Excellent blog post, excellent advice. This part in particular:
> When working with paid professionals, I think people tend to put them into one of two categories: doctors or general contractors.
> With doctors, if your oncologist says you have a lump that needs to come out, you pretty much do whatever they say. You’re the patient; they’re the expert leading the charge.
> With general contractors doing home renovations, most people intuitively know that’s not the right approach. You stay on top of them, give clear instructions, try to understand the issues yourself, and assume you need to provide lots of direction and monitoring to get what you want done.
> Most people—entrepreneurs included, certainly myself—put lawyers in the doctor category when they should really treat them more like general contractors.
Except... I think if one has enough time, it's better to treat everyone like general contractors. Doctors make mistakes, often. You can and should challenge them.
> Doctors make mistakes, often. You can and should challenge them.
The problem with challenging doctors is that the body is incredibly complex, and is not really under any obligation to "make common sense" / be bro-science-y.
The vast majority of the time you're going to be wrong and annoying, even if you're consulting LLMs first.
If a doctor is making a mistake, and you're a lay-person, you're not likely to spot it. But you are likely to challenge a bunch of things that the doctor is right and just be an annoying back-seat driver.
You're better off trying to get a doctor you can trust than treating your doctor like someone who isn't good at their job.
There are bad and shady doctors to be sure, but they are extreme outliers.
Doctors, unlike lawyers, typically care about your care - whereas lawyers are mostly interested in extracting as much of your money into their pocket as possible.
Unless you're going to some elective surgeon, most doctors are so busy, they don't need to make up pretend bs to have you come back and get work.
Two separate doctors have almost killed my wife with incorrect diagnoses over the span of 15 years.
She had cancer when she was 18 and the doctor insisted that women just don’t get cancer at that age, and insisted the lump was benign without testing it. We got another doctor to remove it, and it turns out it was stage 1 cancer.
A decade ago she was in crippling pain right in the gall bladder area. The doctor insisted it was indigestion. We found another doctor (thank goodness for PPOs letting us go directly to specialists without a referral) who did an ultrasound and said my wife probably had less than a week before she would suffer a rupture, and she had to have emergency surgery.
I’m glad you haven’t had that experience, but it’s a very real problem.
Not true in my experience. Just because a doctor has gone to medical school doesn't mean they are good at debugging/troubleshooting. I've had many doctors try to diagnose my chronic issues with guesswork and hunches instead of methodically eliminating possibilities with tests. I had to switch doctors many times to find one good enough to diagnose my condition (LADA aka type 1.5 diabetes). I actually asked the first doctor if it could be LADA and he said "nah, I don't think so", so then I asked if we could test for it to rule it out and again he declined and confidently encouraged me to exercise more and eat fewer carbs.
Any good doctor will tell you that you should be an advocate for your own care. That includes asking questions when something does seem right or doesn't make sense. You don't have to be a doctor to tell them they marked the wrong limb to be removed in surgery or ask why they recommend one treatment over another.
You sound like someone who was lucky enough to only meet good doctors.
Bad doctors, that really don’t give a shit, exist and are doing well, at least where I live, because there simply isn’t enough doctors.
The ratio good to bad doctors is the same as good to bad contractors in my experience.
I fully understand how annoying it is to be challenged by a patient as a doctor but why would the doctor do that with his contractor and not accept that from the patient? Because he’s more of an expert? I’d argue he’s less of an expert actually, because medicine is so insanely complex and we know so incredibly little of it.
> Doctors, unlike lawyers, typically care about your care
Yes but doctors, like laywers, often err on the side of caution. I don't want to be cut open unless absolutely necessary.
Maybe the approach is simply to ask for a second, expert opinion rather than trying to make your own. But asking pointy questions can't hurt (within reason, of course; you don't want to be the guy "doing their own research" (even if you are)).
This approach seems more like an overreaction to bro-science/anti-vaccine crowd. Like you arrived here by deciding to trust doctors more, since others don't trust doctors enough.
Often, you get out of something what you put into it. People who don't try to understand their own health/relationships/finances often end up where they didn't want to be.
If you won't advocate for yourself, why should you expect a 3rd party do it?
I'm in the UK. As well as doctors making mistakes, they can be under direction diagnosing critera. The UK has had a multi-year struggle for people with ME/CFS, (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). It falls under neurology in the UK, and a sub-chapter neuro-psychiatry has the ear of the national health service's supremos, and has historically entertained an "all in the mind" approach. I digress. Back to AI and medicine again: https://x.com/vipintukur/status/1931049593535627417 - insights can come from that quarter, and medicine is going to have to play catch up at times.
> Doctors make mistakes, often. You can and should challenge them.
It is worse. Many doctors will administer against your interest if it boost their bottom line. There is, also, very little legal recourse against doctors.
This. Doctors have to work in a system. The hospitals are institutions that have quarterly quotas to hit, and they want doctors to maximize profit. How much the doctor will oblige depends on the individual doctors but the pressure is always there.
I read the same and came to the opposite conclusion. I said: "Yikes. The balls on this guy.":
> Some lawyers bristle at clients setting strategic direction. They believe there’s a “correct way” to do things, they know it, and they’ll fight you if you disagree. In that case, get different lawyers.
