That’s how the legal system in the US has always worked though

Many lawyers are owners/partners compared with software engineers who are more like cogs in the machine. They also bill hourly/contingency per case compared to engineers who are salaried. If a partner in a firm thinks they can take on more cases because of AI assistance then they will because that's just more money in their pockets.

That's already the case in law because you could just hire the best or most lawyers.

With regard to certain legal questions this has always been the case. AT&T Fought the US Government for 20 years and eventually won because the government gave up. Without some kind of national anti-SLAPP law we're all one irritated oligarch away from having our lives financially ruined.

I am curious what level of trust established law firms treat LLMs with.

That’s a great question for Astra for Law.

You know most of that was wash trading, right?

True, unless you're a surgeon.

I mean that's what all of these execs are openly telling everyone: they want you out of work, they want their ai to be the one to bring the world to it's knees, they want to surveille every second of your day, they want killer drones to use, they want to lay all of your cities to rubble and build "paradises" on top of them like in gaza.

They also openly tell you what they are afraid of btw: collective worker power. something that is massively lacking in our industry, although i feel like it would be one of the easiest industries to unionize in terms of # of workers.

Interesting interview I just watched about how powerful and dangerous these "wishes" or "prophecies" are especially in the hands of the ultra-wealthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7grHa1NR0

May I just note that there are other jurisdictions on this planet that are less money-biased than than the US one but will be disrupted by law-LLMs as well?

It seems much more probable to me that these LLMs will make good things worse than that they will make bad things better.

Those professions will likely evolve, but the traditional forms (ie writing code by hand, writing law filings by hand etc)

there will still be writing initial and incremental prompts by hands, until and if LLMs surpass humans in all intellectual functions.

XIX century dickensian society and Gilded Age barons were replaced by the time of the New Deal.

Eagerly awaiting your robot plumbing startup. I highly doubt anything in plumbing is compute-limited.

Genuinely wondering (aka not snarky): Has anyone found frontier models to provide useful research in the context of European civil law systems?

Your comment made me wonder if there are any halfway-acceptable model benchmarks for law tasks? Specifically I’d love to know how the frontier models’ abilities compare between common law vs. civil law systems. My guess would be that an AI in a common law context should have a clearer idea of how a specific case is interpreted/accepted by (common law) practitioners, whereas trying to rely on AI in a civil law context, like Germany, can be daunting. In a few Germany-specific recent examples, the models feel like they present only (maybe too stubbornly?) the “civil law”-based laws. All while negating much of AI’s research benefits because civil statutes are portrayed as being absolutely accurate, binding, and their enforcement (and thereby the legal reality) being uniformly applied. Am I making this interpretation up? If so, how can I prove myself wrong?

The definition of AGI is whatever a frontier lab wrote a blog about doing in the last week.

presumably that will remain true for the lawyers using the product

it seems like for law specifically all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans.

Don't be too sure about that. [0]

0: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans

I've talked to a lawyer about how they handle this. They do indeed double-check everything, since it'd be embarrassing (or worse) to send hallucinated statements to opposing council or to the court. They still find the assembly a huge time saver

But based on stories in the news on the subject, not everyone has this same level of diligence

Sure but just like generating 100x more code, someone has to review it. So you are wasting everyone in court's time (defendants, prosecutors, judges, staff) by making them parse through what is quite often a bunch of hallucinated slop. Time that could be much better spent on parties who prepared and reviews their own arguments.

Interesting to see the callout to companies like harvey in the post itself as consumers rather than competitors? I guess openai isn't quite willing to step into those customer relations themselves?

I already use them for that, they are pretty excellent at it. Much better than the terms of use generator products that used to exist. That said, nobody cares to sue your business for the most part until you're big enough to be worth it. By that time, you'll have a team of legal analyst to assist you... or agents should I say.

Then again, nobody will have money to buy anything at this rate, so in all liklihood, this is a total non-issue.

