed the relevant case law in this jurisdiction. A: The AI was last updated a week ago. B: Afraid we have to a deeper search than Claude.
They are, because they are a partner with you in law. Part of their job is working with you and looking out for your best interests.
> Because verifying the 1000s of ways for you not to get hurt is often a waste of time which will cost you time and money itself.
That verification is what you are shortcutting but also not what you are after. You want their experience to be able to say whether or not a path is good. The fact is, there's no 1 right way to do things and what you really want is "is this reasonable".
> Most clients want to have a reasonable chance of success?
Most clients want to pay the least amount of money possible, including legal fees (In civil cases). "Success" isn't really measurable beyond "will this bankrupt me".
There's also not a lot of guarantees that this motion or that motion will ultimately drive down the cost of the case. There are literally thousands of motions that get field especially when talking about corporate lawsuits.
Yea, but plumbers tend to hate this. Electricians and HVAC pros also don't like it when you sit in the driver's seat. Car mechanics, too. When you've already done the diagnosis, and you just want them to install this OEM fuel pump which you've already purchased. Some mechanics will even refuse the job. They want to pump their bills with hours of diagnosis and their parts markup.
Tradesmen have a process they want you to go through that maximizes their revenue.
Pick your tradie, to suit your requirements, and be a great PM and pay for quality work. I've been the Purchaser, Project Manager and often the apprentice/gofer too (saving myself many many billable hours of cost on each job).
The last three multi-thousand tradie jobs (builder, plumber, electrician) I've had deep interaction with the tradie and I am a repeated client with significant different jobs with each.
Properly respect the person, be ultra-polite if you want to question how anything is done. Never micro-manage or be an overdemanding perfectionist and accept normal mistakes. They are the experts but they sometimes get things wrong.
You are an apprentice trying to learn, but you can be firm with requirements and watch for gross mistakes.
I often get involved with other tradies or professionals too (recently car electrical, car mechanical, medical specialists, fencer). Sometimes to save money, sometimes to get job done better.
If you want to be OCD about a job, then pick an OCD tradie and be prepared to pay for your perfectionism. I'm usually more cowboy. One friend is a tiler, and he likes delivering amazing jobs (but he costs somewhat more per hour than average).
> and you just want them to install this OEM fuel pump which you've already purchased
Recently just done similar with my mechanic (supplied wheel studs and they've told me where to get replacement handbrake cable which they'll fit), and I did this with my electrician (used my own reels of cable) and I wish I did this with my plumber (because I would have made a better choice of fitting than they did). For cheaper jobs perhaps pay them for the lost income (trade discount or trade markups are usually known, or you can just ask). Actually did this with a fuel pump with the second hand car dealer when they had to fix under warrantee (helped simplify things to get their mechanic to fix car while I waited).
Context: I'm in New Zealand and I'm in my 50s.
On-topic: when you're a founder you need to hone the skill of working with professionals (e.g. lawyers) and getting them to do work right. My take on being a founder is that you are ignorant about everything but you have to get it done anyway: you often have to become your own expert and just do it (your meta-skills are most relevant). Advisors/mentors often lack context or have their own agendas, so you just gotta get ahead regardless of your ignorance. Learning how to listen to advice, pick the value out, and throw away the dross is just hard. Being submissive or falling for status plays is ruinous.
There's this comedian who tells the story of his grandmother aged 97 who was diagnosed with cancer, and they offered her chemotherapy. She said: what's the point? Are you going to prolong my life for an hour? That makes people laugh, but it's the truth, and it's also, I think, the point of the post.
The point of defending a lawsuit is not to be right, and die. It's to survive it.
If you won't advocate for yourself, why should you expect a 3rd party do it?
The problem with challenging doctors is that the body is incredibly complex, and is not really under any obligation to "make common sense" / be bro-science-y.
The vast majority of the time you're going to be wrong and annoying, even if you're consulting LLMs first.