The thing is -- there are correct ways to do things in the legal sphere. Litigation is highly professional and highly formal, and has only become more so. While sub rosa it's fine to ask an AI for advice, and to engage it in draft brief writing, summarization to bullets, etc., it's wild not to realize how much of litigation and the law is wrapped up in people and experience and intricate formal processes. Such as this court has local rules, and this judge likes his briefs this length and the arguments just so, this needs to be filed here, stamped by the clerk, and filed again over there.
AIs may be exceptionally clever, but they may misunderstand the theatre of a trial. They may overweight the importance of the law and then underweight human factors, like the importance of assigning blame, or the lack of credibility of certain witnesses, or the bad faith of certain actors. AIs may fail to give credence to the ordinary meaning of terms, or fail to emphasize that these are two sophisticated businesses which understand the technical terms. AIs are still very poor at actual "reasoning", that is, a deep consideration of the multitude of ways of looking at any one set of facts and/or words on the page.
One area in which this article is entirely right is -- one must manage attorneys, and you must make certain that legal costs don't become leverage against you. But there are points at which you say: Can this guy keep it all straight? Does he know how to be useful to his own defense and then does he know how to get out of his own way?
Lawyers shouldn’t set the direction because they tend to try to minimize liability at the expense of everything else.
CPAs shouldn’t set the direction because they tend to want to structure your business in ways that save taxes, at the expense of everything else.
If you’re the CEO/President of your company, you should set the direction, using lawyers to know what the liabilities of the different options are and using accountants to know what the different tax implications are. Lawyers and accountants help you make informed decisions, but they should not be deciding the strategy.
> The thing is -- there are correct ways to do things in the legal sphere. The legal sphere is highly professional and highly formal, and has only become more so.
In some ways. OTOH, my wife works in the legal sphere, and after spending most of her career at a small boutique firm before being subsumed by a larger one, she was kinda dismayed to discover that there’s no singular “right way” to do things, and that different lawyers kind all do their own thing in a multitude of different ways.
The correct procedures are why you (and the OP) need a lawyer in the mix.
Strategic direction, though, isn't something that has a correct mechanism. That strategic direction can include things like how hard you want to fight on each motion and if/when you want to try and settle and for how much.
Said another way, if you approach a plumber with "I need more hot water" they'll probably try and sell you an industrial tankless water heater with a nice markup. However, if you tell them "I want you to install this water heater that I purchased" then they'll do the work to get it fit in and setup. 1 option will cost you $1000s of dollars more. There is still a correct way to install water heaters, but the stuff related to whether or not you need a new water heater and what kind shouldn't be left up to the plumber.
The law is the same way. If you just tell a lawyer "I'm being sued, help me" they can justify putting any amount of time researching case law for your case. Taking a more active role, though, and saying "this is how I want you to respond to that motion" will shortcut a lot of that research time. They'll still have to do some work to validate you aren't giving them garbage to file. And of course they are still expected to follow all the local rules. But the actual billable hours will be massively reduced because they aren't doing nearly as much research.
Not disagreeing about the risks of AI here. But the thing is, there are correct ways to do things in court. But this guy's strategy was to improve his negotiating position, pre-court. That sounds like it's a lot more to do with assessment of risk, assessment of your adversaries strategy, and business position. Which are all matters that totally aren't solely the province of lawyers.
In effect, that means that the lawyers should have been doing what he got the AI to do.
Every expert will tend to miss the forest from the trees because it's their job, and mission, and billing criteria, to find every possible tree and categorize it. But you and I don't care about the trees, we only care about the forest.
There's this comedian who tells the story of his grandmother aged 97 who was diagnosed with cancer, and they offered her chemotherapy. She said: what's the point? Are you going to prolong my life for an hour? That makes people laugh, but it's the truth, and it's also, I think, the point of the post.
The point of defending a lawsuit is not to be right, and die. It's to survive it.
Yep, i'm pretty sure every kind of patient, from a cancer patient to someone with an ingrown toenail has googled their condition, looked for alternatives (especially if the proposed treatment was subjectively bad for the patient, even if it was objectively good).
People tend to skip the googling and verification process only if the problem is something simple or if the treatment is simple... eg. broken outlet, for legal reasons can't replace yoursefl, call contractor, outlet replaced... or in case of doctors, fever, infection, blood test, it's bacterial, antibiotics, two pills per day for 10 days, done.
There is actually a significant portion of the population that wants nothing to do with it and wont even google their cancer diagnosis and leave it up to the experts.
We had a doctor that had prescribed us a dangerous amount of medicine (we didn't know) without running any tests. The doctor was also doing procedures he didn't need to do and ultimately recommended a surgery that has been stopped since the 90s.
We caught him because of the surgery. We sought a second opinion about it because the google was telling me "This surgery is no longer performed because it has serious negative consequences, and it rarely treats the symptom it's done for". I even double checked with the quack that it's the surgery he wanted to do because I was a bit flabbergasted he was suggested it (he was, of course, annoyed that I looked it up).
We sought a second opinion and I've never seen a doctor angrier. First, he was livid that the doc had us on such a mega dose of the drug and wasn't doing bloodwork to confirm we even needed it. But also, he was furious the doctor wanted to do the surgery. I'm 90% sure he got the docs' license pulled because the quack sent out a sad "Sorry to inform everyone but we'll be closing up shop".
