I would expect such an article to start there, or at least make some argument that concludes that a computer actually could perform professional legal tasks. Which I don't think they can, just as they can't do philosophy.

Since law evolves, I wouldn’t be suprised that LLMs would spit out arguments that are out of date.

> But law isn’t actually code, and society and courts aren’t computers. [...] the law is not deterministic. You simply cannot take the facts of a case, the law as written, and predict the outcome of that case with any real certainty, even though the formality of the legal system makes people think it works like a computer — that it’s predictable.

> [...] it’s actually ambiguity that’s at the very heart of our legal system. It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side, and it’s always possible to find the gray area in the law. That’s why prosecutors end up working as defense attorneys and why our regulators tend to end up working for big corporations.

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba...

IMO, as with most domains, AI _tools_ will save a huge amount of time, but it's the human specialist making judgment calls based on real world context.

That way the billable hours can match, but like the article says, who does this benefit? Ultimately the transfer of time to another task will keep law just as expensive. Perhaps there is room to save time on verification vs creation. Is it worth all the investment though?

> They sell the editorial infrastructure built on top: headnote taxonomies that organize millions of opinions into searchable categories, practice guides written by specialists over decades, and treatises that synthesize primary law into usable guidance.

> The Free Law Project’s CourtListener provides free access to millions of federal and state court opinions, oral arguments, and PACER documents.

I think issue of a data-moat is somewhat overstated, or at least it is not argued very well here. If secondary organization and interpretation of open data is their moat, and if it is mostly focused on guiding humans through the complex web of knowledge, then AI should make short-order of that.

But, as usual, the issue of structural and organizational barriers is definitely convincing. Sometimes existing players are too entrenched to change. A new kind of AI-oriented law-firm might need to emerge and show itself to be competitive to either make mainstream firms truly change or push them out of the market.

What horrendous morals behind this article. Why would anyone advocate for prioritizing economics and technology before ethics, especially in something as important as law?

The "won't someone think of the all the poor people with no access to legal counsel" part sounds a lot worse once you realize they actually mean "won't someone think of the money we're leaving on the table by not getting some revenue from selling cheaper AI slop, uh I mean AI legal representation, to those who can't afford anything else".

I do not understand why we do not abandon english common law and find common sense.