Maybe we need a better-scaling legal system that does not take years to resolve simple disputes. I am not convinced AI can replace lawyers, but more people having access to the law without extremely costly fees does sound good to me.
Maybe we need a better-scaling legal system that does not take years to resolve simple disputes. I am not convinced AI can replace lawyers, but more people having access to the law without extremely costly fees does sound good to me.
Moving from an adversarial each-party-has-lawyers-presenting-as-extreme-a-case-as-possibly-can-be-made-for-their-side system to something more like expert arbitrators and independent/court fact-finders would avoid the 'bury them in paperwork and filings' lawyer-cost explosions.
Usually the concerns I've seen are around the lines of "the experts are gonna favor the powerful incumbents who they see a lot" buttttt if our system is already doing that AND costing way more anyway, barring entry entirely to many, is that so much worse? Even assuming we can't try to regulate that?
Such systems do exist in 'civil law' (vs common law) countries (which are most of them outside the English-speaking world).
Yes, although they don't really obviate the issues raised by GP (costs, length, complexity).
If anything, some of the largest civil law countries in Europe, like Germany and Italy, can arguably be considered worse than common law countries in all of these respects. Whether that's incidental or due to civil law, I cannot say.
This is a very simplistic approach in itself that is self contradictory. You can't just lump together all legal proceedings of "largest civil law countries" together and compare that to common law countries in general. Statistics will be very different based on exact type of proceedings, the type of cases you try to compare ... if you can find any reliable statistics at all that compares apples to apples as they say. Take a look at the best the EU has (covering both civil law and common law countries) at https://www.coe.int/en/web/cepej for 2022 data. Italy is indeed an outlier in almost all legal areas, but it's just not in any ways similar to Germany... And I also couldn't point to any clear cliffs between common law and continental law countries. The US works very differently with its own 50 states. They have their own statistics at https://www.ncsctableauserver.org/t/Research/views/TrialDash.... But it's very difficult to do any meaningful comparison with the CEPEJ (Council of Europe) data above. It's very judgmental even to compare seemingly simple things, such as what does actually a "criminal law case" means in one jurisdiction and if that is roughly the same in another. The NCS and CEPEJ are probably well equipped to make decisions on convering the data to be comparable after long deliberations by expert court statisticians doing this all their life... but I wouldn't dare to do that by myself, even if assisted by "Fable 99" and billions of tokens.
Check out the amount of lawyers per capita. From experience in Berlin, one of the most dysfunctional German states, the length of lawsuits is a big problem, complexity I don't know - but costs are not crazy, and loser pays (a fixed amount depending on properties of the case). AFAIU, a side can pay more than the fixed amount for their lawyer, but the loser will not pay more. All that discourages outspending someone with frivolous litigation.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lawyers-p...
I'm not sure I understand what you are referring to here. The lack of a jury system, or no trial procedures? Both common law and 'civil law' has quite similar forensic expert and arbitration systems. One thing I can think of as a difference is that in civil law notary systems (and civil cases), you may request an out-of-court preliminary evidence taking. But you can have something similar in pre-trial discovery/disclosure in common law, at least in the UK (where you don't have jury system at all in civil cases).
I suggest you google the phrase 'civil law country' or 'English common law' as I can't do the topic justice here.
The English legal system/philosophy (including jury trial and the adversarial prosecution/defense dichotomy) derives historically from English/Anglo-Saxon traditions (the 'common' law of England) and differs substantially in some respects from the legal systems in other countries which derive from Roman and later French/Napoleonic conventions (known confusingly as 'civil' law).
EDIT: although you mention civil law in your other comment - what I am getting at is the difference in role of judge/prosecutor in criminal cases between the two systems being comparable to GGP's suggestion
How is that different from the current system? Wouldn’t you just bury those fact-finders in paperwork? Or are you trying to shift the cost and responsibility of the discovery phase to the court instead? Would the court pass it through to the plaintiffs/defendants like the lawyers do or is it just covered by the state?
We have quite a few tribunals, ombudspeople, and other non court dispute resolution services in Canada.
Typically, the arbitrator is very well versed in the rules/area they are enforcing, and can see right through a snow job. In my province there is a tenancy tribunal that has to make a ruling before a court gets involved, and the courts rarely disagree with a decision made by the arbitrator in the 1% of cases that do get appealed. Because the rules are so clear, you can shovel piles of paperwork at them, and they will ignore it because they know what pieces of paper they actually need to make their decision.
It isn't for complex big money cases, but it means that courts have more time for those cases because they aren't dealing with ticky tacky minor disputes over damage deposits and fender benders.