Needless to say, always always look up the procedures and medications doctors want. Second opinions are also a good thing and good doctors will respond with "The more the merrier". And don't be like us, you should be thinking at all times "what test did the doctor do to determine we should be doing X". If a doctor is freeballing shit, you should be leery. Except maybe if they are throwing Tylenol at you for pain. [1]
I agree with you. I think it comes down to the fact that you have to “live in the house.” Whether it’s a doctor (where the house is your body) or a general contractor (where the house is a house), at the end of the day, nobody cares about the house more than you do.
I wonder if it's really that rare for lawyers to look at a case from a strategic / economic point of view? When at some point in the past I was considering suing a company for breach of contract, that was pretty much what the entire initial conversation with our lawyers was about: they considered the timeline, probability of winning, costs for the lawyer'ing, costs for external experts, ability to recoup legal costs if successful or to incur those of the counterparty if not, ability of the counterparty to pay, alternatives to litigation and so on.
After about a day of prep work on my part, having them read through that prep work for about an hour and then discussing it with me for another hour, we concluded that the expected outcome was break even, with a time investment that was decidedly not break even, and did not proceed to litigation. They really helped our company to look at the problem objectively and without emotion, and I really hope that's not a rare experience!
(That said, I do understand that strategies for successfully dealing with being sued might need to get a bit more creative than those for deciding whether to sue.)
I also had an experience like this, where we found a great lawyer who basically explained to us the social dynamics of the particular arbitration court that the legal battle would be fought out in, and how if we can establish a paper trail that just made the guy suing us look like he was acting in bad faith, that it would be hard for that guy to make his case. Then our lawyer helped us craft emails without being emotionally involved like we were to socially engineer this outcome, and then came out with a nice settlement at the end once his lawyer convinced him that he was in trouble.
I think finding these people is a dark art, but they exist.
It is not rare (among competent counsel, at least).
You seem to know what you're doing, but for other readers, the time to think about breach of contract and litigation, and the time to talk with your attorney, is before you enter contracts and business dealings. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but many mistakenly consider prudent consultation and planning to be a waste or a drag on the bottom line.
> It is not rare (among competent counsel, at least).
While this is true lawyers are still lawyers, and you're paying them primarily to give you legal advice. The best will be able to also consider wider business perspectives, but at the end of the day they're still going to have a bias towards doing what is safest from a legal perspective which you need to weigh up against other risks for your business.
Going back to the point in the parent article, educating yourself on the legal side so you're going into the discussion on a more equal footing is a pretty good idea in general.
>I wonder if it's really that rare for lawyers to look at a case from a strategic / economic point of view?
I'd say it's more likely that they're aware that their client simply isn't going to like the answer.
If a client is all fired up about wanting to sue someone you can caution them to reconsider, but at some point they'll just go "fine I'll find someone who will do what I tell them to". Litigation doesn't put people into an open & receptive mindframe normally.
This is very much what you want from a BUSINESS lawyer. And what the author apparently didn't understand. You, your business, the other guys ideally - nobody in here should be there for ticking boxes and the exact details of the law. What you are sorting out with a business lawyer is business issues, which need to be resolved in pragmatic business terms. It's not a legal puzzle but a business puzzle.
Same thing from the point of view of writing a contract, or writing or answering a demand letter: The point is to solve a business problem - not satisfy some ideal of the law. And the business lawyers you want do understand this and can be amazing at finding the right terms and shortcuts and at helping you come to an understanding of what matters and doesn't. And yes, these lawyers very much exist.
People often argue that it's a lawyer's job to point out and try to protect you against anything that could possibly go wrong - with the result that indeed it's impossible to run a business. No, that's not the job.
But it takes time to find a great business lawyer, so this should be part of the tasks right from the beginning when founding a business. That lawyer won't cost all that much initially - and they will already be useful working on contracts.
Same thing for in-house corporate counsel, when you get to that. Some amazing ones who can defuse a situation in an instant - and others who spend their life making things impossible.
Now, it might get to the point where the business lawyer helps you understand that all alternatives have been explored and it's time to spend serious money on courtroom litigation specialists - but hopefully that's only seldom.
I dunno about the US, but every lawyer I've ever hired was like this. Maybe it's more regulated in Germany or something. They run the math with you and find the optimal strategy (or the least bad one), not create a black hole of costs towards an uncertain outcome.
Re: Zeal
As lawyers, as part of obtaining our professional liability policies, we have to attend seminars about mitigating malpractice claims.
You'd be surprised how often
--an attorney advises A,
--the client wants to do B,
--the attorney advises the client of the downsides of B, and has the client sign a document stating they understand the risks of B,
--they do B, and have a sub-optimal result,
--client sues attorney claiming they should have done A, and they weren't adequately informed of the risks of B.
Zeal is, in many jurisdictions, an outdated concept and standard. Even where it still exists, other considerations outrank it — such as candor to the tribunal.
I think this article really buries the lead—what really allowed him to win was leverage. He says that’s an over beers info, not a blog post. But that’s actually what let him win—not learning from the LLM how to understand his lawyers arguments better.
OP told you what he could in a public forum and left out a few things for private. Its only fair.
The incentives are against you. Lower costs lets defendant fight it out longer with less $$ for lawyer. Law firm isn't spending more hours to earn less. So you gotta have a friend with this skill and a vested interest or do the legwork, which OP suggest AI was for him.
I don't agree AI had a significant part to play here. The leverage, whatever it was isn't likely to be public. Certainly wasn't AI as the title suggests.
