Easy to say, but nobody will agree to changes. People know how things are and don't like change, even if it would be for the better. In many cases things would be better overall, but the voters who care are the ones that would be worse off.
I see problems in LLMs doing research, making drafts, etc.
I see 3 kinds of potential users.
1. Non legal background people trying to avoid going to a lawyer. They should definitely NOT use an LLMs.
2. Fresh out of law school graduates.
They think they can do fast work, draft quick replies, do fast case research, enh. They should go the traditional route of interning, learning the "art", they probably won't need it because they will learn "how the law works"
3. Established attorneys.
They usually have templates made for most things, over their career, they have established routines of making things fast, maybe it can help them but to say replacing good chunk of work or offloading to LLMs isn't probably going to go well.
There is a reason why interns are made to do grunt work. The "chain of command" is built so they learn on basic stuff, learn to make decisions, etc. Without these basic decisions under their belt, an intern can't take bigger decisions later on. They just won't know....
>Non legal background people trying to avoid going to a lawyer. They should definitely NOT use an LLMs.
I used LLMs to replace a lawyer this year to great effect. I successfully advised myself as to the right strategy and drafted an immigration petition in the correct language. Granted it wasn't 100% LLMs (I also supplemented it with "traditional" online research and wrote the letter myself using the LLM version as rough guidance), but still, I certainly would've gone to a real lawyer in 2024 for this stuff but didn't.
Professional advisory work can be divided into two types:
1. Once you know the rules of the game, the next move is immediately obvious.
2. Knowing the rules is not enough to know the next move -- that requires judgement and experience.
LLMs in the hands of someone smart and savvy can easily replace the first type of work.
If it is at all possible to replace a lawyer with an LLM, it should always be the preferred choice. Using a lawyer is not a zero-sum game, using an LLM is.
Lawyers nearly universally tend to: convince clients they need a lawyer; promote extreme views; charge legal fees (that ultimately result in financial damages to the client). There are no winners in this game, except for lawyers, who are having a lovely time. Even if you won the case, you've lost, because the pie got smaller due to lawyer fees.
You’re managing risk and what you pay for is derisking yourself. You be the judge of what that is worth to you, but it’s not zero and it’s not always your attorney’s fee either.
Retaining an attorney is a little bit like feeding a shark in order to catch a ride on its back and do some jousting with your opponent, while your opponent is entertaining a possibly bigger shark or two, and has possibly infested the place with piranhas.
There is a chance of de-risking yourself, but the chance of a bloodbath is even higher.
And yeah, the sharks are trying to convince you that they are "your" sharks, while it is quite clear that their mates are the other sharks.
Might be true today, but I still feel pareto principle applies. These points also sound like gatekeeping a bit and I hope future AI versions prove that law is also essentially something that can be made as programmable as possible for most common answers if the underlying principles and constitution are organised such.
If there is no precedence for X happening when Y , Z, P, Q, R are special combinations , the judge decides and sets precedence. But if another judge interprets it differently with similar set of circumstances it is not considered incorrect I presume especially if in different jurisdiction unless overridden by a higher court. This is my layman understanding but I think this design is wrong and essentially where human subjectivity controls the system.
Subjectivity is not totally avoidable in law but the goal of the legal system should be reduce it as much as possible along with ambiguity.
Your understanding is correct, but where your understanding goes astray is thinking that that's a bug. The subjectivity is a feature. It is not possible to specify what should legally happen for all possible circumstances the entirety of humankind faces. Like, literally not possible. We humans can't even create rigorous specifications for what our programs should do that keep up with their evolving requirements, and you want to make life-ruining decisions set in stone based on a rigorous set of predetermined rules about all possible circumstances the entirety of humanity could face any time in the future in an evolving world?
Law is intentionally not code. The world is not something you can program.
Isn't achieving a rigorous, unique specificarion what civil law tries to achieve? Not that it is a success, but the idea behind it. Sorry if this is a silly question, but this is how I understand it.
No, it doesn't. It aims to provide a fairly comprehensive framework within which judgments can be made, but it is absolutely expected that there are edge cases and ambiguities which are resolved by human judgment of the circumstances.
Since this is a thread about using ChatGPT for law, I should note that this is actually one of the most important reasons you'd rather hire a lawyer than ChatGPT to represent you. A good lawyer or firm will know the local judges and how they tend to lean on ambiguities in their area of expertise, and will be able to use that information to both advise you and tailor their arguments to appeal to the judge's sensibilities. There is an element of unfairness to this, to be sure, but you'd find much more unfairness really quickly with machine-generated judgments because of how messy and non-compressable real world circumstances are.
> Non legal background people trying to avoid going to a lawyer. They should definitely NOT use an LLMs.
In my experience, it is incredibly hard, practically impossible, to find a lawyer who will even talk to you. I think this is a valid use case to get at least some understanding what the next steps might be and if it even makes sense to seek legal representation.