Tenancy arbitration is just one of them, BTW. Just about every industry or agency has an outside ombudsperson that is the first step of dispute resolution before a court will be interested.
Sounds good, but what's to stop the party with more money to appeal the ombudsperson decision if it's not to their liking and then apply the "we have a whole legal department for this" strategy?
With frontier models, I have found so many self contradicting points in Indian tax law that I would rather welcome a good AI helping to reduce discretionary powers of officers via highly subjective interpretations. This power asymmetry is basically the driver for a lot of developing world corruption.
I've been thinking about autoformalizing local laws using agents into TLA+ or something, but it's sufficiently past enough my actual skillset that I'm pretty sure I'd just end up wrestling with slop like a pig in the mud. It's a shame though, I consider law to be just kind of a shitty codebase, with natural language being tortured into cooperating, so it's a really natural fit.
I'll probably yield to my temptations eventually and proceed anyways. Lord help me from all the creative but completely detached interpretations I'll land on.
I did this for a few federal agencies, here a few examples
https://ice.dhs.dev/program/13732-human-trafficking-investig...
https://atf.doj.dev/program/44825-open-gun-store-need-ffl
LMK if you want to know more.
I do, though I'm not entirely sure what am I looking at on those links. Could you start by explaining that? They look like training courses or something.
I saw a sequence diagram browsing around, seemed to be specific to a sample scenario?
Each time I try and explain, it flags comment and says its ai slop.
Each "program" here is a government program, agents orchestrate everything including the collaboration between all parties required.
High points: I have been able to help over 100 people get housing with no HITL on my side.
Note: Each host/subdomain is a project, they all inherit policy from each other and that drives the program generation and orchestration layer. Policies can be managed for the diff agencies at rnc/dnc.dev
tl;dr a "program" here is a government program (get an FFL, file a discrimination charge, apply for a benefit), codified so that every step has an actor, typed inputs and outputs, and a citation to the provision that authorizes it. Agents then walk each party through it. And note it points the opposite way from ChatGPT-drafts-your-tribunal-claim in TFA: that dynamic broke because AI made filing free while adjudicating stayed expensive, so the queue explodes. Codifying the procedure attacks the other side; what's actually required, where it actually goes, and whether you have it; before it becomes a hearing in 2030.
Fair question, and the "training course" read is not an accident; it's the same shape underneath. A program is an ordered chain of modules, each with a declared actor and typed inputs/outputs. Courses are also that. So it renders with the same components. The sequence diagram you found isn't a sample scenario, it's the deal template's actual step graph; the thing an instance runs on.
Three authored files per domain:
- an ontology: the domain's vocabulary, its regulatory frameworks with real citations, the O*NET occupations that staff it, the systems of record it touches
- intents: what a person actually shows up wanting ("open a gun store, need an FFL"), with typed parameters
- deal templates, one per intent: ordered pipeline_steps, each with an actor, inputs, outputs, and a policy_check
The page you clicked is generated from the last two deterministically. No model in that path.
The part that speaks to your TLA+ instinct: I deliberately don't formalize what the law means. I formalize the procedure, and bind each step to the provision that authorizes it. Formalizing semantics is exactly where you get the creative, detached interpretations you're worried about, because every gap gets filled by the model's guess. Formalizing procedure asks the model to transcribe and cite, which is checkable:
- every step input is a ref; param:x, step:3.some_output, system:NICS.event; and it has to resolve. A step: ref must name an earlier step's declared output, so the dataflow is a DAG with referential integrity.
- every step's policy_check must name a framework declared in the ontology. A step that no provision authorizes fails validation.
So most hallucination becomes a build error instead of a plausible sentence. That's the whole trick. Not a smarter model; a narrower artifact.
Concretely, since you're right to expect slop: my first pass at four new agencies came back with 100% of step inputs referencing parameters that didn't exist, and prompts that literally said "Subject?". The validator refused all forty programs. That's the mechanism working; I'd have merged them on a read-through.
Intents and flows for ATF, if you want to see the layer under the program page: https://wiki.doj.dev/agent/atf
Limits, since you'll ask. It decides nothing; no adjudication, and consequential steps are human-gated. It's also not a formal method: the invariants are referential integrity and citation binding, not model checking. The genuinely temporal parts are the deadlines, and those do bite; the NLRB's six-month charge window runs from filing and service, with service being the filer's own duty, so a filing-date-only clock computes the wrong date on a deadline that destroys the claim if you miss it.
Re: the sibling comment about discretion; that's the actual pitch. Discretion hides in the gap between the written rule and the practiced procedure. Writing the practiced procedure down, with a citation per step, is what makes the gap visible.
This comment was automatically removed because it is AI slop.