If a doctor is making a mistake, and you're a lay-person, you're not likely to spot it. But you are likely to challenge a bunch of things that the doctor is right and just be an annoying back-seat driver.
You're better off trying to get a doctor you can trust than treating your doctor like someone who isn't good at their job.
There are bad and shady doctors to be sure, but they are extreme outliers.
Doctors, unlike lawyers, typically care about your care - whereas lawyers are mostly interested in extracting as much of your money into their pocket as possible.
Unless you're going to some elective surgeon, most doctors are so busy, they don't need to make up pretend bs to have you come back and get work.
Lawyers on the other hand...
It's not practical to test for everything right away, and if an adult is overweight and presenting with diabetes you initally treat for type 2, and advise losing weight and changing diet.
Every medical school class has people who graduate near the bottom. The critera for entry, and the filters that you have to pass before you can practice as a physician means that even those people are generally decent doctors.
I'm not saying doctors are never wrong but you're not likely outguess even an average doctor by googling your symptoms. It's very easy to convince yourself you have some rare condition because your symptoms match, but you ignore "rare." The fact that someone has an anecdote to the contrary doesn't change this.
I went to a second random doctor I found on ZocDoc who also thought I was T2, but then LADA was eventually confirmed by a third doctor who I chose specifically because he's worked with a lot of diabetic and pre-diabetic patients. He took one look at me and said "You look too skinny for a typical T2, let's run a GAD-65 autoantibody test", which came back 10x higher than the normal rate.
So yes, if you are a doctor and you hear hoofs I do think it's a good idea to think horses not zebras, but also if you've never actually worked with zebras, maybe have the humility to defer to a different doctor or listen to the patient who clearly has done more research than you about the condition they've struggled with for years instead of confidently pushing your wrong theory.
P.S. Early on in the process I also tried to see an endocrinologist (who probably also would have recognized LADA). However, they are a gated resource. I was unable to set an appointment with an endocrinologist without a recommendation from my PCP, and my PCP wouldn't give one. Just frustrating all around.
There should be a specific course on boolean logic in high school, distinct from math. Doesn't need to last a year; but needs to be graded separately from everything else.
Yes but doctors, like laywers, often err on the side of caution. I don't want to be cut open unless absolutely necessary.
Maybe the approach is simply to ask for a second, expert opinion rather than trying to make your own. But asking pointy questions can't hurt (within reason, of course; you don't want to be the guy "doing their own research" (even if you are)).
She had cancer when she was 18 and the doctor insisted that women just don’t get cancer at that age, and insisted the lump was benign without testing it. We got another doctor to remove it, and it turns out it was stage 1 cancer.
A decade ago she was in crippling pain right in the gall bladder area. The doctor insisted it was indigestion. We found another doctor (thank goodness for PPOs letting us go directly to specialists without a referral) who did an ultrasound and said my wife probably had less than a week before she would suffer a rupture, and she had to have emergency surgery.
I’m glad you haven’t had that experience, but it’s a very real problem.
Bad doctors, that really don’t give a shit, exist and are doing well, at least where I live, because there simply isn’t enough doctors.
The ratio good to bad doctors is the same as good to bad contractors in my experience.
I fully understand how annoying it is to be challenged by a patient as a doctor but why would the doctor do that with his contractor and not accept that from the patient? Because he’s more of an expert? I’d argue he’s less of an expert actually, because medicine is so insanely complex and we know so incredibly little of it.
It is worse. Many doctors will administer against your interest if it boost their bottom line. There is, also, very little legal recourse against doctors.
I'm in the UK. As well as doctors making mistakes, they can be under direction diagnosing critera. The UK has had a multi-year struggle for people with ME/CFS, (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). It falls under neurology in the UK, and a sub-chapter neuro-psychiatry has the ear of the national health service's supremos, and has historically entertained an "all in the mind" approach. I digress. Back to AI and medicine again: https://x.com/vipintukur/status/1931049593535627417 - insights can come from that quarter, and medicine is going to have to play catch up at times.
