For all the consternation about Copilot and AI coding tools, its looking like legal work is as much if not more setup for disruption.
Document review is already being done by AI, lawyers are using AI to beef up closing arguments and review arguments, AI researchers to go through the relevant cases for citations have been worked on for awhile.
Lawyers being lawyers have immediately reached to "make it illegal" and setting up protections for their trade like they always done. Roberts is commenting that they are going to be disappointed if they think they can get legal protections that X or Y must always be done by a human.
Worse, judges are writing decisions and evaluating cases based on this.
The problem is that we’re going to have people litigating court cases and stupid bureaucratic nonsense within companies by lobbing nonsense that nobody has read at each other. Everyone will wink and nod, but these organizations and institutions will be exponentially more clueless.
As technologists, it’s easy to shrug. What do you do when a judge takes your kid away after using an LLM to read and interpret bullshit generated case notes that a CPS worker generated with another LLM?
Technologists are spectacularly bad at understanding how much the system relies on trusting that people will do something vaguely reasonable/legal/prosocial, just how that trust is built up and preserved, and how fragile that trust really is. A lot of Big Tech disruption and moneymaking has been based on ignoring this point to consume systemic trust without replenishing it.
Replace LLM with "clerk" and "generated case notes" with "copy pasted from my standard legally approved phrasing" playbook. Government workers who fill out standard reports already have standard forms pre filled with the results they know they are landing out, with certain sections that differ ready to be edited while the rest stays the same, look at things like warrants as an example. When I worked a government job i was literally handed templates by my supervisor of "pre approved ways to phrase things", that they percieved would help avoid lawsuits or any contest.
> The problem is that we’re going to have people litigating court cases and stupid bureaucratic nonsense within companies by lobbing nonsense that nobody has read at each other.
At an abstract level, this sounds like a precursor to war. Everyone has competing interests and the peaceful way to resolve them is communication. When that stops force starts.
Maybe the out is that there is some automated sense of listening and agreement.
I think judges will continue to enjoy sanctioning lawyers for quoting fake cases. It's pretty easy to check if the citations are real or not. The legal system is not some API you can just spam with bullshit. There are serious consequences for doing that. The fun part comes when the Woke API refuses to make arguments for case law that goes against its woke programming.
What you are describing has being happening for a long time in tech. It was suppose to make our life easier and do things we don't want to do, but has it? Seems like we are just become salves of digital technologies now days.
Instead what we got instead are surveillance capitalism and now this LLM/AI stuff that becomes much better are emulating human behaviour and languages. UX in software has NOT improved, and I dare to say it has gotten worse. Just feel the performance of iOS 6 on iPod touch vs the lates iOS. Tech over quarter century has just tech getting more complex, and made more easily to centralised and consolidate control. Is this what we really want?
> Lawyers being lawyers have immediately reached to "make it illegal" and setting up protections for their trade like they always done.
The legal field does not have a strong cartel at the moment.
In 1940 and in 1970, the population of lawyers was about .13-.16% of people in the US. Currently, it's 3x higher at .39%... after 3 years of declining numbers.
The market is saturated. Large numbers of lawyers can't find enough work, or have moved to other fields.
Try setting up a business for something relatively minor like helping people contest a traffic ticket (no representing them in court) and see what happens. You dont need a full legal education to do basic contestation of traffic tickets, but the legal system requires it.
There is a plethora of things that are minor, don't require going to court, and can be handled via bog standard forms and documents that are just "replace the names" and that lawyers have their paralegals do for them in their entirety. But the paralegal cant go into business on their own can they?
What is the equivalent of the nurse who can get you antibiotics in the US legal system?
You raise a very worthwhile topic, because both fields have expanded, and they have expanded along very different paths.
The medical field has splintered. Osteopaths kind of invented their own thing and broke into medical doctors' monopoly. Registered Nurses can do some things, but not others. BSNs. CNAs. Nurse Practitioners. Physicians Assistants. Chiropractors. etc. The strength of their cartel has led to attacks by new and novel qualifications, and the compelling need for more medical providers has allowed these attacks to successfully carve out roles.
Some can prescribe medications, others can't. Some are limited to specific medications. Others can perform surgery, others can't. Some can diagnose diseases, etc. Moreover, some qualifications are a step toward a higher qualification, others are traps that don't progress you to an MD/DO at all.
The legal field seems far more egalitarian in that any lawyer can practice any area of law (except patent law), and people can generally represent themselves and their minor children without any qualifications. Folk don't need a lawyer to contest tickets, or to draft contracts that they're a party to, or to negotiate their own settlements, etc.