That or a hydrogen balloon of financial engineering

The glucose wetware will actually fight your case...

Wetware is a new phrase that both horrifies me and makes me crack up in laughter :)

Yes, because glucose wetware can be held liable for malpractice if it gives you nonsensical advise.

You will be the one getting sued. It's just a tool.

I'd expect they could indemnify you against hallucinations or similar if this gets good enough for that to be a very rare occurrence? Or you could buy insurance on it that's cheaper than hiring a lawyer (not a high bar to clear). I wouldn't rely on it currently, though.

can you use this to create legitimate terms

I don't think you can. What I get from this article is that this is not a product they're going to sell to average consumers.

Same for SWE when pushing code they don't understand.

Solved without AI https://commonpaper.com

https://commonpaper.com/standards

You are.

when you shoot someone with a gun, who gets sued? you? or the gun manufacturer?

The product isn’t meant for you or me it is for lawyers. If you can’t take personal liability for a badly written contract then you shouldn’t be using it.

You can create terms and contracts even if you're a 7 year old with no AI.

And yes, even contracts drafted for millions of $ have oversights and unlawful or unenforceable terms.

You thought you could sue your lawyer when a contract they drafted turns out to not mean what you thought it meant?

I used ChatGPT the other day to resink a CPU with termal paste, replace a PSU in my PC and snake my kitchen sink from the wall. I didn't exactly need it's help but wanted someone looking over my shoulder so to speak. It can help you repair all types of stuff, but as far as county / building codes and such, that probably isn't far off. It seems to understand things quite well.

We have big problems for humanity.

The biggest problem is that we're conditioned by a paradigm that frames these as problems.

There will still be a need to distribute and exchange ressources, goods and services.

Real estate, food, energy, mobility.

That will be done with money. Or violence. Either way, a scary future to people when labor doesn't provide any value. Elon promises abundance, but what can he do against greed?

Of course, but who (what?) is going to make the food and the shelter?

there are always be next frontier of problems which require creativity, unless AI become supersmart completely make humans redundant in all cognitive functions.

As one wise man said - the oldest profession will also be the last to go.

Most HNers are clueless that if you have Top Talent + Capital you already have an insurmountable moat. OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic all have that and none of the regular guys can compete against them (if they choose to attack that industry)

Every other profession has increased their productivity.

You dropped this /s

how so? delayed justice is denied justice

It's completely failing at that too. Public trust in the courts is lower than it's ever been, and it was never all that high to begin with

https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

How are we fighting it online? You cannot

There's a Judas Priest joke in here somewhere.

JG Ballard could probably turn that into something darkly atmospheric, and even more dystopic than his usual depopulated worlds...

Relevant:

https://www.ftrain.com/nanolaw

Call it a Prediction Market

You presented the concern from my adjacent comment perfectly (“LLM performance: common law vs civil law” essentially). So is AI possibly just growing the “Reverence for Professional Experience” factor that plays such a big role for legal compensation here in the US?

I am not sure "eaten out" was the correct phrase to use here.

The legal system is robust and deliberate by design. That winds up being necessarily slow. But it doesn't need to be inefficient.

It's really not. The legal system is slow and inefficient because it's a deeply pipelined system built to maximize the throughput of the bottleneck resource: judges. Judges are constitutional officers who exercise independent authority in meat space and thus are necessarily limited in number. The rest of the design flows from that.

If you got the judge, all the parties, and all the witnesses in a conference room together until the case was resolved, you could probably handle a lawsuit in a few months. But each judge has hundreds of cases pending before them, so that would never work. Instead, you get something like how a GPU works. You do some work on a case, submit the work to the court, then work on something else for a few months while you wait around to get the results back. Then you do some more work and submit it to the court, then go do something else for a few months while you wait to get the results back. A few months of actual work gets spread out over a few years that way.

are pretty good at surfacing some stuff without having to pay lawyers

They are also really good at making stuff up as evidenced by the many, many, many examples you read in the news about actual lawyers using AI to write briefs that are full of errors and hallucinations.