The leverage came in the form of reducing costs. When you ask your lawyer to explain, they happily bill you for that time.
The incentives are against you. Lower costs lets defendant fight it out longer with less $$ for lawyer. Law firm isn't spending more hours to earn less. So you gotta have a friend with this skill and a vested interest or do the legwork, which OP suggest AI was for him.
I don't agree AI had a significant part to play here. The leverage, whatever it was isn't likely to be public. Certainly wasn't AI as the title suggests.
The seemingly valuable advice was on how to handle lawyers who fail to see your big picture interests rather than just winning the case.
In my case, I used small claims when a contractor took my money and didn't perform work. The threat of losing a lawsuit was enough to get the money back.
I suspect the plaintiff did something that would allow Tyler to countersue, or otherwise there was some kind of threat of negative publicity / tattle to other customers.
After about a day of prep work on my part, having them read through that prep work for about an hour and then discussing it with me for another hour, we concluded that the expected outcome was break even, with a time investment that was decidedly not break even, and did not proceed to litigation. They really helped our company to look at the problem objectively and without emotion, and I really hope that's not a rare experience!
(That said, I do understand that strategies for successfully dealing with being sued might need to get a bit more creative than those for deciding whether to sue.)
You seem to know what you're doing, but for other readers, the time to think about breach of contract and litigation, and the time to talk with your attorney, is before you enter contracts and business dealings. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but many mistakenly consider prudent consultation and planning to be a waste or a drag on the bottom line.
While this is true lawyers are still lawyers, and you're paying them primarily to give you legal advice. The best will be able to also consider wider business perspectives, but at the end of the day they're still going to have a bias towards doing what is safest from a legal perspective which you need to weigh up against other risks for your business.
Going back to the point in the parent article, educating yourself on the legal side so you're going into the discussion on a more equal footing is a pretty good idea in general.
I'd say it's more likely that they're aware that their client simply isn't going to like the answer.
If a client is all fired up about wanting to sue someone you can caution them to reconsider, but at some point they'll just go "fine I'll find someone who will do what I tell them to". Litigation doesn't put people into an open & receptive mindframe normally.
I think finding these people is a dark art, but they exist.
This is very much what you want from a BUSINESS lawyer. And what the author apparently didn't understand. You, your business, the other guys ideally - nobody in here should be there for ticking boxes and the exact details of the law. What you are sorting out with a business lawyer is business issues, which need to be resolved in pragmatic business terms. It's not a legal puzzle but a business puzzle.
Same thing from the point of view of writing a contract, or writing or answering a demand letter: The point is to solve a business problem - not satisfy some ideal of the law. And the business lawyers you want do understand this and can be amazing at finding the right terms and shortcuts and at helping you come to an understanding of what matters and doesn't. And yes, these lawyers very much exist.
People often argue that it's a lawyer's job to point out and try to protect you against anything that could possibly go wrong - with the result that indeed it's impossible to run a business. No, that's not the job.
But it takes time to find a great business lawyer, so this should be part of the tasks right from the beginning when founding a business. That lawyer won't cost all that much initially - and they will already be useful working on contracts.
Same thing for in-house corporate counsel, when you get to that. Some amazing ones who can defuse a situation in an instant - and others who spend their life making things impossible.
Now, it might get to the point where the business lawyer helps you understand that all alternatives have been explored and it's time to spend serious money on courtroom litigation specialists - but hopefully that's only seldom.
Look for "My AI Legal Research Workflow", and if you really want TLDR, go to "The Cost Arbitrage Advantage"
> For what it’s worth I didn’t necessarily find one platform (Claude or ChatGPT) or even specific models to be materially better than others at this work. ..
> 3: Leverage AI for Contract Analysis. AI excels at reviewing lengthy contracts. When you have a 400-page agreement where page 6 references “customary exceptions” that are finally listed on page 421, AI can instantly find and connect these references without you having to jump around through table of contents.
