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Comment by granfalloon | Hacker News Reader

"Superhuman" in what sense? With respect to legal work.

Is it just faster? More persuasive? Better at coming up with novel arguments?

Speed is great from a client perspective, but not as important as accuracy on important stuff. I haven't seen LLMs produce arguments that are more persuasive than those crafted by good lawyers. Finding the "perfect case" in Westlaw is helpful, but rarely the deciding factor.

I could see asking an LLM to reproduce your work AFTER you've done a first pass, to see if you missed anything -- that seems like a real value add. But I truly can't understand how not using it would be "malpractice." In fact, I still think committing malpractice would be MUCH more likely with AI. (Now if by "malpractice", you meant pissing off clients with expensive bills, that's a different story...)

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I've found it depends a lot on how Claude is setup, and spending some real time on the default Private Instructions to focus on accuracy, identifying/flagging uncertainty, citing sources, checking itself, and first surfacing all assumptions and asking questions dramatically pays off in terms of getting concise and solid usable results.

Edit: add: I've found this to the degree that a relative who works at a top biglaw firm and has their internal AI (MS-based) and used to find ChatGPT and Claude actively time-wasteful, when I posed a question they'd spent a day+ fruitlessly researching (multiple areas of law and international), Claude came up with a very useful answer in ~10min — they were quite impressed.

The last year has made a huge difference

I think the parent post meant that it's very good at writing code and operating the computer. I think we're also biased because we've used older generation models and the latest ones are orders of magnitude better than what we had 6 months ago.

For example, for your legal work, it can:

Develop a machine learning model (CRF, running on CPU) for clause extraction from scratch, Find training documents and training data and train the model for various provisions (you might help it here by pointing it to the directory with annotated documents),

Build an app where you upload your legal documents and it extracts the provisions you want from all documents.

Integrate semantic search and an AI agent into your app which lets it answer any question about your documents with exact evidence from the documents.

All of this from one well crafted prompt, a few skills and a workflow. It could probably complete this in one night, while you sleep.

Or you can point it to your saas of choice and tell it - 'create me a copy of this app'.

All you need to know is how to steer it through the planning/research phase.

So it's not that it's 'accurate' in legal terms, it's that it can build you any tool you want from scratch so that you can become more accurate.

I'm not in the legal world, so my experience is limited from a coding perspective. I don't think AI could ever truly come up with novel arguments, at least not yet, but their value for you may be to sharpen your arguments or pull on every thread that you may not even have thought about.

For example, theres a very popular coding skill set call Matt Pocock's Grill Me where it just asks you a relentless amount of questions about the feature you're trying to build. You may be able to tailor this somehow to act as the opposing counsel and have it poke holes in your argument. I suppose the closest analog would be a sparring partner.

Its helpful for me and my ADHD brain because I can go down all sorts of rabbit holes and it can easily keep track of all the ideas i have while grilling and it can send sub-agents out to investigate other claims to add more context to the grilling session.

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