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Comment by niklasd | Hacker News Reader

The AI hype also seems to lead to sub-hypes in certain fields. E.g. in the legal profession there is a new buzzword called "Legal Tech". The hope is that AI-driven programs will eventually transform the field. While I think this is certainly possible and will eventually happen, it is astonishing how few programs there are admit the huge hype and countless workshops and conferences about the topic. And while it is possible to compile a list of programs and companies on the market, from my experience most of them aren't actually really used in business.

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I am a lawyer and a coder and I have to disappoint you that that hype is very real indeed.

The problem is two fold a) Lawyers completely underestimated the decision making abilities of software even without AI b) People who are not lawyers that completely overestimate the complexity of legal resolution.

(a) Happens because the software we lawyers use is basically... well... crap and most lawyers are clueless when it comes to technology, even ones that specialize on it. (b) Happens because of TV and Movies have created this fantasy legal world where lawyer, especially expensive ones can prove that they are elephants because of their virtue to win arguments.

Surprisingly and this was also a surprise to me when I started to study law, law and coding is much closer than people think because there is a lot more logic than there is tv drama in a real court room.

Not only AI should not have problem resolving legal issues , judging from its current achievements, but it can help with the most valuable skill for a lawyer which is pattern recognition. Our profession bombards us daily with tons of data that is extremely hard to organize and keep track of. This applies more on civil than criminal law , but most of law is civil law anyway (economical issues), and this data is documents used as evidence, case law (court cases that have created a precedence) and of course legislation.

Also there is no much of an option really, AI is pretty much unavoidable because the ever evolving immense complexity of modern society has made legal resolution so complex that court cases take up to decades to be fully resolved which of course is not a viable solution.

An example is the IT law which has been a huge suffering for courts and legislators to keep up with its rapid evolution in a profession where court cases and legislations take decades to move forward. In IT decades are in legal terms , centuries.

AI will replace lawyers , for that I have no doubt, cause law is a dying profession anyway for the reason I explained above. Obviously lawyers will still be around for a long long time but yes AI will fundamentally change the profession. The profession is in desperate need of modernization as it has barely evolved that last few thousands of years.

The problem was never what AI can do, it can do amazing thing, the problem is supply and demand. AI is a field of huge demand and minimal supply but then this is a problem that has rampaged the coding profession which is why freelancer coders make more money than lawyers.

> Also there is no much of an option really, AI is pretty much unavoidable because the ever evolving immense complexity of modern society has made legal resolution so complex that court cases take up to decades to be fully resolved which of course is not a viable solution.

Instead of turning law into a computer game where the company with the most TPUs wins, why not simplify or reform the system so that human beings can understand it? Isn't the point of the legal system to resolve conflicts between people, not computers?

I'm worried that we're driving off a cliff of incomprehensibility, where things happen but nobody can understand why. Or even if they do, they don't have the authority to override the system which is making the decision. Reforming the system outright is always too risky -- it's been working OK so far, right? But what happens when it stops working? How can you fix a system you don't understand?

Simplification is an illusion. Simplification works great for understanding and learning , I completely agree but is terrible on problem resolution. Mainly because problems don't get simple just because you want them to. Secondly because the nature of knowledge and the world we live in is of immense complexity.

You are absolutely correct though that we are indeed driving off a cliff of incomprehensibility , I cannot count the times when I have caught , including myself, lawyers and coder not understanding even basic concepts like OOP or legal responsibility under the influence of drugs and alcohol. It's not that the concepts are hard to understand but they are so numerous it becomes so easy to get lose track of where you are , where you were and most importantly where you are going.

When I started coding back in the end of 80s coding in Assembly was not that hard. After 30 years of coding I decided to go back to Assembly I just got blown away how much more complex it became, though obviously not surprised, and of course I discovered that even Assembly coder mostly use C libraries cause well, otherwise it gets insane really fast.

My solution to this may sound insane but in life I have learned that when I have a crazy idea ,usually, I end up being correct. I do believe that AI wont replace us but rather augment us. I am not talking about cyborgs , singularity and these nonsense I am talking about software that helps you navigate through the chaos of information. And when I say AI I mean it in the most vague way possible obviously the technology will change in the future in so many ways.

The only viable solution for the human being is to either find news ways to take advantage of the potential of his own intelligence or augment himself in some way.

Afterall its not a secret that AI is already used to construct AI and this opens the door to a ton of potential.Afterall is it not coding all about automated decisions making ? It's not as if we have not being trusting automated machines for thousands of years. But nonetheless humans are terrified of technology. The marvel of the human condition.

