In many (most?) countries you can defend yourself, waive your court appointed attorney. You are of course highly discouraged to do so. But sometimes people do it, mostly for smaller claims where they don't want to rack up legal bills for things which might cost more than what is at stake.
But, it makes me wonder, will clients be able to use these AI-attorney systems in the future, in the court. Where they basically either just parrot what the model is instructing them to do, or - I dunno - give the model permission to speak for them (while waiving liabilities).
I have no doubt that some complex AI system can perform better than a bottom-tier, overworked lawyer.
Pro se litigants are hyper vulnerable to LLM hallucinations.
One wrong advice clump and, like a step onto the wrong path while hiking, all subsequent steps go in the wrong direction. And sycophancy tuning means marginal one-sides takes get presented as sure-fire things.
I’m of the opinion that the big wins aren’t in using the LLMs to do the work (legal, in this case), but rather to refine and improve the dialog and presentation from all parties. A court-centric LLM that could give likely procedural needs to a litigant, and a law-firm-centric LLM could help a pro se litigant create a meaningful and refined set of questions for lawyer consideration, condensed and targeted, saving all parties time and confusion while meeting the clients linguistic needs ‘where they are’.
All the lawyers know things LLMs never will, the law is interpreted, and the written part isn’t engineering grade facts but suggestions interpreted in context. Arguably this is a racket and a thin veneer of plausible deniability for authoritarian rule. But as the law stands even with federal statues and citations from the courts website, practicing lawyers will frequently end up explaining that in this county/country/court/jurisdiction The Way of Things is different.
I think it could work for some things. Years before LLMs became capable of doing anything substantial, people were selling "legal services" via websites where people could dispute trivial stuff like parking tickets, and what have you in the small courts.
Those services were usually just based on NLP + simple decision trees, and people actually won their cases.
Of course, doing huge corporate contract disputes, IP disputes, M&A, and whatever will probably be out of question for a good while. Same with more serious criminal cases where the stakes are very high.
But I think there's potential for automating away less serious cases, especially where there's good structure.
And of course, it all depends on what kind of legal system one is situated in. Immediately I'd think that Civil Law would be easier for AI lawyers, as its inherent structure is a better fit for machine reasoning. So I'd expect to see more AI products start in Civil Law countries.
> Arguably this is a racket and a thin veneer of plausible deniability for authoritarian rule.
The fact that Lexis and WestLaw have such an iron grip on the entirety of the US legal system is exactly why general LLMs are completely unequipped to be useful in this domain.