This is the reason I think the 'AI' angle of the post is less interesting than how he came to understand the power dynamics and strategy of the situation. Maybe AI helped him reach that point, but it could easily have been a lawyer friend or family member playing that role
Because the point was how he used AI, not the actual leverage.
In my case, I used small claims when a contractor took my money and didn't perform work. The threat of losing a lawsuit was enough to get the money back.
I suspect the plaintiff did something that would allow Tyler to countersue, or otherwise there was some kind of threat of negative publicity / tattle to other customers.
Developers and lawyers have a lot in common. In the end, we write rules that are interpreted, whether a machine or a judge.
Therefore I think the same things apply as in software development, when you start to think you can fire lawyers and replace them with AI: you will then bear the responsibility of the job they did before. That means it can go the right way, but it can also go the wrong, wrong way.
Funny you should phrase it this way. One of the better self-taught software engineers I know had a prior career as a defense attorney. When I had the privilege of working with him about ten years ago, he used to say "legal arguments are kind of like code that you run on a judge, instead of a CPU".
The notion of a smart contract (as implemented by blockchains like Ethereum) makes the difference between a legal contract and code even smaller: the [Solidity] code IS the (unambiguous) contract.
To me AI in law seems better since you have a judge at the end. If you get something wrong it'll most likely be fine. There seems to be some tolerance for mistakes when representing yourself so it's most likely helpful for small claims and fighting tickets/fines. In a perfect world people wouldn't be paying BS fines or letting people scam them because they can't be arsed to take 2-3 days to deal with it the first time (once you've done the spiel once it's much easier).
Would make more sense if it was not written in a natural language such as English, but Lojban instead. It is not ambiguous at all (but can be made). The difference is that natural languages are naturally ambiguous, whereas Lojban is not, but can be made so, for poetry or whatever.
Good points. But the main point of the article was not about replacing lawyers with AI - rather it was about using AI to be an informed client and thus work more in partnership with lawyers.
right, and the same thing is true when hiring software developers as a non technical[*] person. you need to make an effort to understand what the devs are building and you need to guide them to work towards the goals you want to achive and the constraints you have (budget, time, etc). if you don't they will focus on things that are not important and you will spend more money than you planned on a solution that doesn't quite fit your needs.
(*) as a technical person too, but then the understanding part takes less effort and you can skip using AI to do it
In the US, our system of lawyers is broken. If we are to be a People governed by laws and not persons, then we People need to be able to use the law to right wrongs. In other words being able to use the law by using the courts is a requirement in a democracy.
As an experiment try to go to court pro se. The experience is characterized by the fact that in US courts, pro se clients can be sanctioned for improper actions, but lawyers can not be sanctioned for purposeful improprieties by pro se clients.
It is sort of like a commoner going up against a knight. The knight has armor and a lance and you have your scythe. Fun! In other words it is rigged.
And here is the kicker. Lawyers are "officers of the court". You could take that to mean that they uphold the standards of the court. Or when a lawyer does bad things, that could mean that the other lawyers - including the judge - see that lawyer as one of them. You know, sort of the way that many priests see abusive priests as priests first and abusers second, and so take actions to "protect" the church.
So whats a poor person to do? You try to get a lawyer. Lawyers will not want to take you on if the other side has a high power lawyer and lots of money. Not because your case isn't proper, but because the economics are not there. For the lawyer. At some point the side with more money will simply run you out. Your lawyer will urge you to settle.
Again this is not an us vs them thing. The issue is that if common people cannot afford to obtain justice, then we are not a democracy. We are something else. Corporations and the ultra wealthy have deep pockets to use the courts. If we tolerate that, it is reasonable to expect that the common people will not find this kind of "democracy" to their taste.
The problem is that corporations pushed for Tort law as a mechanism for protecting the public from harm rather than regulations “if we do something wrong, we will get sued and lose money and that will motivate us to not do harm”. So it means that there is much less proactive harm reduction by regulators (compared to many other first world countries) as well as much less regulators can do if a complaint is made.
The second issue is our lack of universal, affordable healthcare (and other basic safety nets). If you are injured and don’t want to go bankrupt, you have to sue to pay for your treatment, loss of income, etc.
The result is that we have lawsuits constantly all the time for everything. Not only does it clog up the courts, but it also helps the powerful to outspend “the little guy” to avoid accountability. Fighting a government regulatory body with actual powers and authorities is much harder to outspend/outlast than some random person one lawyer working on contingency.
And that doesn’t even get into how corporations have been pushing “tort reform” to neuter how much they can be sued for, therefore the amount they can be punished for wrongdoing. As well as their decades long propaganda campaign to paint tort lawsuits as frivolous, baseless, shameless cash grabs by greedy people attacking the poor helpless business.
Yes. It seems to me important that we correctly understand the problem. It is like your car won't start. If you fail to diagnose your battery is dead, then you keep putting gas in and it still doesn't work. The question is what needs to change to fix the problem AND why.
My diagnosis is Citizens United vs F.E.C. That bizarre has allowed corporations to control the laws that are enacted. So we see "tort" reform - but who benefits? It is not the People.
There is another factor that amplifies this, targeted advertising. Targeted ads, you know like the ones that pay for our "free" internet services are as toxic or more than the pollutants in coal and gas. They have destroyed trust in the internet. And they allow corporations to "fund" candidates for public office.