However, appallingly, the general public is not allowed to prescribe medicine for themselves or their children. Folks cannot buy contacts / glasses on their own, etc. Folks shouldn't need a nurse to get antibiotics for ourselves, and yet we do.
Nurse practitioners have as much, if not more, education than attorneys. And they still need to work within the regulations of our system.
I get what you are trying to communicate - maybe we are over-regulated... yet any time your professional work has the potential to harm your customer if done incorrectly, I don't think having some educational requirements are unreasonable.
> What is the equivalent of the nurse who can get you antibiotics in the US legal system?
A paralegal. In about half the US, said nurse practicioner must be working under a supervising doctor, just like the paralegal works under a supervising lawyer.
Also using AI (ChatGPT) to write briefs, appeals, etc. Just edit. Saves a lot of time, which reduces the number of paralegals needed. This ship has already sailed. But it does not eliminate the need for a well-trained person to edit and review.
You will need really trained people to review whatever the AI writes and also need to be able to check sources in case the AI hallucinates and starts referencing made up case law or precedents. So maybe paralegals will transform into reviewers or something similar.
this is how document review works now basically. It used to be lots of lawyers got hired to go through the documents, now AI does it, and flags things for actual lawyer to review (along with suggestions), so what was the work of a couple of dozen lawyers is like maybe 2.
this is one of the huge issues for the unemployed lawyer problem, as those jobs were the entry level for straight of school lawyers. I expect similar problems with dev roles coming soon.
Indeed. Legal documentations are much more shared-source than software, by nature. Most agreements need to be in the possession of multiple parties and their attorneys in a reviewable form, for example, and court filings make the most contentious of such agreements public record.
This is a massive boon to the training data set. GitHub is also massive, but legal has other systemic advantages as well (e.g. being similar to past work is a structural advantage rather than just a practical one).
Agreed. LLMs seem almost purpose built for the boilerplate part of legal work. "Read this user agreement and point out any unusual or particularly risky clauses."
A lot of them can't step down. They have debts that to repay that require them to stay in that position (both financial debts, and political ones), or family members who can only continue doing what they are doing if they stay in that position. Say a small family business that consistently gets works, but only to curry favor with the Senator. They quit, their grandchildren's business takes a dive, so the family begs them to stay on.
In Feinstein's case, its pretty clear she was forced to stay on by her party while they made arrangements for her successor, there is a lot of people and factions in California who want her seat in the Democratic party.
Also the competency crisis is real, alot of them dont have successors. Often by their own actions in an attempt to consolidate power, but they've left the field barren now thats its time for them to leave.
what union opposed the change? The Alliance group mentioned is not a Union of teachers. https://www.aqeny.org/
Unions aren't mentioned at all in the article. Your claim is also a bald faced lie. More so than the OP. This article supports OP's claim https://nypost.com/2023/03/16/nys-education-leaders-again-pr..., I can trivially find other articles from other sources where the New York teachers union has made it clear they dont find how they are evaluated by test scores acceptable. That may even be a reasonable position to have. There is more data out their to support OPs claim than yours that they are against it.
Nothing has been presented that suggests that the teachers' union wanted this to happen. That "article", an editorial from a right-leaning source, doesn't support the claim that "the New York teachers union has made it clear they dont find how they are evaluated by test scores acceptable". In fact, it doesn't include any statements from any unions at all, direct or indirect.
If one actually reads it, it's just a recapitulation of the root-level link. "SED", the organization the editorial rails against, isn't a teacher's union, you know -- it's the State Education Department. ctrl+f for "union" in that piece, and beyond a reference to the Times Union article, the only involvement of a teachers' union is at the end, where the editorial's author claims that the union is the only beneficiary of these shenanigans, and implies that they had a dastardly hand in anointing the Assembly Speaker.
>There is more data out their to support OPs claim than yours that they are against it
Ah, but you didn't provide data, but instead a slanted editorial without the proof you trumpeted. If there were other articles from other sources that you could trivially find, why didn't you use them? Why use this and misrepresent what it said?
And, fine, you got me, there doesn't appear to be any direct link between the AQE and a teachers' union -- where I come from, the teachers' union donates to grassroots lobbyists like that, the better to improve education funding for children, because teachers are actually there to teach kids, not get fat from subsidy and shirk their responsibility. I reflexively assumed it was the same here. TBH, I suspect we're not going to see eye to eye on this because I can't conceive of a scenario where teachers would rather just turn down the standards rather than lift up their charges. What's happening sounds like an admin thing -- and indeed, both the root-level link and your editorial suggests that it's the admin, the SED, doing this. I hate to say it so bluntly, but I think your own biases are clouding your judgement as to what's happening here and why. Blaming teachers is a red herring, as teachers generally do not have control over, nor approve of, what school boards wind up mandating in the name of "cost-cutting" or "modernization".