Agree. Now imagine the same thing in less developed and/or less well off countries.
There was a post here a few weeks ago about a UK court being inundated with some kind of claims (unfair dismissal?). To submit a claim you do not need a lawyer, but the process is (intentionally?) vague and very complicated, so it takes a lot of effort to figure it out yourself. But AI makes that kind of stuff easy.
AI is not going to replace layers billing big corporate clients millions a month, but it will replace things that are fairly standardized processes, that don't require a lawyer, but today are just too complicated for regular people.
> To submit a claim you do not need a lawyer, but the process is (intentionally?) vague and very complicated, so it takes a lot of effort to figure it out yourself.
I'm not sure there's quite accurate. The form is really not that difficult to complete.
It's basically: Party details, type of claim, particulars, damages
Obviously knowing these details requires some legal knowledge but I actually think ET claims are easy enough to bring if you've got the time to do a little research and build your case. Almost all ET judgments are public so there isn't the usual difficulty with research as you get with law reports being restricted either.
> In my experience, it is incredibly hard, practically impossible, to find a lawyer who will even talk to you.
Really? I find them quite talkative. But I'm not sure what kinds of questions you are pestering them with?
In any case, the whole discussion reminds me of people using LLM to replace medical professionals.
For both: unless you have a doctor or a lawyer always on standby, you have to make a decision on whether to even go and seek out one of these professionals. By definition, you make that decisions without professional help. I think LLMs can help you there with the initial research to decide whether it's even worth it to contact the professionals.
I do think non legal background folks can use LLMs today to sense check legal ideas, like for instance, "what are my legal rights in this situation?"
These situations usually are not ones that an individual can justify the time or money to contact an actual lawyer, but then if they do decide to contact one they will come in with better questions and more of a sense of what they are expecting.
This is similar to medical. Should you use LLM to diagnose yourself, treat yourself with prescription drugs you buy from shady gray market online sellers? No. But you can use it very well to know when it's time to go to the doctor and what to ask.
Yes. Unless you have a lawyer or doctor on standby, you have to make the decision whether to contact them. And by definition you have to make that choice without professional help.
LLMs can help with that. I don't think they are worse at this than me trying to figure this out all by myself.
You sound much like software engineers sounded when the first coding agents dropped.
"You can't trust the output, it doesn't understand bigger systems"
"Its an art, you need to learn the ropes of it to truly write good code"
Its a very dangerous line of thinking. Software engineering will never be the same, as writing code has basically vanished from the daily workflow. Not for every specialized usecase, but for many.
> There is a reason why interns are made to do grunt work. The "chain of command" is built so they learn on basic stuff, learn to make decisions, etc. Without these basic decisions under their belt, an intern can't take bigger decisions later on. They just won't know....
That might be true, but that doesn't mean you benefit from training up juniors.
There are 3x as many lawyers per capita in the US as we had in the 1970s. Credit agreements that used to be 50 pages are now 500. This increase in volume has not lead to any increase in actual value. The legal profession is a metastatic cancer on our society. Un-fuck this situation and maybe I'll think about taking your advice of not using a LLM.
I'm not defending Israel as the minister is clearly wrong here, but surely silencing critics by killing them (what Iran is accused of) is quite a bit more severe than removing citizenship?
Thanks for giving me an article of something I know about and think is terrible. That unfortunately wasn't the comparison and if it was I wouldn't have made my comment. The comparison was with removing citizenship.
Quite a few. If that was the comparison I wouldn't have mentioned anything because it would be a similar thing. Comparing murder with removing citizenship is not the same thing. Israel murdering journalists is, but not related to the conversation.
Funniest comment I’ve read all day, thanks. Never seen someone make light of a government rendering someone stateless. Especially rich in the context of an apartheid state.
Are you saying your own comment is funniest your read all day? If not then I am quite confused because I never made light of anything and made it clear that it was the wrong thing to do. I just think comparing murder and removing citizenship is not a great comparison.
If anybody made light of anything it was the person I was responding to.
Israel has murdered journalists in Gaza. That would be the better comparison to Iran's actions. I don't think Israel removing citizenship has an equal comparison with anything Iran has done.
I know for a fact If you use "signal" matrix or whatever "security" app, you will get branded a terrorist in India, your life will be upended and you will face a long list of problems.
Yes that's bad but that's an Indian government problem, not a signal or other messenger app problem. And really, it sounds like there was a lot more going on with these people than just using a particular app. Discord and WhatsApp are mentioned too.
India also bans most satellite phones by the way. I have one so I looked into that as to not get caught out travelling.
The big deal is, having talked to security people, they are "fine" with WhatsApp because the theory is, they get data from whatsapp so they have some sort of backdoor access.
They are pretty chill with WhatsApp which id unexplainable
Maybe WhatsApp gives them a ton of metadata like all their contacts, when they chat and with who, IPs, etc. Signal only gives out either time registered or last used last time I checked.
