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Comment by DanielHB | Hacker News Reader

It is really interesting because I have been using LLMs a lot for reading legalese documents. At least in the realm of Legal matters we already have this dynamic of "people make overly wordy and bloated LAWYER generated content and other people try to use LAWYERS to compress it back into useful pellet"

So at least for legal documents this LLM craze is a big improvement! It is much harder to out-spend other people on LAWYER stuff now.

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In the case of lawyers though, it's more akin to paying someone to find and document edge cases.

That tends to end up verbose.

In the case of other realms, it's just padding because previously word-count was a metric used as a proxy for quality or depth of analysis.

In effect, we pay lawyers to be ridiculously pedantic for us where pedanticism is required or desired.

That level of pedanticism elsewhere, though, is incredibly annoying or precisely what is not desired.

I’ve wondered from time to time if we could replace some of the wordiness of laws and legal documents with bullet lists. For example, a trial about some interpretation of a word in a law could be contributed back to the law as a bullet point that says, “this also applies if …”.

What you're describing is law, most of it is bullet points, take for example the computer misuse act 1990, section 1:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/1

Or if you're more patient, the whole lot:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/crossheading/co...

It's all bullet points.

> a trial about some interpretation of a word in a law could be contributed back to the law as a bullet point that says, “this also applies if …”.

Is this not what happens in case law?

The law doesn’t literally get updated with a bullet point. Subsequently attorneys have to do ever greater searches to analyze all the precedents.

I thought this is the case until I had an exit and I myself was actively participating adding to the contracts.

> I thought this is the case until I had an exit and I myself was actively participating adding to the contracts.

A couple of years prepping cases and docs for an attorney helped me appreciate the necessity of language in law.

Conversely, the lack of legal language gives us overly broad (abusable) laws. The CFAA is one notorious example.

Obligatory warning: a lot of what seems like bloat in legal documents is there for a reason and has a specific purpose that your LLM isn't guaranteed to be able to handle. Sure, some lawyers add bloat just for the sake of it, but in many cases the text is there because it changes or clarifies the meaning of the surrounding document in a way that matters in court.

An LLM can probably help you understand the document if you're using it side by side with the real thing, but in this context it sounds more like you're using it to summarize.

I have been using it to ask questions about the document. For example I throw the document at the LLM and ask something and ask it to quote the original text. Then I ctrl+f the original text for the quote just to make sure the LLM is right.

And in other cases the text is there because it has been used in other legal documents, and might not be needed for this document, but those documents were good and it doesn't cost anything to put that text in so we should keep using it.

In other words it's a cargo cult.

The question is, do you trust an LLM to distinguish the cargo cult from the actually necessary text?

its use in the legal realm isn't new, and companies like @LegalDiscovery have been at this for years.

LLMs are more general purpose, and will probably eat/merge with that business.

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