I guess the issue is the definition of problem. If the law reaches a point where you need AI augmentation to understand it, that's a good sign it's being applied to problems it can't actually address or which may not even exist at all.

Look at GDPR. It's impossible to know what it really means. Huge efforts are put into action with no idea of whether it will be considered good enough or not. That's not a problem you can fix with ai. You need better law (in this case, no law would be better)

I'm OK with a computer assisted legal code so long as our policy makers recognize it for the public good that it is. If there is a standardized "legal robot" then everyone who is eligible to votr should have free access to it.

Humans cant understand the Law because of the sheer volume of it. The legal corpus is so large than even lawyers need to specialize into smaller subsets of expertise. Software could at least make the Law more readily available for citizens.

law and coding is much closer than people think because there is a lot more logic than there is tv drama in a real court room.

I've a friend who abandoned her engineering career at 30 to become an IP lawyer (she is incredibly senior in her firm now) who says the law is just a program that you run on a judge.

I have 10 years experience in law and father is a lawyer and even though her remark has obviously a comedic basis , she is very much correct. Objectivity is a huge deal in the legal profession, the ability to separate emotion from critical thinking. Of course its easier said than done which is what creates the laughing part :)

Isn't it more like ROP attack? You present data meant to cause the judge to follow a desired execution path through the relevant laws.

Can you name a legal tech product that is currently used and really improves productivity?

Generally I agree with many of your points, especially that tech w i l l transform law. However, I'm not so sure how soon that will be.

I also studied law and I am a coder and I see similarities between both. However, I think it will be a long time until a computer will truly replace a lawyer. There is one thing that I think is especially hard: Not all rules are clear cut (like "If the company has a turnover >5 Million, x applies"). Many rules have an element of judgement (in Germany we call it "unbestimmte Rechtsbegriffe", which roughly translates as vague legal concepts) that require context knowledge, which is something that has not yet been achieved by machines (or at least I wouldn't know about it). While logic is undoubtly an important part of law, judgement (especially one that requires broad context knowledge) and interpretation it another one, and from what I experienced, the latter can unfortunately often not to be solved with the rules of logic and thus it will be hard to bring a computer to do it.

It's interesting, because as a coder and lawyer I have the exact opposite view. Legal technology is a lot like coding technology -- there has been stuff invented since the mid 1990s, but it's all of debatable utility (see Paul Graham's articles on Lisp). What are these tools the capacity of which lawyers are underestimating? To me, legal tech seems a lot like the talk about how visual programming tools were going to make coders unnecessary.

The law (at least, litigation) involves marshalling precedent and facts to achieve persuasion. Circa 1990s tools like WestLaw are still the gold standard for legal research. And technological tools for collecting, organizing, and synthesizing facts are basically non-existent.

There is, in fact, market validation of the idea that legal technology is not particularly useful. You might argue that defense lawyers have disincentives to adopt technology that would reduce billable hours, but what about the other side of the v.? Plaintiffs' lawyers working on a contingency basis have enormous incentives to minimize effort invested in each case. Yet they don't.

> You might argue that defense lawyers have disincentives to adopt technology that would reduce billable hours, but what about the other side of the v.?

The US has a vast oversupply of lawyers (sure, star litigators make lots of money because they are in short supply, but they aren't the people whose labor legal technology aims to replace), which makes the value of reducing legal gruntwork low, plus to replace legal grunts using WestLaw or similar tools, you've got to either build on top of one the handful of such tools or duplicate it's corpus of annotated data and the massive infrastructure dedicated to keeping it current before you even get to the novel part of your tool, or you won't have anything usable.

So, it's a super high barrier to entry for a market where you are competing with cheap, abundant human labor.

My fuzzy mind when from AI and legal to google for Stuart Sierra (just to see how is clojure evolving nowadays), the link "is clojure dying" was irresistible, then appcanary from clojure to ruby transition and happiness for programmers, then Stuart "Do not" about combining lazy evaluation with side effects and the comments there seems to justify that clojure "Simplicity over easyness" is a problem. When the AI hype expand from deep learning to other techniques I think we'll see a better scenario to apply AI to real world. Yesterday the "How is Haskell in 2017 and 70-100 full time programmers in Haskell in the US" give us an idea of how is the tech world evolving. The velocity of the expanding radius of technology and IA is decreasing.

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