And question. Do the media such as the Washington Post, owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, address these issues? Nope.
Thank God I've never been involved in serious litigation, but his description of the process sounds absolutely wild to me. Reminder that the US is a global outlier in 'loser doesn't pay winners' attorneys' fees' (as he notes, this is literally called the American Rule). And a global outlier in using juries for civil trials, which can lead to some gigantic unpredictable judgements. I'd imagine our discovery laws are unique too.
Surprised some business-friendly US state hasn't greatly restricted discovery in civil litigation, so as to attract companies to incorporate there. And this is why arbitration rose as a way to settle disputes- if you look at the standard arbitration agreement they greatly limit discovery
It cuts the other way as well. It's incredibly easy to file suit against larger corporations (e.g. your landlord in small claims) and just represent yourself and be confident all you're potentially out is the court filing fee. I've personally done it twice and settled before it went to trial; without the American rule there would be no way I could risk having them take it to trial and pay their fees.
Sane countries do not elect their judges by popular vote (or, even worse, by their executive branch), and thus judges are generally apolitical, which removes a lot of incentive for the issues you mention.
It's insane to me that the US accepts that their judiciary are either 'red' or 'blue', and that their opinions are dictated by their tribe.
Seems like a non-sequitur. 'Corruption' is typically not an issue in civil disputes. 'Influence peddling' and 'political horse trading' are not the subject of civil litigation. If you think 'corruption' is influencing judicial remedies- it's certainly a lot easier to bribe a juror than an appointed judge.
Most developed countries using a panel of judges to hear civil disputes score better than the US on corruption indicators, not worse
This article has good advice but it’s not really AI advice that’s the important tip.
The main observation is you 100% have to manage lawyers aggressively and understand and question what they are doing at literally every step or the budget will be out of control. Sounds like AI helped this guy but it’s more about your personality/approach than anything else.
Also don’t hire $1000 an hour lawyers for litigation unless you’re a major corporation in a complex case with a ton at stake.
I think the AI advice is pretty important. You say you should understand and question everything the lawyers do but where do you even start without an AI to read and explain thousands of pages of contracts and legal process. Nevermind all the case law and it's trained on and has access to.
I think if he tried this ten years ago he'd have a pretty hard time with it.
Unless you're using an ephemeral on-prem LLM that doesn't keep logs you should begin with an assumption that your AI chat transcripts will be available to your opponents in discovery. There isn't clear caselaw on this yet, but given that material you share with third parties other than your lawyers almost always is and sharing your strategy musing would probably be disastrous, you should plan accordingly.
Particularly, subpoena are quite powerful in the US and can be obtained quite easily and often without an adequate opportunity for the ultimate user to oppose them. The AI providers will comply with them as just a matter of process, and the first notice that an opponent is seeking your transcripts may be after they already have them. (And that's assuming your opposition doesn't have insiders at the AI company to begin with...)
That aside-- Having thoroughly dispatched an AI dependent opponent in court, uhh, well lets just say that I hope any future opponents read this article. ChatGPT outputs an astonishingly embarrassing amount of completely wrong pseudolegal nonsense and set him up for multiple case losing disasters.
There are also a number of advanced strategies available to an opponent who has realized you are using an LLM, as they now have oracle access to something similar to your own AI advice and can test their actions against the advice it will cause you to get from your AI. ... even so far as brute force searching rewrites of the language in their correspondence to increase the odds that you get disastrous advice.
> There isn't clear caselaw on this yet, but given that material you share with third parties other than your lawyers almost always is and sharing your strategy musing would probably be disastrous, you should plan accordingly.
Wouldn't this have largely been settled already with cloud computing? If I use gmail to write an e-mail to my lawyer, then I can't imagine that e-mail is unprivileged because it's "shared" with Google.
An aggressive litigant might claim the AI was essential to assist the founder in communicating with counsel, and thus similarly protected to some degree. This is coming up in search results as an "agency" rule and the founder still would need reasonable expectations of confidentiality from Claude, etc.
There are legal research AI's and tools out there, which sophisticated non lawyers probably use. Discovery rules haven't been a deterrent because of the companion work product doctrine which is an adjuct to the American Rule-- you generally can't use discovery to extract legal research from the other side.
Right but with cloud services, you can't control their retention and settings to not retain almost always do retain but deny you access to it. They'll still serve it up in a subponea even when they won't give it to you.
Readit News
> When working with paid professionals, I think people tend to put them into one of two categories: doctors or general contractors.
> With doctors, if your oncologist says you have a lump that needs to come out, you pretty much do whatever they say. You’re the patient; they’re the expert leading the charge.
> With general contractors doing home renovations, most people intuitively know that’s not the right approach. You stay on top of them, give clear instructions, try to understand the issues yourself, and assume you need to provide lots of direction and monitoring to get what you want done.
> Most people—entrepreneurs included, certainly myself—put lawyers in the doctor category when they should really treat them more like general contractors.
Except... I think if one has enough time, it's better to treat everyone like general contractors. Doctors make mistakes, often. You can and should challenge them.
The problem with challenging doctors is that the body is incredibly complex, and is not really under any obligation to "make common sense" / be bro-science-y.
The vast majority of the time you're going to be wrong and annoying, even if you're consulting LLMs first.