In civil courts, you'd likely get more sympathy from a judge if you represented yourself and admitted your lack of understanding, rather than try to appear as someone you're not because you wrote some prompts and copied the output.

Yes. And you(r lawyer) can collect lawyer's fees and you can be made to pay the court fees, if you lose.

IME the American legal system is set-up to discourage litigation, though. A common tactic is to bury your opponent in the threat of heavy damages or jail-time to get them to settle for what you were originally after, which courts are perfectly happy to facilitate because it gets a potentially lengthy trial off their dockets. They'll punish (or be biased against) whichever party seems responsible for not accepting a "reasonable" settlement.

Algorithmic abuse of the system to extract payments already exists in the form of the debt collection industry.

CourtListener already has an MCP interface and Grok is quite good at pulling from it. In my experience, Grok 4.6 is quite good at analyzing legal cases and human-written documents. Better than Opus 5. I'm not sure if it's better than Fable 5.1 on that task, b/c I'm not willing to spend my precious Fable tokens on case law searches lol.

We could enforce (suggest?) a common format / api at the federal level. Especially if it’s incentivized with funding that more than justifies the cost of maintenance. Similar to how federal interstate funding is only available to states with a 21+ drinking age.

There is none, not for statutes and definitely not for case law; even at the appellate level where you have multiple federal circuits, then 50 states, then territories, military, tribal and a whole host of other niche courts. And the appellate court systems can be split into districts, and by lower and higher levels.

Then if you want to really get into it, The People should also be able to access trial court level, and at that point you have over 3000 distinct court systems with their own access systems, usually requiring logins and CAPTCHAs, and half of them not even having anything accessible online at all, and the other half only having recent stuff online and the rest rotting in a flooded basement.

https://axiom.org is working on this but very early.

Let's swap it out for the AI cartel!

Max Junestrand has consistently said Legora treats the model layer as swappable, selecting across frontier providers rather than building the product around one.

OpenAI didn't need to name Legora and Harvey in the second paragraph of the launch post.

They are pre-empting the obvious interpretation of Astra for Law: that moving this far up the legal stack puts them in direct competition with their biggest legal AI customers.

“Don't worry, they can build on us” is a pretty conspicuous message to include on launch day.

They have clearly thought about some pessimistic outcomes.

"We are also expanding our work on privacy and governance to give law firms specific controls for confidential client work"

This is everything OpenAI have to say about privacy in this announcement. No guarantees. No promises. Just a pinky-swear promise.

Anyone trusting them–or a lawyer who relies on them–for legal work deserves what they get.

Google went to that model after they had a massive cash cow though.

You can afford to play silly buggers when you have dumpster trucks of money backing up to your door every day see also: Meta.

I think the comparison is unfair. Google had/have a product that was 10X better than anything else at the point of release (search then chrome). And they have several money making products like YouTube and android that are either singular or in a duopoly.

OpenAI doesn't have any of these things. They have products that they're paying for customers when the market they're in is rapidly converging on fighting for API reasoning as part of enterprise systems and fighting a race to the bottom for fickle consumer solutions that will be eaten by open source once they have to make money.

Maybe they had a brief window for dominance of information search (or maybe it was only ever going to last as long as Google releasing all their internal research) and maybe they had a brief moment of monopoly till Anthropic got going but theyre not in the same dominance position as Google.

They have a lot of compute, so I think it makes sense to spray and see what works. Anthropic is limited in that regard, and focused in coding/tech, but OpenAI don't need to do the same. They even got the lead without having to focus in coding only, which is remarkable.

Enterprise is eventually get caught (if it isn't already) by the Microsoft/Google. Because with office/teams/suite they were already in every enterprise, and that just added a new tool to existing offerings.

Provisioning and contracts and data retention was just an extension to review of existing ones.

Nobody serious is going to risk sending sensible data to OpenAI/Anthropic, etc because "the benchmarks have shown +8% performance there and +2% there". Irrelevant.

