Psychopathy in Lawyers

[couragewolf]

I hope so. I'm in-house now so I'd love to reduce legal spend if I could keep similar outcomes to hiring outside firms. So far, everything has been mediocre at best, and I'm hoping we get some real competition before 2030.

It’ll be some time yet. Even good engineers in software sort of are missing the boat rn. 26 is gonna change that up quite a bit though I think.

 

[Wolkenflieger]

Lawyers will continue to do most legal work because the law requires it.

Guess who writes those laws?

Laws change. We CA gun owners know this all too well.

 

[Wolkenflieger]

I don't disagree that AI will replace tasks that are repetitive or rote. Entity formation, tax, or anything forms based is probably going to be automated sooner rather than later. They are not exactly profit centers for firms. From my experience, the bulk of revenue come from high budget legal spend for M&A or some flavor of litigation. For these practices, AI is a nice tool to have but it can't replace even a mid-level attorney.

I don't see the overall employability of the lawyer going down. I see a reduction in supply of new attorneys, like coders now, and an increase in the value of experienced attorneys who can now work more efficiently. The supply of new attorneys has been decreasing long before AI was developed. The damage to your professional reputation for getting caught using AI is also significant. Clients hate it. Judges hate it. It implies laziness whether that implication is warranted or not.

While the law itself may be similar to code, the practice of law isn't.

AI is a tool, and it will improve significantly, just like today's computers versus the early days or early Internet and search engines compared to today.

 

[couragewolf]

AI is a tool, and it will improve significantly, just like today's computers versus the early days or early Internet and search engines compared to today.

FWIW I think we’ve mostly hit the limit transformer based LLMs are going to offer. There will be some improvements but when you look at the data larger data sets actually reduce the quality of LLM outputs so this whole marketing ploy that more data is the race seems like smoke to me.

I think the advances are gonna be showing up with smaller param specialized models and finely tuned agentic workloads.

I also think people barely understand the science of prompting so tools that improve that are going to be everywhere soon

 

[Wolkenflieger]

FWIW I think we’ve mostly hit the limit transformer based LLMs are going to offer. There will be some improvements but when you look at the data larger data sets actually reduce the quality of LLM outputs so this whole marketing ploy that more data is the race seems like smoke to me.

I think the advances are gonna be showing up with smaller param specialized models and finely tuned agentic workloads.

I also think people barely understand the science of prompting so tools that improve that are going to be everywhere soon

Not just language models though. We're talking generalized intelligence and way smarter than human, and way faster too.

Think of it like the advancement of flying machines from the very first, or how computers have advanced much further than the first iterations which filled a room.

Now imagine that advanced AI in a humanoid robot like Optimus which can navigate the world, which means it can work.

Still think we would need juries of people who believe in psychics and space fairies and repeatedly misspell three-letter words, or couldn't recognize a logical fallacy to save their lives...or cannot recognize logical fallacies used to manipulate them?

I own a Tesla which drives itself amazingly well, and there are zero lines of code doing that. It's better/safer than humans in aggregate but not perfect yet, but we know human drivers are far from perfect, and perfect is not the standard. Perfection for any tech has never been the standard.

Also, today's laws have little bearing on what will happen tomorrow and years hence. When a tech is brand new, like powered flight and the Internet, laws have to be changed or added to adapt to the new tech, just like so many "morality laws" on the books are wildly outdated.

There is very good reason why some people have warned about AI, and it's not because of any current or future incompetence. The key is to control it and with safeguards in place so it doesn't work against human interests.the same is true for motorized transport or aircraft...we've made these better and safer for all involved.

I was in jury-selection pool once (the defense pleaded out) and I was shocked how stupid some of the other jurors were. They shouldn't be deciding on wallpaper, let alone someone's fate...

Humans aren't just irrational, they're proud and immovable in their irrationality because of emotion. Why else would a human learn about a repeated error they're making and continue to make that error? Why is it so difficult to divest a human of obviously erroneous beliefs? It should take 5 minutes, but some peoole never figure it out.

Intelligence in humans is never just a function of raw mental power so much as the humility and courage to correct mistakes and embrace actual facts despite any perceived shattering of social networks, tradition, norms, etc. This combination of traits is extremely rare/insufficient in humans.

AI has no such encumbrance.

 

[Jimi Jah]

Laws change. We CA gun owners know this all too well.

Laws are written by politicians that are elected lawyers. Every law is written to benefit lawyers. That will not change until voters shun electing lawyers.

This is why we will never see tort reform in the USA. Other developed countries are different, they have things like "loser pays" for lawsuits.

Here, lawyers rule supreme. All those judges currently making "rulings" are lawyers too. Lawyers run the legislative and judicial branches of government. Trump is the only president that is not a lawyer since Reagan.