If a doctor is making a mistake, and you're a lay-person, you're not likely to spot it. But you are likely to challenge a bunch of things that the doctor is right and just be an annoying back-seat driver.
You're better off trying to get a doctor you can trust than treating your doctor like someone who isn't good at their job.
There are bad and shady doctors to be sure, but they are extreme outliers.
Doctors, unlike lawyers, typically care about your care - whereas lawyers are mostly interested in extracting as much of your money into their pocket as possible.
Unless you're going to some elective surgeon, most doctors are so busy, they don't need to make up pretend bs to have you come back and get work.
Lawyers on the other hand...
She had cancer when she was 18 and the doctor insisted that women just don’t get cancer at that age, and insisted the lump was benign without testing it. We got another doctor to remove it, and it turns out it was stage 1 cancer.
A decade ago she was in crippling pain right in the gall bladder area. The doctor insisted it was indigestion. We found another doctor (thank goodness for PPOs letting us go directly to specialists without a referral) who did an ultrasound and said my wife probably had less than a week before she would suffer a rupture, and she had to have emergency surgery.
I’m glad you haven’t had that experience, but it’s a very real problem.
Bad doctors, that really don’t give a shit, exist and are doing well, at least where I live, because there simply isn’t enough doctors.
The ratio good to bad doctors is the same as good to bad contractors in my experience.
I fully understand how annoying it is to be challenged by a patient as a doctor but why would the doctor do that with his contractor and not accept that from the patient? Because he’s more of an expert? I’d argue he’s less of an expert actually, because medicine is so insanely complex and we know so incredibly little of it.
Yes but doctors, like laywers, often err on the side of caution. I don't want to be cut open unless absolutely necessary.
Maybe the approach is simply to ask for a second, expert opinion rather than trying to make your own. But asking pointy questions can't hurt (within reason, of course; you don't want to be the guy "doing their own research" (even if you are)).
If you won't advocate for yourself, why should you expect a 3rd party do it?
I'm in the UK. As well as doctors making mistakes, they can be under direction diagnosing critera. The UK has had a multi-year struggle for people with ME/CFS, (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). It falls under neurology in the UK, and a sub-chapter neuro-psychiatry has the ear of the national health service's supremos, and has historically entertained an "all in the mind" approach. I digress. Back to AI and medicine again: https://x.com/vipintukur/status/1931049593535627417 - insights can come from that quarter, and medicine is going to have to play catch up at times.
It is worse. Many doctors will administer against your interest if it boost their bottom line. There is, also, very little legal recourse against doctors.
> Some lawyers bristle at clients setting strategic direction. They believe there’s a “correct way” to do things, they know it, and they’ll fight you if you disagree. In that case, get different lawyers.
The thing is -- there are correct ways to do things in the legal sphere. Litigation is highly professional and highly formal, and has only become more so. While sub rosa it's fine to ask an AI for advice, and to engage it in draft brief writing, summarization to bullets, etc., it's wild not to realize how much of litigation and the law is wrapped up in people and experience and intricate formal processes. Such as this court has local rules, and this judge likes his briefs this length and the arguments just so, this needs to be filed here, stamped by the clerk, and filed again over there.
AIs may be exceptionally clever, but they may misunderstand the theatre of a trial. They may overweight the importance of the law and then underweight human factors, like the importance of assigning blame, or the lack of credibility of certain witnesses, or the bad faith of certain actors. AIs may fail to give credence to the ordinary meaning of terms, or fail to emphasize that these are two sophisticated businesses which understand the technical terms. AIs are still very poor at actual "reasoning", that is, a deep consideration of the multitude of ways of looking at any one set of facts and/or words on the page.
One area in which this article is entirely right is -- one must manage attorneys, and you must make certain that legal costs don't become leverage against you. But there are points at which you say: Can this guy keep it all straight? Does he know how to be useful to his own defense and then does he know how to get out of his own way?
CPAs shouldn’t set the direction because they tend to want to structure your business in ways that save taxes, at the expense of everything else.
If you’re the CEO/President of your company, you should set the direction, using lawyers to know what the liabilities of the different options are and using accountants to know what the different tax implications are. Lawyers and accountants help you make informed decisions, but they should not be deciding the strategy.
In some ways. OTOH, my wife works in the legal sphere, and after spending most of her career at a small boutique firm before being subsumed by a larger one, she was kinda dismayed to discover that there’s no singular “right way” to do things, and that different lawyers kind all do their own thing in a multitude of different ways.
Strategic direction, though, isn't something that has a correct mechanism. That strategic direction can include things like how hard you want to fight on each motion and if/when you want to try and settle and for how much.
Said another way, if you approach a plumber with "I need more hot water" they'll probably try and sell you an industrial tankless water heater with a nice markup. However, if you tell them "I want you to install this water heater that I purchased" then they'll do the work to get it fit in and setup. 1 option will cost you $1000s of dollars more. There is still a correct way to install water heaters, but the stuff related to whether or not you need a new water heater and what kind shouldn't be left up to the plumber.
The law is the same way. If you just tell a lawyer "I'm being sued, help me" they can justify putting any amount of time researching case law for your case. Taking a more active role, though, and saying "this is how I want you to respond to that motion" will shortcut a lot of that research time. They'll still have to do some work to validate you aren't giving them garbage to file. And of course they are still expected to follow all the local rules. But the actual billable hours will be massively reduced because they aren't doing nearly as much research.