> Always have the AI excerpt the actual contract language with page numbers, then verify by searching the document yourself. Don’t take the AI’s word for it—confirm everything.
Check out Tritium (https://tritium.legal) to save this upload step. Open the folder (or right-click your folder on Windows) with your documents and chat with your model of choice.
Another reason not to blindly use Delaware
There are 49 other states, a district, territories, and various native reservations, with their own incorporation statutes
They haven’t all just sat idly over the last 30 years in the competitiveness of their statutes
Some even have Chancery Courts just like Delaware
And the lack of case law is actually a benefit. If you don’t like Delaware’s case law you can argue for a completely different ruling that only benefits you. while if you do like Delaware’s case the local judge has a strong incentive to lean on it and you can push for that.
Its surprising how uninspired people are about this, especially ones that arent raising capital
Brrrrrr. AI an be enormously helpful when it comes to trying to understand - I have no doubt the author got exactly what they needed here. But if you're making blanket rules about ditching expert opinion because you can wield a model then I think you're letting your own engineer's syndrome drive things, and you're letting it be validated by survivorship bias.
Looking up the lawsuit in question but without reviewing the record, it looks like this was probably as much personal as it was business. This always makes cases a lot harder to settle. When it is just business, you can almost always work it out in numbers. When you screw over a wealthy man in a very personal and humiliating way, your contract case can become like divorce, which is only good for the lawyers and for no one else. Ask the chatbot to summarize "The Prince" for you and maybe this will be one of the points that it gives you.
Why would you fix the legal system instead...
Surprised some business-friendly US state hasn't greatly restricted discovery in civil litigation, so as to attract companies to incorporate there. And this is why arbitration rose as a way to settle disputes- if you look at the standard arbitration agreement they greatly limit discovery
(or influence peddling, political horse trading, etc…)
Most developed countries using a panel of judges to hear civil disputes score better than the US on corruption indicators, not worse
It's insane to me that the US accepts that their judiciary are either 'red' or 'blue', and that their opinions are dictated by their tribe.
As an experiment try to go to court pro se. The experience is characterized by the fact that in US courts, pro se clients can be sanctioned for improper actions, but lawyers can not be sanctioned for purposeful improprieties by pro se clients.
It is sort of like a commoner going up against a knight. The knight has armor and a lance and you have your scythe. Fun! In other words it is rigged.
And here is the kicker. Lawyers are "officers of the court". You could take that to mean that they uphold the standards of the court. Or when a lawyer does bad things, that could mean that the other lawyers - including the judge - see that lawyer as one of them. You know, sort of the way that many priests see abusive priests as priests first and abusers second, and so take actions to "protect" the church.
So whats a poor person to do? You try to get a lawyer. Lawyers will not want to take you on if the other side has a high power lawyer and lots of money. Not because your case isn't proper, but because the economics are not there. For the lawyer. At some point the side with more money will simply run you out. Your lawyer will urge you to settle.
Again this is not an us vs them thing. The issue is that if common people cannot afford to obtain justice, then we are not a democracy. We are something else. Corporations and the ultra wealthy have deep pockets to use the courts. If we tolerate that, it is reasonable to expect that the common people will not find this kind of "democracy" to their taste.
The second issue is our lack of universal, affordable healthcare (and other basic safety nets). If you are injured and don’t want to go bankrupt, you have to sue to pay for your treatment, loss of income, etc.
The result is that we have lawsuits constantly all the time for everything. Not only does it clog up the courts, but it also helps the powerful to outspend “the little guy” to avoid accountability. Fighting a government regulatory body with actual powers and authorities is much harder to outspend/outlast than some random person one lawyer working on contingency.
And that doesn’t even get into how corporations have been pushing “tort reform” to neuter how much they can be sued for, therefore the amount they can be punished for wrongdoing. As well as their decades long propaganda campaign to paint tort lawsuits as frivolous, baseless, shameless cash grabs by greedy people attacking the poor helpless business.