They can't be seen to commit to strongly to a specific product experience, because if they are understood as a regular tech product business that has way different financial scaling considerations than "superintelligent everything-factory"

I suspect that half-assed announcements like this are a result of different people internally with conflicting incentives resulting in a split-the-baby solution.

Perhaps, but then someone would do the same but bill you for 7 hours, someone else would undercut them again, until the price reaches a lower equilibrium.

Sure, if they actually spent 7.5 hours, and it was a reasonable amount of time. If not, perhaps it would be seen as evidence of incompetence.

In the real world, lawyers submit detailed bills and their clients examine them. If you don’t, that’s on you.

How could that be enforced/checked?

Law is a solved problem.

where are the benchmarks

Wouldn’t this and similar efforts to centralize bureaucracy make AI the new gatekeeper? Without reliable transparent models we’re just trusting OpenAI instead of a hundred top legal firms.

Seems like another “product” that will be killed in 6 months, but is good for the IPO so they can say they solved law.

Haha clever

Drop the s and p. Just law.

It’s cleaner.

Right. Pigs enjoy eating their slop. It’s not bad from their point of view.

Slop?

What do you mean by “lawslop”?

law-bearing

I imagine the point here is to separate out the APIs by different professions and charge accordingly.

So there's a strategy shift here. They launched financial services specific tools and now law?

Is the play here a set of specialized harnesses using their best general model?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but isn’t that what legislators do?

Now there will be even less friction to horribly abuse the law. To democratize the law we would need to move in the opposite direction - to always keep it simple and aligned with our intuitions. The more intricate and complex legal arguments become, the more abstracted they are from their original purpose and spirit.

Hence the crypto analogy - it was also supposed to "democratize", but the opposite happaned - it only further empowered the most powerful. Imagine legal case so purposefully complex that only those with access to best models have chances to participate and win the dispute.

Why do you think LLM's language abilities are unable to understand the spirit of the law?

Went from AI replacing my job as an attorney, to them begging me to use their tools

worse, it was trained on reddit law comments

They are excellent, especially the latest models. That said, (a) I wouldn't feel safe filing something without a real lawyer looking at it; (b) it can't (easily? legally?) do oral arguments for you; and (c) a lot can happen in the hallways outside the courtroom to move a case forward that the AI can't easily do.

We do and it saves so much time. Of course human judgment is needed but it’s like cooking with someone else doing the mise en place.

I’m sure there are a wide variety of experiences out there, but here’s my perspective as a former biglaw associate and current solo litigator:

I have had some success using frontier models from the last 6ish months, but only when I can break up my work into discrete and verifiable tasks. For example, I had ~15k pages of discovery I needed to dig through for a summary judgment motion. Instead of just asking Claude to find the best evidence, I asked it first to run a clean, high quality OCR pass (it was almost entirely PDFs). Then I had it generate embeddings and write some reusable python scripts to make keyword and semantic searching easy for agents. While I was writing the brief, I would routinely ask my agent (Claude Code) to use both keyword and semantic searching to find the best evidence supporting whatever assertion I was trying to make. I trusted it because there were traces I could follow.

In other cases/situations, I’ve tried just giving a model access to all the docs and saying “write a brief arguing X,” but it’s always terrible at this. It writes briefs with lots of evocative jargon and rhetorical flourish, but a low signal-to-noise ratio.

Again, I’m sure others’ experiences differ based on workflow, legal area, etc.

I've always said this will be when we get the real Butlerian Jihad, when the AI firms start trying to liquidate the legal profession.

If you automate lawyers out of a job, you can absolutely automate lawmakers out of jobs next. (Not that this would be a bad thing? Maybe pervasive agents for everyone can be the gateway drug to a "this time it's different!" workable direct democracy)

I really hope the bar associations continues to hold lawyers to high standards but I have feeling they may not be ready to handle fallout of AI slop-law.

