[jeffbee]

It appears that researchers and commentators are totally missing the application of LLMs to law, and to other areas of professional practice. A generic trained-on-Quora LLM is going to be straight garbage for any specialization, but one that is trained on the contents of the law library will be utterly brilliant for assisting a practicing attorney. People pay serious money for legal indexes, cross-references, and research. An LLM is nothing but a machine-discovered compressed index of text. As an augmentation to existing law research practices, the right LLM will be extremely valuable.

[violet13]

It is a lossy compressed index. It has an approximate knowledge of law, and that approximation can be pretty good - but it doesn't know when it's outputting plausible but made-up claims. As with GitHub Copilot, it's probably going to be a mixed bag until we can overcome that, because spotting subtle but grave errors can be harder than writing something from scratch.

There's already a fair number of stories of LLMs used by an attorney messing up court filings - e.g., inventing fake case law.

[jeffbee]

I am not suggesting that the generative aspects would be useful in drafting motions and such. I am suggesting that their tendency towards false results is harmless if you just use them as a complex index. For example, you could ask it to list appellate cases where one party argued such-and-such and prevailed. Then you would go read the cases.