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Answering Legal Questions with LLMs
- RecycledEle 2y agoLLMs are Internet simulators. They will give you an answer the Internet thinks is a good answer. If you live in CA or NY, the legal advice might be passable. If you live in TX, the legal advice is horrible. LLMs are biased because the Internet is biased.
- beeboobaa3 2y agoNo thank you, let's not.
- kevingadd 2y agoDon't sections of regulations reference each other, and reference other regulations? This article says they only insert snippets of the section they believe to be directly relevant to the legal question. It seems to me that this automatically puts the bot in a position where it lacks all the information it needs to construct an informed answer. Or are the laws in some regions drafted in a "stand-alone" way where each section is fully independent by restating everything? This feels like they've built an ai that justifies itself with shallow quotes instead of a deep understanding of what the law means in context.
- hugodutka 2y agoYou're right that sections reference each other, and sometimes reference other regulations. By creating the "plan for the junior lawyer", the LLM can reference multiple related sections at the same time. In the second step of the example plan in the post there's a reference to "Articles 8-15", meaning 7 articles that should be analyzed together. The system is indeed limited in the way that it cannot reference other regulations. We've heard it's a problem from users too.
- MontagFTB 2y agoA tool like this should live in service to the legal profession. Like Copilot, without a human verifying, improving, and maintaining the work, it is risky (possibly negligent) to provide this service to end users.
- tagersenim 2y agoMy number one request is still: "please rewrite this legal answer in simple language with short sentences." For this, it is amazing (as long as I proofread the result). For actual answers, eh...
- SoftTalker 2y agoI assume you're in the legal profession? Do you find, as you proofread, that you want to insert caveats and qualifiers into the "simple" language and end up with something like the original legalese? Legal language is what it is in large part because simple short sentences are too imprecise to express the detail needed.
- aeonik 2y agoIndeed, a corrolary in computer science is the the reasoning behind why using the Go programming language is, in general, a major mistake. Simple vocabularies, while attractive will inevitably fail to properly describe systems of any sufficient complexity without long chains of hard to follow low-level logic. Any system of sufficient complexity necessitates the use of more complex vocabulary to capture all the nuances of the system. See: Legalese, medical jargon, chemical naming schemes, the existence of mathematics itself, etc..
- zitterbewegung 2y agoThis service may have been better with a higher context window but with the required accuracy of legal document writing the inaccuracy of the RAG systems are too high. Also, people have actually used it in practice and it didn’t go that well. So human in the loop systems in practice should have users finding corrections but won’t occur when you release the product. https://qz.com/chat-gpt-open-ai-legal-cases-1851214411 https://qz.com/chat-gpt-open-ai-legal-cases-1851214411
- mediaman 2y agoThe systems described in the article don’t sound like RAG at all. RAG systems have a much lower propensity to hallucinate, and generate verifiable citations from the source material. Though I think they’re better as research aides than “write the final product for me.”
- tagersenim 2y agoMany laws, especially GDPR, can only be interpreted in conjunction with a lot of guidelines (WP29 for example), interpretations by the local Data Protection Authority, decisions by local and European courts, etc. Given all of this information, I think the bot will be able to formulate and answer. However, the bot first needs to know what information is needed. If a lawyer has to feed the bot certain specific parts of all of these documents, they might as well write the answer down themselves.
- Workaccount2 2y agoI'm surprised Gemini 1.5 isn't getting more attention. Despite being marginally worse than the leaders, its still solid and you can dump 975,000 (!) tokens into it and still have ~75,000 to play with. I've been using it lately for microcontoller coding, and I can just dump the whole 500 page MCU reference manual into it before starting, and it gives tailored code for the specific MCU I am using. Total game changer.
- nick7376182 2y ago[dead]
- lionkor 2y agoIs the resulting (C) code maintainable, unit testable, do you understand it? If your answer is "I'll just ask gemini to explain it", I will laugh sarcastically and then sob for the poor people around the hardware you program for
- Workaccount2 2y agoI haven't had an issue (at least more than what is expected). I am also an EE, not an SWE. I use it for internal test systems and it has saved me tons of time that I would have had to spend combing the reference manual. As I am sure you know, embedded code often has terrible portability and requires lots of "check the 500 page datasheet" to get stuff working properly.
- 2099miles 2y agoUnintuitive LLM only rag?
- balphi 2y agoI think its unintuitive relative to the standard implementation of RAG today (e.g. vector-based similarity)
- anonylizard 2y agoGPT-4 also cannot solve full programming problems, and frequently makes large errors even with a small focused context, as in Github Copilot Chat. However, it is still extremely useful and productivity enhancing. When combined with the right workflow and UI. Programming is large enough of an industry, that has Microsoft building it out in VScode. I don't think the legal industry has a similar tool. Also, I think programmers are far more sensitive to radical changes. They see the constant leaps in performance, and are jumping in to use the AI tools, because they know what could be coming next with GPT-5. Lawyers are generally risk averse, not prone to hype, so far less eager customers for these new tools.
