Never Hire a Robot Lawyer

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To paraphrase a friend of mine: "I'm excited to live in a world with robot lawyers because I love easy wins on procedural grounds."

"All lawyers are soulless demons..." "We should replace them all with soulless robots!"

I like how he immediately wants to jump to the Supreme Court, instead of starting out with some testing in a mock court and slowly moving up as the technology develops.

This is so much sillier than I could've imagined. There's even an "I was poor once" kid with a wealthy dad! Classic!

A legitimate version would partner with a University of Law to hold some mock trials with aspiring lawyers in front of legal professors. Once you've demonstrated competence there, you could imagine a bar and Judge being willing to tolerate its entrance into an actual court room in a very limited and protected scenario and slowly expand from there. But yeah, I totally think a guy is going to succeed when he jumps straight to the final boss.

I would like to give you props for faithfully recreating the entire "I for one welcome our new overlords" speech instead of just the one line.

"The bailiff WILL tackle you" card is my favorite guest star in LegalEagle vids.

Okay but you can’t lie. It’d be pretty damn funny to listen to an 800 year old judge talking to a machine lawyer that is basically just one of those answering machines that always asks you to repeat your question or answer.

I'm imagining an AI lawyer arguing the chewbacca defense at the supreme court.

This AI lawyer scheme sounds exactly like the kind of thing a person too stupid to park a car would come up with.

When you mentioned Browder’s dad, you forgot to mention that his great-grandfather was Earl Browder, the leader of the US Communist Party. I’m sure he’d be thrilled to see his descendant become a tech startup bro 😂

Devin's editor woke up this morning and chose violence. And I am here for it.

Ahhgh! My company installed a program to automatically edit and redact complaints that I was editing. This was supposed to help free up my time for other projects. Instead, it now takes me longer to edit the complaints because the computer program can't grasp the distinctions between the complainant and the company that the complaint is about. It also takes out apostrophes, spacing between words, the words bill, may, earnest and grant. Drives me crazy. I wish that they would drop the whole thing and just let me get on with what I was doing before.

"she has a patience that I do not have" - a lawyer - the entire profession of paralegals, explained

Letting unfeeling AI run our legal system is a terrible idea. Even now with it being run by beings that are (usually) capable of empathy it's still a mess. This is one of the many areas we need to keep AI away from.

After all of the craziness of the last few years it turns out I’ve ended up rooting for lawyers.

There's also a somewhat easy thing for them to offer to consumers, which is potentially combing through all of the cases argued by all of the lawyers licensed in a particular jurisdiction (including cases argued in other jurisdictions that they have practiced in) and finding lawyers with relevant experience to an individual's case. Even narrowing it down from say 200 divorce lawyers listed on a state bar's website in your area to 10 or 20 that have represented clients in somewhat similar situations to you would be enormously helpful.

Coming from the AI side of things: what he's proposing the robot do with the loophole thing is just... not where the technology is at right now. AI is very, VERY good at recognizing patterns in things it has already seen and extrapolating from that. There's a thought experiment called the Chinese Room Experiment that's often used to describe how AI perceive things(not completely accurate by any means but it works for an analogy). Imagine you don't know Chinese and you're locked in a room and given a translation guide with Chinese characters. Every so often you get a paper slid under the door and you have to decode it and send back a response using that guide and eventually, you get very good at it, and even when given unfamiliar characters you can make a good guess at what's being asked by picking out the familiar characters and how they're used. It looks to people on the outside that you speak perfect Chinese but in reality if anyone were to speak to you in Chinese you would not understand a single word. The AI does not actually understand the law or nuances: it is looking at patterns from what it was trained on. AI is only as good as its training set so if you have a more typical legal case, there is a good chance it could give a decent legal response. HOWEVER, if an AI does not pick up on any specific nuances in the case that completely change the outcome(which, let's be honest, often happens), then that legal response isn't relevant anymore and the more concerning part is the consumer would likely not realize there was a mistake. It's like using ChatGPT for writing answers on homework: not only would you not know if it made a mistake but ChatGPT and a lot of natural language AI have a certain syntax some people can pick up on and realize it was written by an AI which on homework is straight up plagiarism and in a court of law would prejudice the court against you to some degree. The smart thing to do here would be to make an AI to assist lawyers, not try and do their jobs. Lawyers are human and miss things that an AI could pick up on. Public defenders who don't have much time per client could do their jobs much better if there was an AI to review the case and suggest certain laws, known nuances, or legal precedence so the lawyer could look those specific points up and see if they apply instead of potentially not being able to offer proper legal defense because they have less than an hour to prepare per client.

He could easily recruit volunteer judges and attorneys to carry out a mock trial where one side is being argued by an AI, and only the audience is aware of which side it is. The fact that he's instead relying on sneaking the technology into a real courtroom is alarming.