I have found that it’s useful generally speaking to get the intent of contracts and red lines, but actual drafting I agree is where I lose all confidence. My guess is that the significance of the difference between using a word like “and“ or “or“ can be so meaningful that that level of nuance can often be lost. But I know nothing I’m not in the space, I just pay too much money for lawyers.

I think "email" and "westlaw" fairly count as "the Internet." LLMs might be bigger than either of those.

What model did you use?

Yep, just yesterday, Nike removed one leach middlemen called retailers and sell directly through their app. Turns out working out very well for them too.

The law is much more interpretation and argument based than logic routing based than you seem to believe.

If you think paralegals + AI can do the job of good lawyers you don't understand the profession at all.

Yes. For example, HR people already are basically doing a bunch of unlicensed legal practice. LLMs will have a huge impact on allowing them to do more without having to retain a lawyer.

Human professionals put their reputation and finances at risk when performing their work. This risk functions as a guarantee.

I would rather argue they SPECIFICALLY will read everything. However, they'll likely often just be like "I'd phrase this differently but that works, too".

The best writer I know of was an associate attorney. He didn't have the technical background nor the in depth computer related knowledge, and relying on the information I fed him. But man the briefs he filed to the court were amazingly good. Reading them I would have been convinced his side was right if I were in the jury.

Law LLM will surely help competent lawyers in their fields with greater sources of knowledge not in their core area of expertise.

The need for actual lawyers will persist I think

But will their glamorous salaries persist? That is the question that matters.

AI doesn't need to wipe out lawyers. If they just depress salaries enough, virtually nobody is going to want to be a lawyer anymore.

The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience

This doesn’t replace lawyers, but paralegals surely will be affected. A good enough model could shrink the number of paralegals needed in a firm.

Lawyers sure. Paralegals and assistants are cooked in the way typist and secretaries were back in the day.

I said this before but I wonder if Dan Kan will reboot Atrium. Rally up some old partners and hope Anthropic buys them out for a couple billion.

This is really cool.

crop-topping

this essay details how law firms became sweatshops from 80s. They charge hundreds of dollars to do make busy work by the junior most staff. LLM will kill the goldengoose of the law industry.

https://aeon.co/essays/what-made-law-into-a-white-collar-swe...

Astra isn't doing well on bullshit Benchmark https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.n... and is even worse in Legal department.

Qwen 3.8 Max and Opus 4.8 score highest.

This is the first blog post I saw OpenAI call out Claude directly like that.

I'm not familiar with the Vals AI Legal Research Benchmark. But their website has other frontier models' scores, and the scores OpenAI is now revealing for "Astra for Law" are slightly less than Claude and Muse:

The top is a three-way tie: Muse Spark 1.3 Max, Claude Opus 5, and Claude Fable 5.1 all reach 55.29% all-pass accuracy, a clear ~6-point step ahead of the next model. [Astra for Law reached 54.0%]

Under partial-credit scoring, Claude Opus 5 reaches 90.58% weighted pass rate but 55.29% under strict all-pass grading, where every rubric check must pass. The gap shows models often get most of an answer right but fail on one or two required elements. [Astra for law reached 90.0%]

https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/legal_research

"Rogue OpenAI agent swarm accidentally overturns the Civil Rights Act"

followed a month later by

"Anthropic's Claude inadvertently repeals the 19th amendment"

the partner shouldn't be doing sig packets

As a user of ai hooked up to my Gmail I assume I’ve lost all privilege

At a certain point why would they sell anything other than services and products their eventual (actual) AGI/ASI builds in literally every market.

When opportunity cost isn't a thing anymore because it reaches every corner of the planet simultaneously faster and builds better than any human can.

There's no reason to let others build on top of AI, except if the AI determines that it needs capitalism to continue because it's paperclip goal is to maximize shareholder value.

most of the complexity in software isn't in the actual code

"Introducing Astra for Dog Walkers"

The end goal should be AI judges, I think China has implemented that to some degree.