Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Attorney. Build a system, work from anywhere, make your own schedule. Hard to outsource.

Really? I would have assumed that attorney is one of those jobs that is going to be hugely disrupted by AI. Should people new to the field bother if they aren't going to be top X% (5? 10?)?

There's way more to legal work than filling out forms. The AI is going to replace legal assistants, not the attorneys themselves.

For people without the resources, yes. For people that have a problem and resources, no. They pay for the best and want to be sure it‘s watertight.

Just get into and through Harvard Law, easy peasy...

The best programmers make good money too.

Quality is determined by a combination of network, reputation, and results, not your Alma mater. Search for a securities or criminal defense attorney, ask around, see if where they got their diploma plays into the referrals you get.

Actual legal work, as opposed to legal-adjacent tasks, will be the last to be disrupted by AI, at least so long as AI means LLM. Law is simply too complicated to rely on something that doesn't have the ability to understand.

Doc review staff will be effectively eliminated...but they're already being eliminated by non-AI technology, so AI will just be the last straw.

I watched a tech demo of an LLM writing code to make a neat little user interface. I would have thought that utterly impossible a couple years ago.

I don’t think this would be a good time to start a career drafting contracts.

It’s not even the complicated part, these are fields where people still use fax machines and wouldn’t use teleconferencing until they were dragged kicking and screaming through COVID (And even then, lots of courts were like, nah, we’ll just close court for a year, too bad for you)

Free market dynamics don’t apply. Healthcare is the same way because it’s controlled by an old guard backed up by the force of law. There is no way to disrupt because the system is rigged.

Here I am the one to bring up AI, ugh. I get a sense that, of all things, LLM's actually encroach on legal professions the most (aside from copywriters). But this is from an outside perspective. Any insights?

If blockchain didn’t replace the law, neither is a hallucinating robot in the near term. Has to pass legal muster, not techbro bar. I say this as someone deeply involved in GRC in finance where a component of my work is working on improving LLM guardrails for knowledge management.

What does build a system mean?

Focus on a niche, create a funnel, be very good at that niche, scale horizontally.

EDIT: Picked attorney because you have to be licensed to practice law, creating a barrier to the equivalent of code bootcamps. My apologies if the model around the idea wasn't clear, I will do better!

Why is this seemingly general rule so specific to law (being an attorney)?

The license is the key, as a barrier to entry. Medicine is very high and takes a lot of time but pretty impenetrable. Law is cheaper for the time and money. What else would have this property?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com