My diagnosis is Citizens United vs F.E.C. That bizarre has allowed corporations to control the laws that are enacted. So we see "tort" reform - but who benefits? It is not the People.
There is another factor that amplifies this, targeted advertising. Targeted ads, you know like the ones that pay for our "free" internet services are as toxic or more than the pollutants in coal and gas. They have destroyed trust in the internet. And they allow corporations to "fund" candidates for public office.
And question. Do the media such as the Washington Post, owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, address these issues? Nope.
When you get sued, you get a reasonable amount of time to respond. That includes time to interview firms, discuss the approach and goals, and then choose the best firm that will attempt to carry it out. And then that firm will have enough time to write and file the response. Of course, you have to start immediately.
A good litigator wants to give the other side their bar number, and have them shit their pants when they look up their litigation record. It’s absolutely a strategic advantage; milking hours and aiming for a settlement is bad for a litigators career.
Telling the other side that you have an expensive lawyer just gives them more leverage.
This is all you have to do to counter kneejerk AI naysayers
You can also do this when talking to professionals its just that those professionals are charging you hourly, have low emotional intelligence and dismissing your ability to comprehend anything, have an ego to defend the discipline they had to use to get there, and confirming anything with them requires a separate meeting weeks later
I'm new to entrepreneurship and just signed my first few corporate legal agreements. I was also deeply aware that anything agreed to was basically a gentleman's agreement--it wouldn't be worth either party going to litigation over, and even less so if the other party was internationally based.
So I've been following the "no-assholes" policy as well.
"When you tell lawyers “what do you think we should do,” they’re going to give you the “best representation” they can—because that’s what they’re incentivized to do. This means ticking every box, being as thorough as humanly possible, and taking everything the other side throws at them as seriously as possible."
My experience with smaller matters seems to be that they don't give it much attention because it's not worth their time. I think the author's take only applies above the small claims level.
The entire US legal system is fundamentally and utterly broken.
If you want to make a few thousand dollars, I hate to share this secret thing you can do, but the reality of my experience is that the only thing stopping more people from doing this is, you know, some semblance of morality. Go find any local, smaller nonprofit organization. Volunteer with them for a day or two. Pay $80-$150 to sue them in small claims court for $5000 because <<you can literally make up any reason, you don't need evidence, it doesn't need to have happened, "mental hardship", I'm actually wondering if you hadn't have needed any interaction at all with the organization>>. Have an LLM generate 2-3 emails a week outlining anything at all related to grievance; each one you send to the organization is likely to result in billable legal hours. When the court date gets near, you can file for a motion to extend. Keep sending emails. After 4-6 months of doing this, send them a settlement offer for half of what you originally sued for.
I've seen this essentially destroy one nonprofit; the board was inexperienced in dealing with it, the person doing it had clearly done it before, by the end they'd spent ~80% of their bank account on legal fees, paid out a few thousand in a settlement to the plaintiff, and half the board resigned in burnout.
If you've never came into contact with this kind of weapon before, you might have it in your head "we'll just argue the case, we're clearly in the right" ha. ha. No. You'll never get the opportunity, and the people who do this know it.
If you're now thinking "well, if you're such a small organization why are you paying lawyers at all? We have AI. We'll just file responses on our own" I wish it were the case. But sadly: at least in my state, you can sue organizations in small claims court without representation, but filings made to the court in defense of the organization must be made by a licensed attorney. Asymmetry is built into the system.
The only thing that can protect nonprofit organizations from this, beyond having a massive bank account, is getting a lawyer to donate work pro-bono and/or sit on your board of directors. This is a common thing for nonprofits, for this exact reason, and assuming you're legit and well-known its not too hard to find legal experts who will do this for you.
If you're not a nonprofit, I have to imagine you don't have this angle open to you, and you're just SOL.