AI doesn't give you a lawyer service without fees though. It makes you feel like you're getting a lawyer service, then you show up in court and say what the AI tells you to say and lose ten times your net worth because what the AI told you to say was legally nonsense.
The answer is in the article. There needs to be a financial mechanism to deter nuance complaints. A small penalty for lodging a complaint and losing.
This fee should help pay for the courts and reimburse and employer for time spent defending itself.
(With the judge / magistrate able to wave the fee on compassionate grounds)
That deters honest complaints from poor plaintiffs. The Economist may approve, but justice shouldn't depend on the relative finances and/or power and status of the opposing parties.
Of course it does, often. But that's a pathology, not a feature to be proud of.
It's true that some complaints are irrational, vindictive, or vexatious, but the system seems quite good at identifying those already.
> That deters honest complaints from poor plaintiffs.
If the complaint has a high probability of success then it has a low probability of making the plaintiff pay costs. If it has a low probability of success then isn't that what we're trying to deter?
Probability of success and merit are different things.
For instance if you know for a fact that you have been fired due to your race (perhaps you were outright told this is the case), but have no evidence (you weren't recording and there were no witnesses), your case has merit (it really did happen), but unless you get lucky and some evidence appears in discovery your odds of success are miniscule.
I'd argue that in such a case preventing such a person from seeking justice would be wrong, since they were really victims and diserve redress.
I think there's a distinction to be made between "a nuisance complaint" and "a legitimate complaint whose presumptive odds of succeeding in court are less than guaranteed"
When the odds of success are 99% but not 100%, that's not going to deter a lot of people.
When the odds of success are 50/50, in this context that's a nuisance complaint because making it "free" to turn all of those into real adjudications would flood the system with exactly the cases where the outcome is unclear which are correspondingly the hardest to efficiently resolve. The only practical way to address that is to clarify and simplify the rules to begin with so that the outcomes are predictable rather than ambiguous, and then we're back to not really deterring anyone because it's obvious who is going to win.
And in the meantime plugging up the system with unlimited questionable complaints isn't very prudent.
People are more worried about the worst case than an imaginary average case. Unless you can get insurance for the fee, significant amounts can be a big deterrance even when they're quite unlikely.
1% might not deter, but I bet it still deters more than you want. 10% will deter a lot despite those being cases that should happen. Especially because these non-experts don't know the actual odds. Their fuzzy guessing range is going to include worrying amounts of failure chance even for very strong cases.
This is a thing, and in the context of the article too. In UK, if an employment tribunal finds you’ve wasted the tribunals time they can and do order costs paid for both the tribunal and other party. Odd they don’t mention it.
As with most such things, though, what is needed are escalating penalties. If you're a Joe Schmo who files a complaint that turns out to be invalid, no penalty for you. If you're a rich jerk who files a bunch of such complaints, a few million maybe. If you're a giant company that is using the legal system to push people around, $50 billion.
Again, this is covered, to an extent. Speaking only for England & Wales, the courts have pretty broad costs powers. Especially if one party is bringing litigation unreasonably. There’s no ceiling to it either, it just has to be defensible.
It’s also on the court system to leverage procedure correctly to add safeguards against the kind of behaviour you describe.
I understand anecdotally the US system is more open to abuse of this nature, but I don’t know the details. This article though was specific to UK.
In Germany, the losing party pays 3x the court costs. The only issue is that everyone gets paid - the lawyer, the court etc. The only person that doesn’t get paid for their time investment is the person who is suing.
But as far as I understand in many lawsuits both sides lose at least for some of their claims/counterclaims, at least in business law. So court sees it as both sides lost, who should pay 3x?
what about a "rich loser pays" rule? if the losing side can afford to pay the other sides fees without getting close to bankruptcy they have to do it, otherwise it reverts to each side paying for itself.
that would encourage lawsuits against the state and big corporations, and make it less worth it to sue small businesses or your own employees. thats common sense because bigger more powerful organizations tend to be more evil (as in breaking the law because they can afford to pay fines) and money is a good measure of power in capitalism.
I don’t see how that helps?
A lawyer isn’t going to sign on to take liability risk unless they spend quite a lot of time analyzing the AI’s outputs for possible blunders?
So it structurally can’t cost significantly less.
Lawyers normally don't have any liability risks, no? And reputational risks are very limited, a lawyer can always point to a judge, to the other lawyer, to circumstances, and away from their own (or the AI's output) blunder.
Layer can be disbarred. And judges do not accept "ai did it therefore I, the layer am not responsible for the false claim" as an excuse from layers.
Representing anyone in a court room by definition carries liability risks, because the judge can punish the lawyer unilaterally, but not the AI.