I'd say Lowtax was more of a hindrance than their business model; especially in retrospect. I always thought the edgy dirtbag thing was a bit of a put-on (which I enjoyed), but I was quite wrong on that, and it's a mistake I've learned not to make again.
Whats weird is that I've heard the opposite too. That being an old employee is a suckers game for taking the 2 to 4 percent each year.
For instance the staff level who was with the company from junior and climbed the ranks is probably making alot less than the staff who came in as a staff, because climbing the ranks means you get percentage based increases or reset to the floor for the rank, and the staff who came in could negotiate higher than that. (You cant really negotiate comp for a promotion, its take it or leave it). Even though the junior to staff probably has more institutional knowledge, domain knowledge and political connections to get stuff done in the company.
Otoh: I’ve seen new-staff bring more maturity and diverse experience and broader knowledge of patterns and practices than the junior-to-staff, so the value prop may not be as clear cut as it seems.
But of course the principle is true that if you hanging around make sure you get real market adjustment raises. Some companies/managers are better about this than others.
Sure, there's also the point that while the junior to staff has connections, they might have also earned enemies too which will seek to impede stuff they want done. Where as the new staff has a fresh slate with everyone.
Generally speaking though, people i've seen promoted to Staff are more effective at the role than people who come in at the role, because Staff seems heavily weighted towards being able to influence at most companies. And being a known quantity counts for a lot. (also to become a staff someone higher in the food chain had to have already vouched for you and be willing to grant you some degree of patronage)
Also the value prop for what you are saying of "new pattern or practice" only applies if the staff gets to do green field dev, its rare a brand new staff without political capital can force a pivot on an already in development product that has patterns already set. In short its rare it gets to manifest, and when it does get to manifest it can take a year or 2 to manifest, and people who are willing to jump into staff roles probably have their next spot picked up for their next salary hike already picked out ;)
If you put in 2 weeks notice and you get fired on the spot its a slam dunk un employment claim. (assuming you can show that yes you gave notice and you weren't fired first) Most places would rather just pay you the 2 weeks if they really dont want you around than deal with unemployment. Lots of corporate environments firing people takes more than 2 weeks anyways, and you would just be creating extra work for HR for what would seem like no reason.
Can you explain what you mean by "slam dunk un employment claim"? Do you mean you'd be able to get unemployment benefits (which come from the state, not your company)? Or do you mean you'd have a claim against the company?
As a former lawyer (US-based), my sense is the first is true, and the second is not. As long as they're not canning you for being in a protected class, they can fire at-will employees whenever they want.
Yes, but you generally can't get unemployment for quitting. You have to get laid off or fired by the company to be eligible for unemployment benefits. It's especially easy to get benefits if you were fired without cause. There's no legal protection in cause/or no cause, but it will be the difference between an easy unemployment claim and a contested one.
Most employers get their unemployment insurance rate set by the number of people that require the service just like any other insurance. When an employee can prove they quit (probably before you started 'performance managing' for a with cause termination), then it makes it much simpler to just let them leave then to do the paperwork, eat the unemployment insurance adjustment, risk a possible 'wrongful termination' lawsuit (regardless of merit or ability to win).
Transferring their work and letting them dick around for a week is going to be considerably less work and risk then terminating them before the date. So as a general rule, when you give advance notice, in writing, there is a very good chance that they'll just let you leave on the day.
Additionally, if you fire everyone immediately when they give notice, then people stop giving notice all together, so you just come in some days and are a person short.
Yeah. Last time I looked, MA was like $1k. Just across the border, NH was more like $400. Not a fortune and doesn’t start until vacation payout is done I believe but not nothing for most. You do need to at least go through some motions of job hunting.
Trump more politically aligned in a anti globalist and pro protectionist way. It's Biden who aligns more with the "free markets and global economy" position where this article would service to chide rather than encourage.
"This is dangerous for globalism" would be taken as a "keep going!" to a Trump supporter.
Document review is already being done by AI, lawyers are using AI to beef up closing arguments and review arguments, AI researchers to go through the relevant cases for citations have been worked on for awhile.
Lawyers being lawyers have immediately reached to "make it illegal" and setting up protections for their trade like they always done. Roberts is commenting that they are going to be disappointed if they think they can get legal protections that X or Y must always be done by a human.