- arethuza 2y agoLawyers can also be held professionally liable if they get things wrong.
- withinboredom 2y agoI’ll probably get downvoted to oblivion, but I wish it were the same for software engineers (not programmers, or developers though — but people who explicitly label themselves or be labeled as “engineers”).
- pylua 2y agoThe industry would have to change drastically for that to occur. I don’t think it would be a bad thing, but it would be a fundamental shift and drastically raise the cost.
- photonthug 2y agoWe all know that can’t happen until and unless software engineers get the ability to say “no” to random changes in deadlines or specifications. We’re talking about an industry that invented agile so it can skip the spec..
- withinboredom 2y ago
- vouaobrasil 2y agoThe next step after this is more complicated laws because lawyers can now use LLMs, and thus laws even more opaque to ordinary folk who will have to use LLMs to understand anything. It's an even more fragile system that will undoubtedly be in favour of those who can wield the most powerful LLM, or in other words, the rich and the corporations. This is another example of technology making things temporarily easier, until the space is filled with an equal dose of complexity. It is Newton's third law for technological growth: if technology asserts a force to make life simpler, society will fill that void with an equal force in the opposite direction to make it even more complex.
- sumeruchat 2y agoLmao dont make up laws like that please. If anything my guess is that LLMs will make laws simpler and without loopholes and rich people wont be able to hire lawyers to have a competitive advantage in exploiting legal loopholes
- vouaobrasil 2y agoIsn't it true though, at least in terms of the amount of information we have to wade through these days? Haven't hard drives gotten larger, and why? Because technology makes it possible. It's funny that you are laughing, but it would be even better if you made a serious argument against me. To be honest, I am posing a serious possibility: are we really sure that AI will cause a democratization of knowledge? I mean, our society is valuable and keeps us alive, so shouldn't we be at least asking the question? It seems like even questioning technology around here is taboo. What's wrong with discussing it openly? I think it's rather naive to believe that technology will make life simpler for the average person. I've lived long enough to know that many inventions, such as the internet and smartphone, have NOT made life easier at all for many, although they bring superficial conveniences.
- sumeruchat 2y agoLook i think its true that technology makes life worse in many ways but making the legal system complex is not one of those things in my opinion. There is nothing wrong with your position its just that you are trying to make weak generalizations driven primarily by your emotions and anecdotal experience and not data
- bdw5204 2y agoUsing LLMs to understand laws seems like about as bad an idea as using them to write legal documents: https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-fake-case-lawyers-d6ae9fa79d0542db9e1455397aef381c https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-f...
- efitz 2y agoThis was an excellent article describing how they broke down a complex task that an LLM was bad at, into a series of steps that the LLM could excel at. I think that this approach is probably broadly applicable across law (and perhaps medicine).
- avidiax 2y agoIs there perhaps a training data problem? Even if the LLM were trained on the entire legal case law corpus, legal cases are not structured in a way that an LLM can follow. They reference distant case law as a reason for a ruling, they likely don't explain specifically how presented evidence meets various bars. There are then cross-cutting legal concepts like spoliation that obviate the need for evidence or deductive reasoning in areas. I think a similar issue likely exists in highly technical areas like protocol standards. I don't think that an LLM, given 15,000 pages of 5G specifications, can tell you why a particular part of the spec says something, or given an observed misbehavior of a system, which parts of the spec are likely violated.
- _akhe 2y agoI saw a RAG demo from a startup that allows you to upload patient's medical docs, then the doctor can ask it questions like: > what's the patient's bp? even questions about drugs, histories, interactions, etc. The AI keeps in mind the patient's age and condition in its responses, when recommending things, etc. It reminded me of a time I was at the ER for a rib injury and could see my doctor Wikipedia'ing stuff - couldn't believe they used so much Wikipedia to get their answers. This at least seems like an upgrade from that. I can imagine the same thing with laws. Preload a city's, county's etc. entire set of laws and for a sentencing, upload a defendant's criminal history report, plea, and other info then the DA/judge/whoever can ask questions to the AI legal advisor just like the doctor does with patient docs. I mention this because RAG is perfect for these kinds of use cases, where you really can't afford the hallucination - where you need its information to be based on specific cases - specific information. I used to think AI would replace doctors before nurses, and lawyers before court clerks - now I think it's the other way around. The doctor, the lawyer - like the software engineer - will simply be more powerful than ever and have lower overhead. The lower-down jobs will get eaten, never the knowledge work.