Thats the only reason for at least me to use f droid and I have for the last decade I think.
It "just works".
As opposed to play store apps requiring "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store. It refuses to do so on a FOSS principle so I am literally cut off from a lot of apps.
Aurora store helps but apps that "require play store services" don't work.
> "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store
Not necessarily. Most apps that require Play Services should work fine even if you’re not logged into Google. You do, however, have to have the “gapps” installed. (Some apps would also actually check whether you’ve installed them from the Google Play store and not, say, Aurora, but from my experience most don’t bother.)
Also, perhaps look into microG? It reimplements the Play Services APIs, but is FOSS and only connects to Google servers when it’s necessary for some functionality (e.g. if you enable push notifications): https://microg.org/
I’m using microG without signing in. Could you tell me a bit about what apps you’re using that you’re having trouble with?
A good way to sidestep all those issues is getting your “everyday” apps from F-Droid :-) I’m only using Aurora Store for things like banking, taxi, or food delivery apps, and those are usually working great. Some banks are more trigger happy (shame on you, Revolut) while others seem to be okay. I really only miss Google Wallet.
What's a feature not in KDE connect that the writer wanted and it didn't have?
They could always submit a pr.
Beeper exists you know....
I have a question. It's fine to build for your own self but is it okay to release something in public when the environment is a moving target and you are just a one-man team keeping it afloat?
Wouldn't it be better to go behind established FOSS products and not reinvent the wheel when you don't have to?
I understand no one can tell you how to or why to do certain things but there comes a time, when youw want to help, not build the next temple os and instead help manjaro or whatever is cool these days?
I find KDE Connect severely lacking. It's great that it exists, and maybe it's really excellent with Android, but for iOS it's really not there yet.
Even features that do exist don't always work reliably. I can't send files between devices, most of the time clipboard sharing doesn't work either, and there's loads not implemented.
> What's a feature not in KDE connect that the writer wanted and it didn't have?
From TFA:
"And Tether now supports: iMessage, SMS, Notifications, Contact sync on Linux. In addition to its previous: File Transfer, Clipboard Sync, OTP handling."
> Wouldn't it be better to go behind established FOSS products and not reinvent the wheel when you don't have to?
From TFA:
"Before you ask, I know KDE Connect exists. It's great! If you're on Android you should definitely use it. The problem is that it didn't do what I wanted and it's roadmap indicated it never would."
Maybe next time read the article before commenting?
Let's be fair: At least some of the features you quoted do work in KDE connect in my experience, so I had the same question as GP. Even after reading the article.
A genuine question, does anyone here actually use KDE Connect as a daily driver to actually keep in touch with people? I would love to but, for example, when I'm on a university campus the possibility of keeping those two devices connected appears difficult if not impossible. I keep looking into both Bluetooth and/or the VPN route every once in a while, but it ends up not working and I give up. Something I'm missing, perhaps?
One of the not cool things about KDE Connect is that its "plugins" system doesn't seem like it.
Where are more plugins for it? How you add them? Where are docs for creating them?
I haven't had a great feeling when asking its dev about stuff but hope that situation has changed. Having a proper plugin system would let people like OP extend KDEConnect and potentially benefit more people, instead of being subjected to the will of its devs and the roadmap.
I suspect this is the wrong way to think about it. Since it's FOSS, you don't even need a plugin system to extend it. Likely the plugins are just an internal organisation structure.
This is a very good point and I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I considered contributing to KDE Connect but decided against it for many reasons:
1. This would be a major subsystem added to KDE Connect and I have no history with the project.
2. The KDE Connect roadmap explicitly lists iMessage / SMS support as "Won't Implement"
3. My project requires a browser extension and mail extension, I can't imagine I have much of a chance of getting a "KDE Connect" extension approved.
4. Time: it would have taken much longer to jump through all the (appropriate) hoops.
5. Choice. While I'm not a fan of Omarchy, I LOVE what it is doing. Having an alternative to the Big Two and embracing "custom" desktops is very appealing to me, and I think it is a good thing for Linux and FOSS.
6. I was going to do this no matter what, it worked better than I expected, I wanted everyone to have it.
Personally, few years ago I wanted to use kde connect with my iPhone, and I don’t remember the distro now but it’s when I had to install kde connect later it wasn’t part of it, and after almost a whole day of googling around and trying to compile and solve whatever missing libraries or drivers, it never connected.. so yeah I welcome the fact that there are alternatives, always!
I would argue that if you have the same setup as the author then use it. Yes a moving target but won't you fix something you use for yourself? Also point an agent at it get it back working in a few hours of waiting :P
Glad you brought that up, I was actually going to suggest not to replace KDE Connect but rather to become interoperable with it because AFAIR (but didn't touch an iPhone for few years now) there is no iOS client for it.
I have had this issue few times on a specific wifi router (different router on same line doesn't) so don't know exactly.
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