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Comment by Zafira | Hacker News Reader

> [L]awyers are traditionally tech illiterate

This is the main reason I think disbarment as the punishment in this specific instance may not be fair. There are people who are unaware of the limitations of these systems and the risk of these confabulations occurring.

While I don’t think disbarment is inappropriate, I would rather see the New York State Bar use this to require some better understanding of these emergent technologies or even better have all the State Bars start discussing some standardized training about this because it’s easy to see a person trying to treat this as LexisNexis.

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If your doctor asked ChatGPT to tell him how to remove your appendix, followed the directions, and subsequently removed a kidney instead, would you want him to lose his medical license?

For sure, but the difference there is that someone was actually severely wronged. The worst that happened here was some people had time wasted.

I think a punishment where the lawyer had to pay for all the time he wasted for the judges and various legal clerks (and his client) would be sufficient personally.

He is unlikely to make the same kind of mistake again I would think.

> The worst that happened here was some people had time wasted.

At least one party to the suit, if not both, are going to end up spending extra money. Plus it wasted public resources – the time of the judge and court staff, and their salaries, and more – and cost taxpayer money. Your remedy of having the lawyer pay might bankrupt him, and it doesn't really make whole the other party. In cases where one party has limited financial resources or perhaps is close to death (thing capital punishment, or malpractice), this isn't just waste. Someone could be severely wronged.

that is not a meaningful difference when the issue is that both professions can use tools but are responsible for the results of using them, and thus obligated to apply their professional judgement before and after using a tool that can hurt people (in this case, their clients, at least)

Is disbarment about fairness? Is the primary goal of such proceedings to rehabilitate and apply a sort of justice?

Certainly, civil and criminal courts have those as their raison d'être. But I thought licensing boards had an entirely different purpose. If I surgeon was a good guy who genuinely wanted to help people and who didn't engage in any sort of malfeasance... but even so, he just kept slicing aortas open accidentally through incompetence, the board should say "aw shucks, he's had some bad luck but he really wants to heal people".

This is the same. The court system is replete with circumstances where a client does not get a second chance at pursuing justice. A lawyer that fucks that up, even if doing so in good faith, leaves them with zero remedies. This might have been a bullshit "Slippin' Jimmy" case this time, but the stakes could've easily been higher.

I don't think I want to live in a world where fairness plays any part in the decision by the bar on this matter.

Disbarment is usually considered a punishment of last resort. That the failure of the attorney to carry out their obligations is so absolute, that it justifies taking away their right to practice law in a given state. There are certainly other measures that can be done here that are of a similar rebuke, just not as final. A suspension or temporary disbarment is also possible.

We don’t know the full situation here, but a personal injury case against a bankrupt airline for striking someone in the knee with the serving cart seems remediable?

Disbarment usually happens in cases where attorneys fail to file timely repeatedly at the expense of their clients and after multiple admonishments to stop that; utterly fail in their fiduciary obligations (i.e. they were acting like an escrow and then instead gambled the money away in Vegas).

> that it justifies taking away their right to practice law in a given state.

This seems a little weird. As far as I understand it, no one has a right to practice law.

There is a privilege that can be acquired, it one meets the requirements. If you somehow got through without meeting those, or if you start to fail to meet those... time for a new career.

> We don’t know the full situation here, but a personal injury case against a bankrupt airline for striking someone in the knee with the serving cart seems remediable?

I don't know about this particular case, but many cases and circumstances can be a "one shot at it" scenario. You fuck it up, it's tossed and you can't refile. There are many reasons and details, any of which might be messed up by a lawyer relying on a silly chat program to draft motions. One might miss an absolute deadline. It might be dismissed with prejudice. Appeals might be exhausted. This could even be true of the case in question.

In some cases, it might even be true if it was a criminal trial and your defense attorney was incompetent, that you don't get a chance to appeal. In California, I think, those are Marsden cases (someone correct me if I'm wrong). For those, you have to raise an objection during the trial.

So, if someone found out that ChatGPT gave their lawyer bad advice the day after their conviction... well, oops. No appeal for you.

I'll say it again. I do not want to live in a world where law license proceedings are decided on a "what's fair to the bad lawyer" basis. No one has a right to be a lawyer, if you're bad at it there are plenty of other occupations you might make a living with where incompetence doesn't threaten so many lives and livelihoods.

Let's change the professions a little bit.

Imagine getting fired and barred from writing code ever again over a bug you introduced because you used copilot and didn't spot the issue.

Pretty sure that would be considered an unacceptable infringement of basic human rights here.

You can assert your ideals all you want but the fact is that professions that govern themselves invariably end up with "what's fair to the bad lawyer".

Licensed professionals are licensed (should be, there are notorious exceptions) because if those professions remain unlicensed, horrible things happen.

Lawyers and medical doctors are two of those. Yes, it would be wrong to prohibit the Starbucks barista from making coffees, no matter how many times such a person burned it.

Software engineering probably falls between licensed professional and burgerflipper on that scale... but let's not full ourselves. If you were working on firmware for medical equipment, then yes banning you from ever doing it again because you used ChatGPT when making a heart rate monitor is just and fair.

Not all of our software matters. But the people working on code for space vessels or aircraft or as in my example, medical equipment? I'm more than happy to see them banned from these things for life if they were to do that.

> You can assert your ideals all you want but the fact is that professions that govern themselves invariably end up with "what's fair to the bad lawyer".

This is irrelevant. We're all aware of how underperformant oversight tends to be. The point is to fix that, to rally against its eventual decline. Certainly I don't know why anyone would want to embrace your attitude of defeat/acceptance.

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