- mdgrech23 2y agoI've 100% found AI to be super helpful in learning a new programming language or refreshing on one I haven't used in a while. Hey how do I this thing in Gleam? What's Gleams equivalent of y? I turn it first instead of forums/stackoverflow/google now and would say I only need to turn to other sources less than maybe 5% of the time.
- _akhe 2y agoAbsolutely, I can't imagine doing Angular without an LLM sidekick. Curiosity + LLM = instant knowledge
- AlwaysRock 2y agoYup. Entirely replaced the "soft" answers online like stack overflow for me. Now its LLM and if that isnt good enough then right to docs. I actually read documentation more often now because its pretty clear when I'm trying to do something common (LLM handle this well) vs uncommon (LLM often do not handle this well).
- liampulles 2y agoKey point here is that the implementation combines an LLM summary with DIRECT REFERENCES to the source material: https://hotseatai.com/ans/does-the-development-and-deployment-of-q_2azysfQoPxFksVXKW8TYw2TGT79#legal-trace https://hotseatai.com/ans/does-the-development-and-deploymen... That seems to me a sensible approach, because it gives lawyers the context to make it easy to review the result (from my limited understanding). I wonder if much of what would want couldn't be achieved by analyzing and storing the text embeddings of legal paragraphs in a vector database, and then finding the top N closest results given the embedding of a legal question? Then its no longer a question of an LLM making stuff up, but more of a semantic search.
- still_grokking 2y agoThat would work better and more efficient. But than there's no "AI" in there. So nobody would like to throw money on it currently.
- Terr_ 2y agoThe un-solved problem is how to ensure users actually verify the results, since human laziness is a powerful factor. In the long run, perhaps the most dangerous aspect of LLM tech is how much better it is at faking a layer of metadata which humans automatically interpret as trustworthiness. "It told me that cavemen hunted dinosaurs, but it said so in a very articulate and kind way, and I don't see why the machine would have a reason to lie about that."
- TwitBar 2y agoArguments will be formulated by AI with another AI attempting to poke holes. You get a government appointed AI if you cannot afford one. This will kick off an arms race between plaintiffs and defendants. Legal companies then build moats around their bespoke AIs and it all boils down to a judge/jury voting based on a generated slideshow presentation (hopefully avoiding a miscarriage of justice /s).
- heycosmo 2y agoI would like to see solutions (for professionals) that ditch the whole generative part altogether. If it's so good at finding references or identifying relevant passages in large corpora, just show the references. As you said, the "answer" only entices laziness and injects uncertainty.
- yieldcrv 2y ago2024 and people still just realizing that LLM’s need subtasks and that “you’re prompting it wrong” is the answer to everything Maybe “prompt engineering” really is the killer job
- nocoiner 2y agoWe’ve learned that the combination of high latency, faulty reasoning, and limited document scope kills usage. No lawyer wants to expend effort to ask a detailed question, wait 10 minutes for an answer, wade through a 2-pages-long response, and find that the AI made an error. Nor does any lawyer want to have that same experience with a junior associate (except insert “two hours” for “10 minutes”), yet here we are.
- georgeecollins 2y agoI wonder if this "AI will replace your job" is like "AI will drive your car" in that where once something can solve 95% of the problem the general public assumes the last 5% will come very quickly. Rodney Brooks used to point out that self-driving was perceived by the public as happening very quickly, when he could show early examples in Germany from the 1950s. We all know this kind of AI has been in development a long time and it keeps improving. But people may be overestimating what it can do in the next five years -- like they did with cars.
- barrenko 2y agoThe last 5% recursively turns into 95% of a new whole 100 and so ad nauseum. But one time it will fold...
- akira2501 2y agoI'd say that's it's only value. This is all an obvious open threat against the labor market and is designed to depress wages. If your business can be "staffed" by an LLM, then will not be competitive, and you will no longer exist. This is not a possible future in a capitalist market.
- helpfulmandrill 2y agoNaively I wonder if the tendency towards "plausible bullsh*t" could be problem here? Making very convincing legal arguments that rest of precedents that don't exist etc.
- sorokod 2y agowonder no more [1] In a cringe-inducing court hearing, a lawyer who relied on A.I. to craft a motion full of made-up case law said he “did not comprehend” that the chat bot could lead him astray. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/nyregion/lawyer-chatgpt-sanctions.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/08/nyregion/lawyer-chatgpt-s...
- cess11 2y agoEU law is case driven, and besides the text of cases you also need to know the books interpreting them, general legal principles that might be applicable and hermeneutic traditions. They are clearly a long way from a tool that can compete with a human lawyer.
