this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2026
28 points (85.0% liked)
Technology
88183 readers
3686 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Too many lawyers already do half-assed work, and they have already been doing it faster with LLMs. Laymen usually won't know the difference.
If specialist skills and tools can lead to less shoddy results in spite of endemic human incompetence or similar, it will be better for the average consumer of legal services.
And in the hands of competent and engaged lawyers, better tools are a huge boon.
A game changer (already) is that laymen can often now avoid lawyers altogether as complex laws, contractual terms and procedures can now often be explained in plain english/dutch/swahili by chatbots, helping them to make better and timely decisions.
Note: This is a world-wide phenomenon, with judges, paralegals, prosecutors, police, and end users also reaching for or being impacted by AI these days.
Not coincidentally we're seeing the erosion of the rule of law as a global phenomenon.
I am not as optimistic about the real value of this as you are, but my practice is, ironically, IP and general advanced software counseling specialized in ML and decentralized/distributed network tech, so ymmv. Nevertheless, I think the increasing prevalence bodes poorly for the industry and consumers for two very specific reasons. For the industry, a major part of making good lawyers is by having green lawyers be shit lawyers under close supervision and lots of repetition. The rise of legal AI has already totally short circuited that fundamental process quite a bit. The other concern i have is that consumer reliance on these technologies actually pressures legal systems to converge towards greater convolution and arbitrary heterogeneousnes. This is bad because it (a) makes human inspection less and less feasible, (b) introduces a great many failure points that we'll never be able to discern until it's too late because of (a), and (c) makes the surviving equivalent of practitioners (and even automated systems) more vulnerable to the myriad issues with hyperspecialization. It is noteworthy that these are very similar issues facing the software industry.