There's this comedian who tells the story of his grandmother aged 97 who was diagnosed with cancer, and they offered her chemotherapy. She said: what's the point? Are you going to prolong my life for an hour? That makes people laugh, but it's the truth, and it's also, I think, the point of the post.
The point of defending a lawsuit is not to be right, and die. It's to survive it.
“try to understand the issues yourself”
Your contractor is a skilled professional, not a drone. You need to exercise good judgment if you’re going to make decisions.
People tend to skip the googling and verification process only if the problem is something simple or if the treatment is simple... eg. broken outlet, for legal reasons can't replace yoursefl, call contractor, outlet replaced... or in case of doctors, fever, infection, blood test, it's bacterial, antibiotics, two pills per day for 10 days, done.
We had a doctor that had prescribed us a dangerous amount of medicine (we didn't know) without running any tests. The doctor was also doing procedures he didn't need to do and ultimately recommended a surgery that has been stopped since the 90s.
We caught him because of the surgery. We sought a second opinion about it because the google was telling me "This surgery is no longer performed because it has serious negative consequences, and it rarely treats the symptom it's done for". I even double checked with the quack that it's the surgery he wanted to do because I was a bit flabbergasted he was suggested it (he was, of course, annoyed that I looked it up).
We sought a second opinion and I've never seen a doctor angrier. First, he was livid that the doc had us on such a mega dose of the drug and wasn't doing bloodwork to confirm we even needed it. But also, he was furious the doctor wanted to do the surgery. I'm 90% sure he got the docs' license pulled because the quack sent out a sad "Sorry to inform everyone but we'll be closing up shop".
Needless to say, always always look up the procedures and medications doctors want. Second opinions are also a good thing and good doctors will respond with "The more the merrier". And don't be like us, you should be thinking at all times "what test did the doctor do to determine we should be doing X". If a doctor is freeballing shit, you should be leery. Except maybe if they are throwing Tylenol at you for pain. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD6olRJ8S3I
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After about a day of prep work on my part, having them read through that prep work for about an hour and then discussing it with me for another hour, we concluded that the expected outcome was break even, with a time investment that was decidedly not break even, and did not proceed to litigation. They really helped our company to look at the problem objectively and without emotion, and I really hope that's not a rare experience!
(That said, I do understand that strategies for successfully dealing with being sued might need to get a bit more creative than those for deciding whether to sue.)
I think finding these people is a dark art, but they exist.
You seem to know what you're doing, but for other readers, the time to think about breach of contract and litigation, and the time to talk with your attorney, is before you enter contracts and business dealings. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but many mistakenly consider prudent consultation and planning to be a waste or a drag on the bottom line.
While this is true lawyers are still lawyers, and you're paying them primarily to give you legal advice. The best will be able to also consider wider business perspectives, but at the end of the day they're still going to have a bias towards doing what is safest from a legal perspective which you need to weigh up against other risks for your business.
Going back to the point in the parent article, educating yourself on the legal side so you're going into the discussion on a more equal footing is a pretty good idea in general.
I'd say it's more likely that they're aware that their client simply isn't going to like the answer.
If a client is all fired up about wanting to sue someone you can caution them to reconsider, but at some point they'll just go "fine I'll find someone who will do what I tell them to". Litigation doesn't put people into an open & receptive mindframe normally.
This is very much what you want from a BUSINESS lawyer. And what the author apparently didn't understand. You, your business, the other guys ideally - nobody in here should be there for ticking boxes and the exact details of the law. What you are sorting out with a business lawyer is business issues, which need to be resolved in pragmatic business terms. It's not a legal puzzle but a business puzzle.
Same thing from the point of view of writing a contract, or writing or answering a demand letter: The point is to solve a business problem - not satisfy some ideal of the law. And the business lawyers you want do understand this and can be amazing at finding the right terms and shortcuts and at helping you come to an understanding of what matters and doesn't. And yes, these lawyers very much exist.
People often argue that it's a lawyer's job to point out and try to protect you against anything that could possibly go wrong - with the result that indeed it's impossible to run a business. No, that's not the job.
But it takes time to find a great business lawyer, so this should be part of the tasks right from the beginning when founding a business. That lawyer won't cost all that much initially - and they will already be useful working on contracts.
Same thing for in-house corporate counsel, when you get to that. Some amazing ones who can defuse a situation in an instant - and others who spend their life making things impossible.
Now, it might get to the point where the business lawyer helps you understand that all alternatives have been explored and it's time to spend serious money on courtroom litigation specialists - but hopefully that's only seldom.
The leverage came in the form of reducing costs. When you ask your lawyer to explain, they happily bill you for that time.
The incentives are against you. Lower costs lets defendant fight it out longer with less $$ for lawyer. Law firm isn't spending more hours to earn less. So you gotta have a friend with this skill and a vested interest or do the legwork, which OP suggest AI was for him.
I don't agree AI had a significant part to play here. The leverage, whatever it was isn't likely to be public. Certainly wasn't AI as the title suggests.
The seemingly valuable advice was on how to handle lawyers who fail to see your big picture interests rather than just winning the case.
In my case, I used small claims when a contractor took my money and didn't perform work. The threat of losing a lawsuit was enough to get the money back.
I suspect the plaintiff did something that would allow Tyler to countersue, or otherwise there was some kind of threat of negative publicity / tattle to other customers.