- daft_pink 2y agoI would say that it’s getting better at answering those questions. I have a list of difficult legal research questions that I worked on at work and gemeni pro and claude opus are definitely way better than 3 and 3.5 and 4. I believe it will eventually get there and give good advice.
- giobox 2y agoWhat is the situation regarding LLM access to the major repositories of case law and legislation at places like Westlaw/LexisNexis? Those are really basic information sources for lawyers around the world and access is tightly controlled (and expsensive!), but its enormously common for lawyers and law students to need subscriptions to those services. I'm just curious because I can't imagine either Westlaw or LexisNexis giving being controller of access to this information up without a fight, and a legal LLM that isn't trained on these sources would be... questionable - they are key sources. The legislation text can probably be obtained through other channels for free, but the case law records those companies have are just as critical especially in Common Law legal systems - just having the text of the legislation isn't enough for most Common Law systems to gain an understanding of the law. EDIT: Looks like westlaw are trying their own solution, which is what I would have guessed: https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/westlaw-edge https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/westlaw-edge
- anonu 2y ago> We preprocess the regulation so that when a call contains a reference to “Annex III,” we know which pages to put into the “junior lawyer’s” prompt. This is the LLM-based RAG I mentioned in the introduction. Is this RAG or just an iteration on more creative prompt engineering?
- pstorm 2y agoThis is RAG. They are retrieving specific info to augment the generation
- sandworm101 2y agoDon't be too worried about LLM arms races. Law is not as complicated as it seems on TV. Having access to a better LLM isn't going to somehow give you access to the correct incantation necessary to dismiss a case. The vast majority, like 99.99% of cases, turn on completely understood legal issues. Everyone knows everything.
- Foobar8568 2y agoCan you use freely information from a website is a simple statement, yet....We have LLM.
- aorloff 2y agoPerhaps, but a lot of lawyering is very expensive. If that turns out to not be so expensive, the practice is going to change. Right now the court system works at a snail's pace, because it expects that expensive lawyering happens slowly. If that assumption starts to change, and then the ineffectiveness of the courts due to their lack of modernization will really gum up the system because they are nowhere near prepared for a world in which lawyering is cheap and fast.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoNah, courts are already hugely backlogged.
- balphi 2y agoHow are you using regex to end the while loop? Are you detecting a specific substring or is it something more complex?
- hugodutka 2y agoIt detects if a message contains the ”Final Answer” substring preceded by a specific emoji. The emoji is there to make the substring relatively unique.
- w10-1 2y agoYes, law applies rules to facts. No, connecting the facts and rules will not give you the answer. Lawyers are only required when there are real legal issues: boundary cases, procedural defenses, countervailing leverage... But sometimes legal heroes like Witkins drag through all the cases and statutes, identifying potential issues and condensing them in summaries. New lawyers use these as a starting-point for their investigations. So a Law LLM first needs to be trained on Witkins to understand the language of issues, as well as the applicable law. Then somehow the facts need to be loaded in a form recognizable as such (somewhat like a doctor translating "dizziness" to "postural hypotension" with some queries). That would be an interesting LLM application in its own right. Putting those together in a domain-specific way would be a great business: target California Divorce, Texas product-liability tort, etc. Law firms changed from pipes to pyramids in the 1980's as firms expanded their use of associates (and started the whole competition-to-partnership). This could replace associates, but then you'd lose the competitiveness that disciplines associates (and reduce buyers available for the partnership). Also, corporate clients nurture associates as potential replacements and redundant information sources, as a way of managing their dependence on external law firms. For LLM's to have a sizable impact on law, you'd need to sort out the transaction cost economics features of law firms, both internally and externally.
- ei625 2y agoAs the same as the software developer, the value of them isn't just to have technical knowledge.
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- spdustin 2y agoI've always felt that a "smart" person isn't smart because they know everything, but because they know how to find the answers. Smart users of LLMs will use the output as an opportunity to learn how to think about their problem, and smart implementations of LLMs will guide the user to do so. I'm not saying that every interaction must be Socratic, but that the LLM neither be nor present itself as the answer.
- jrm4 2y agoYup. As a lawyer and IT instructor, the "killer" application really is "knowledgeable literate human-like personal librarian/intern" When they can do the following, we'll really be getting somewhere. "If I'm interpreting this correctly, most sources say XXXXXX, does that sound right? If not, please help correct me?"
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- niemandhier 2y agoLegal reasoning is extremely interconnected, sometimes directly via inter law references, sometimes indirectly via agreement in the field. This makes setting a sensible context difficult. I believe that it would be possible to teach an LLM to reason about law, but simple RAG will probably not work. Even the recursive summary trick outlined in the post probably is not enough, at least I couldn't make it work.
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