Same in my US state, which I'm actually using to my advantage — my state's small claims jurisdiction extends up to $25,000 so the defendant (a company) would probably get an attorney anyways =P
Once more people realize that LLMs can already throw together a reasonable case, I think small claims courts are going to be [even more] overwhelmed. On my last visit, I was explaining to many of the attorneys how accessible this all is becoming (none of them read SCOTUS Chief's end of 2023 report "On AI")...
There were things I found problematic about this article. One of the primary aspects I found incomplete was that it doesn't go on to specify HOW he supposedly used AI to avoid the necessity for a litigation attorney. To me that was a vital piece of information necessary for the author to prove their point, and its omission means the essay is significantly flawed.
Much like a surgeon, a litigation attorney knows 'surgical' techniques - they know the specific dynamics of law that are at play. They further know from local experience with judges (and their colleagues' experience with same) and the "plaintiffs' bar" (i.e. people who are looking to make cases) which techniques are best for which set of circumstances, much like a surgeon can evaluate which surgical techniques are best suited for the job they see in front of them -- they have the power of accurately observing and evaluating what is in front of them in full 3D high definition, whereas AI is going to be subject to how the facts are reported to it (and what facts may be either purposefully or accidentally omitted by the reporter).
None of those techniques are gone into by the author; he merely indicates that he used AI, without going into what it advised him to do. The act of omitting that piece of information means - at least IMO - that the editorial itself cannot by definition make its point.
Much like a surgeon, a litigation attorney knows 'surgical' techniques - they know the specific dynamics of law that are at play. They further know from local experience with judges (and their colleagues' experience with same) and the "plaintiffs' bar" (i.e. people who are looking to make cases) which techniques are best for which set of circumstances, much like a surgeon can evaluate which surgical techniques are best suited for the job they see in front of them -- they have the power of accurately observing and evaluating what is in front of them in full 3D high definition, whereas AI is going to be subject to how the facts are reported to it (and what facts may be either purposefully or accidentally omitted by the reporter).
None of those techniques are gone into by the author; he merely indicates that he used AI, without going into what it advised him to do.
I will agree that - much like it has done for me with medical knowledge - AI has the power to "prep" you very well for appointments with your attorney, assuming that it is not giving you a higher-level hallucination or leading you into a knowledge blind spot, which, as amateurs in the profession, laymen may not know enough to recognize (I don't omit myself - I would at most consider myself a 'talented amateur' at law).
But entirely omitted from all this evaluation: attorneys nowadays are very conscious of a client's desire to be budget-conscious; they know they charge an arm and a leg and they will try not to, and will try to help. They're not always just out for the almighty dollar, despite the caricature. They will often know what you are looking to spend and they will work to accommodate such price range - because they want to foster client loyalty to them or to their firm, and garner a favorable impression and word-of-mout. Just as one example, as a very experienced legal admin, I have sometimes done things free (not illegally so) that might have, in old days, been done for cost by an associate. (I am not speaking of the practice of law. But attorneys in olden days might've had associates charge for administrative things that can be done freely, and with greater ease now with the presence of the Internet.)
Also, one reason why lawyers are more like surgeons than they are "general contractors" is that lawyers specialize. There are multiple fields of law expertise, much as there are multiple fields of surgery, and litigation attorneys are a particular surgical field.
In short, while I agree with some aspects of the essay - I think that there's value in allowing AI briefing to get you up to speed to be a more educated client, which itself can then save you time with an attorney, which may then translate to money saved - I think there are multiple statements within the article that are simply flawed, wrong, or don't reflect the current reality of law, and how lawyers interact with clients nowadays.
None of the above reflects any attorney-client confidential information. I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, and I do not speak for (nor am I empowered to speak for) my employer.
Really, it fundamentally boils down to this: the CEO didn't bother tell his legal counsel he wanted to minimize legal spend. He just told them to do their thing. So they did, and because they weren't given constraints they did their thing well. But it wasn't what the CEO actually wanted them to do. The problem was that he didn't tell them what he wanted to do, and assumed that lawyers were telepaths and knew what he wanted.
