[yabones]

Who's accountable when it does something wrong? Surely Anthropic Inc won't take the fall for you. There's no errors or omissions insurance, no legal accountability, no attorney-client privilege, and no bar association to handle disciplinary action.

I think we should be realistic here, this is a more advanced version of those "will kits" that spit out a PDF. The legal system will not look fondly upon this stuff until something fundamentally changes.

And like, I would love if we didn't have to spend thousands of dollars to defend ourselves in a culture as litigious as ours. But I wouldn't put my life and well being on this thing.

[rayiner]

> Who's accountable when it does something wrong? Surely Anthropic Inc won't take the fall for you.

Us lawyers. Using AI isn't a binary decision. Your attorneys can use AI to be more efficient, and you can use AI to better understand what's going on, what your lawyers are telling you, or to learn what questions to ask. Or you can use it in lower-stakes situations where nobody is going to pay for a lawyer.

I'm cautiously optimistic about AI for legal work. So much of legal work can be drudgery, mucking through documents, etc. There's a lot of room to apply LLMs even just for the kind of tasks we know they can do. But I think the Claude approach using agents is the way to go for legal work. LLM context windows are far too small to hold the documents for even a small case. So you have to use it the way programmers use it: to work on a file structure, saving state in .md files, etc. That approach is well developed for programming, but the legal AI companies haven't even scratched the surface of it. (And frankly, the products they have put together, which hide the LLM behind some sort of interface, aren't very good.)

Unfortunately, I think the example you mentioned (helping individuals defend against suits at lower cost) is where AIs won't help much. A lot of that work is people work. Something happened. Then you gotta talk to everyone it happened to, sort through conflicting stories, hopefully work out a deal, if not, try to persuade a judge in court, etc. AI unfortunately is more applicable to allowing big companies to throw more papers at each other in big lawsuits while controlling legal spend.

[jonshariat]

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't people still ultimately accountable? You may be able to sue your lawyer for malpractice or they may lose their ability to practice (report them to bar) but in the end no matter where you get your advice from, you are accountable. Question is: who do you trust with it?

Like you said, its a no brainer to use both. Use it as a tool to expand, deepen, or teach. Same with doctors and AI. There may be a point where you build enough trust in the outputs and your understanding of them but until then its best to use it as a tool not put your whole outcome in it.

[48terry]

Claude for Legal: Your #1 AI Agent for getting fined and referred to the bar over filing non-existent citations.

[dyauspitr]

Is the library responsible for some mistake you make based on the research you do from there?

[pixel_popping]

The user should be, user gets info from an LLM, a machine or a web post, it doesn't change anything, the one submitting the documents is the one responsible imo and it should remain that way.

[sorokod]

> The legal system will not look fondly upon this stuff

True, but the legal system didn't look fondly on outlawing jaywalking, until it did. Took it about 20 years in the US.

[Dodo45611]

Whenever you think AI snakeoil salesmen can't possibly make a more deranged argument, Hackernews delivers

[Procrastes]

A more charitable reading might be that the comment you're replying to was specifically referring to how jaywalking was a made-up offense that was specifically created and promoted to cynically protect the auto industry from liability. So there are parallels. [1]

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797

[rayiner]

That's is a deeply bizarre article. In a world where 90% of people would rather drive than walk, you'll obviously have laws that regulate when and where people can walk. You think that if the auto industry hadn't done that, we wouldn't have jaywalking laws today?

[sorokod]

A 100 years ago that ratio was the other way around. There were powerful technological and financial insetives to change the public's attitude and the law.

They say that history rhimes.

[rayiner]

The incentive was convenience. People have rushed to have cars as soon as they can afford it almost everywhere that there is enough space for cars.

[dr_kretyn]

They have a big disclaimer on the repo which says they're in no way liable. This looks more like a marketing use case category than anything useful.

[GavinMcG]

FTA:

> The attorney using the plugin — not the plugin, and not Anthropic — is responsible for the legal positions taken in their work product.

[victorbjorklund]

No different than when googling and a website is wrong