Therefore I think the same things apply as in software development, when you start to think you can fire lawyers and replace them with AI: you will then bear the responsibility of the job they did before. That means it can go the right way, but it can also go the wrong, wrong way.
Although without the timing conflicts. :-)
(*) as a technical person too, but then the understanding part takes less effort and you can skip using AI to do it
As an experiment try to go to court pro se. The experience is characterized by the fact that in US courts, pro se clients can be sanctioned for improper actions, but lawyers can not be sanctioned for purposeful improprieties by pro se clients.
It is sort of like a commoner going up against a knight. The knight has armor and a lance and you have your scythe. Fun! In other words it is rigged.
And here is the kicker. Lawyers are "officers of the court". You could take that to mean that they uphold the standards of the court. Or when a lawyer does bad things, that could mean that the other lawyers - including the judge - see that lawyer as one of them. You know, sort of the way that many priests see abusive priests as priests first and abusers second, and so take actions to "protect" the church.
So whats a poor person to do? You try to get a lawyer. Lawyers will not want to take you on if the other side has a high power lawyer and lots of money. Not because your case isn't proper, but because the economics are not there. For the lawyer. At some point the side with more money will simply run you out. Your lawyer will urge you to settle.
Again this is not an us vs them thing. The issue is that if common people cannot afford to obtain justice, then we are not a democracy. We are something else. Corporations and the ultra wealthy have deep pockets to use the courts. If we tolerate that, it is reasonable to expect that the common people will not find this kind of "democracy" to their taste.
The second issue is our lack of universal, affordable healthcare (and other basic safety nets). If you are injured and don’t want to go bankrupt, you have to sue to pay for your treatment, loss of income, etc.
The result is that we have lawsuits constantly all the time for everything. Not only does it clog up the courts, but it also helps the powerful to outspend “the little guy” to avoid accountability. Fighting a government regulatory body with actual powers and authorities is much harder to outspend/outlast than some random person one lawyer working on contingency.
And that doesn’t even get into how corporations have been pushing “tort reform” to neuter how much they can be sued for, therefore the amount they can be punished for wrongdoing. As well as their decades long propaganda campaign to paint tort lawsuits as frivolous, baseless, shameless cash grabs by greedy people attacking the poor helpless business.
My diagnosis is Citizens United vs F.E.C. That bizarre has allowed corporations to control the laws that are enacted. So we see "tort" reform - but who benefits? It is not the People.
There is another factor that amplifies this, targeted advertising. Targeted ads, you know like the ones that pay for our "free" internet services are as toxic or more than the pollutants in coal and gas. They have destroyed trust in the internet. And they allow corporations to "fund" candidates for public office.
And question. Do the media such as the Washington Post, owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, address these issues? Nope.
Surprised some business-friendly US state hasn't greatly restricted discovery in civil litigation, so as to attract companies to incorporate there. And this is why arbitration rose as a way to settle disputes- if you look at the standard arbitration agreement they greatly limit discovery
(or influence peddling, political horse trading, etc…)
It's insane to me that the US accepts that their judiciary are either 'red' or 'blue', and that their opinions are dictated by their tribe.
Most developed countries using a panel of judges to hear civil disputes score better than the US on corruption indicators, not worse
The main observation is you 100% have to manage lawyers aggressively and understand and question what they are doing at literally every step or the budget will be out of control. Sounds like AI helped this guy but it’s more about your personality/approach than anything else.
Also don’t hire $1000 an hour lawyers for litigation unless you’re a major corporation in a complex case with a ton at stake.
I think if he tried this ten years ago he'd have a pretty hard time with it.
Unless you're using an ephemeral on-prem LLM that doesn't keep logs you should begin with an assumption that your AI chat transcripts will be available to your opponents in discovery. There isn't clear caselaw on this yet, but given that material you share with third parties other than your lawyers almost always is and sharing your strategy musing would probably be disastrous, you should plan accordingly.
Particularly, subpoena are quite powerful in the US and can be obtained quite easily and often without an adequate opportunity for the ultimate user to oppose them. The AI providers will comply with them as just a matter of process, and the first notice that an opponent is seeking your transcripts may be after they already have them. (And that's assuming your opposition doesn't have insiders at the AI company to begin with...)
That aside-- Having thoroughly dispatched an AI dependent opponent in court, uhh, well lets just say that I hope any future opponents read this article. ChatGPT outputs an astonishingly embarrassing amount of completely wrong pseudolegal nonsense and set him up for multiple case losing disasters.
There are also a number of advanced strategies available to an opponent who has realized you are using an LLM, as they now have oracle access to something similar to your own AI advice and can test their actions against the advice it will cause you to get from your AI. ... even so far as brute force searching rewrites of the language in their correspondence to increase the odds that you get disastrous advice.
Wouldn't this have largely been settled already with cloud computing? If I use gmail to write an e-mail to my lawyer, then I can't imagine that e-mail is unprivileged because it's "shared" with Google.
US discovery law is wild.
There are legal research AI's and tools out there, which sophisticated non lawyers probably use. Discovery rules haven't been a deterrent because of the companion work product doctrine which is an adjuct to the American Rule-- you generally can't use discovery to extract legal research from the other side.
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- Delete that data as per your retention records
(there's also the fun alternative with feeding believable but slightly wrong info to the AIs and let the opposite council chase loose ends)