So he did a dumber thing and decided to turn to an LLM, instead of doing the thing he should have done in the first place: tell his original lawyers what he actually wanted. He ended up getting lucky and not getting burned by it due to facts he chose not to disclose, but he is the rare exception.
Also, there are some huge falsehoods in his post, like #3. AIs are absolute shite at reviewing lengthy contracts. They're great at summarizing things where the correctness of the summary doesn't matter, but they're horrible at summarizing things where being correct is important. Also, his example of how the AI is used isn't AI. It's literally just a keyword search, which has been a thing for 3 or 4 decades now, and has been a basic function of doc review software for the last 2 decades.
#4. No, just no. It would cost more money to have the lawyer review an AI-generated legal document than to create one from scratch. Lawyers don't actually create most legal documents from scratch; they use templates from contracts and pleadings that have already gone through the legal trial by fire. So you're actually increasing your legal spend quite dramatically if you use AI instead.
Hallucinations. New models are not getting better at eliminating hallucinations; they're actually getting worse. Many of the recent AI-related court fails were from lawyers using the LLM tools provided by legal service providers like LexisNexis, and those LLMs were trained solely on legal databases. Even a single hallucinated citation in a legal filing allows the judge to void the entire filing and sanction the lawyers and client; in many situations the court this can result in a procedural loss for the client that they would have otherwise won on the merits if it had proceeded to trial.
TLDR: use AI if you want to make things easier for the other side of the lawsuit. Don't be like Trump. Experts exist for a reason. You wouldn't ask your lawyer to program your backend, so why would you turn to an AI for legal advice?
One of these elements he refers to as "leverage" and I think he does an ok job explaining what it is, although maybe not how / why it works.
The other one, contrasting doctors and contractors, I think he does poorly. Full disclosure: I've had really crappy luck with doctors (it's not just luck). Doctors aren't used to getting "not to exceed" demands, things like that. On the other hand my father was a psychiatrist, a specialist, and that gives me insight into the "practice" of medicine; and I've worked for a number of biotechs and I have some insight into the evolution of medical practice. Combined, I have a pretty good sense of when the doctors are "practicing" versus forming a hypothesis (ask for one!).
During one of my burnouts I took a "vacation" working (what started as part time) for a high-end flooring contractor. Although the owner and I had different backgrounds and beliefs we had mutual respect for each other (and we had great conversations). But what the public calls (and in public we called) an "estimate" we called internally an "interview"; and we wanted to take the temperature of the "pain in the ass" factor: Does the prospect truly understand the work? Does the prospect have irrelevant concerns? (I'm doing a poor job here, although I'm pretty sure successful contractors will understand what I'm talking about.) Our bids could vary as much as 300% (upwards) from our baseline model / estimate for the job... before we said "no" outright or came up with good excuse for them to fire us before receiving our bid.
There were some rather "zen" aspects of the process (my father had a zen question: how do you feel? I have a zen question: what do you measure?), such as an insistence that all special instructions had to fit, legibly handwritten, in about 1/3 of an 8x11 piece of paper. (We did $10000 floors on a one page contract, not including non-negotiable required boilerplate; why can't we do that in IT? Can we? Yes, yes I say we can.)
But distilling this down: some contractors would rather deal with the masssages and fish tank cleaning (at 3x the $$$) than do floors... whereas for us flooring was a religious calling or something. You'll find this both in doctors and in contractors; and you'll also find people out there who expect to pay that 300% markup to have the contractor walk their dog.
Unfortunately, it seems you chose the wrong litigator. This, in a nutshell, is the job.
anitil•17h ago
In a previous post [0] they talk about the impact of the litigation, which seems to have contributed to the shuttering of his fund
[0] https://tylertringas.com/code-concrete/
petesergeant•11h ago