> but spending years or decades in prison because Lionel Hutz, Esq. did something stupid at a prompt sounds unappealing to me.

In which case would this be the primary blame, and not the legal system itself, or you for actually doing the crime?

I fail to see how its your lawyers fault that you went to jail for a crime you didn't commit over the system as a whole. And I really fail to see how it's the lawyer's sole fault that you went to jail for a crime that you should - in fact - have went to jail for...

There are a lot of problems with the legal system (including with lawyers). This just doesn't seem like the hill to die on.

A lot of law is combing through large bodies of rule sets and reference cases to find inputs or parallels relevant for a case. Are you sure you'd rather have Lionel Hutz, Esq. with his limited comprehension do that at half a page per minute?

I think they should be somehow restricted to using non-generative models (or at least for the user facing output). Something that would only identify potentially relevant case law from an existing set, to accelerate the search process.

Common law in general seems essentially impossible to formalize in such a way to use purely deterministic reasoning models of yesteryear, but I'm sure many specific laws could be converted, especially in fields like tax law (I'm sure they already are by many big players)

Do you predict the same paralegal crisis people are claiming about junior swe's?

That's already a thing. You have paralegals do most of the grungy work for much less than your hourly rate. You still have to show up to court and talk to customers, and these parts are not going away.

While I agree on the premise – (written*) lawyer activity being reduced to putting signatures under things – I’m not so sure the gilded part is how it’ll actually play out in practice.

It might also become a race to the bottom, since you can’t deliver on quality better than others anymore, you’ll have to put effort towards quantity. That could mean firms might pressure lawyers to sign as much as possible in a given time, while they’re still personally at risk/responsible for the documents they put out. That means either very hectic reading, and missing details, or no reading at all.

*And like socializer said, the written documents are only one part of the job.

Or... the tools get to the point where we don't need a human for expertise but accountability and the role becomes more about ethics, thereby lowering the bar. (PUN!)

Nobody will have any interest if they are not open

Imo, we are going to see a lot more specialised models in the near future as pushing the frontier gets harder. Qwen 3.8 27B for example is a pretty rubbish chat and general world knowledge model, but is stellar at coding (for it's size). Its small enough anyone with a modest gaming PC (16GB vram and 32GB of DDR5) can run it at speeds good enough for overnight coding sessions with an PR to review at the end of it.

Eventually, I hope we'll see many more specialised small models that run nicely on consumer and prosumer hardware. Like LLMs specific to income tax law for UK residents, or LLMs specific to building power delivery circuits for PD USB C devices. There probably is a point where the niche-ness does become to niche to justify the post training, but again, small models means much less training required.

Kind of begs the question if this even needs new/better data? Could you take the foundation model that's trained on everything, and then run a final fine tuning training run on just the set of foundation training data that you want the model to specialise in? Eg, extract just the training data that is about UK income tax law and then run a few epochos on just that? Any ML people know if this is a thing or if not, why it doesnt work?

Not the case for me.

If you’re on a corporate device you may not have recently issued certificates in your cert chain yet

The legal space understands well how to tier services based on who has the liability. E.g. trainees and paralegals whose work is filtered through the lawyer who ultimately puts their name on what gets submitted to courts.

I'm sure we'll continue to see the occasional person who fails to understand they themselves will be held liable if they submit work done by an AI without vetting it, but it's not like they don't have ways of dealing with this.

Until it hallucinates something no one bothers to verify

It will lead to bigger fines :-) https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

How much novelty can there be? If attorneys were as diligent and generous with “open sourcing” their data as SWEs had been, could LLMs benefit from all that training data?