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flawschoolkid wrote:This dude is awesome......

iliketurtles123 wrote:Genuinely curious...

Would his software actually threaten biglaw jobs? The article implies that the reason he was efficient was due to the software.
His sole purpose of going to law school was to destroy biglaw jobs (so I've heard).
Is this an actual threat?

iliketurtles123 wrote:Genuinely curious...

Would his software actually threaten biglaw jobs? The article implies that the reason he was efficient was due to the software.
His sole purpose of going to law school was to destroy biglaw jobs (so I've heard).
Is this an actual threat?

flawschoolkid wrote:Practicing Attorneys with CS degrees ITT: How much of your work do you think a computer system could plausibly do? Would your clients be willing to pay for a computerized version of these services?

Ohiobumpkin wrote:Last time I checked, computer code cannot sit for the bar. Doubt you will ever take the human out of legal services.

haus wrote:

Ohiobumpkin wrote:Last time I checked, computer code cannot sit for the bar. Doubt you will ever take the human out of legal services.

I suspect that 20 years ago, many travel agents felt the same way about computer solutions in their industry.

flawschoolkid wrote:Practicing Attorneys ITT: How much of your work do you think a computer system could plausibly do? Would your clients be willing to pay for a computerized version of these services?

rayiner wrote:

flawschoolkid wrote:Practicing Attorneys ITT: How much of your work do you think a computer system could plausibly do? Would your clients be willing to pay for a computerized version of these services?

My degree is in AE, but I used to be a software developer, if that counts.

How predictive coding works is that a human attorney sits down and classifies an initial corpus of documents that are "interesting." Usually, you need reference set of fifty to a couple of hundred documents. The software then looks through all your other documents to find ones that are similar (and hopefully interesting). At no point does the software really understand what it's doing--it's looking for feature similarity between the reference set and the whole database.

When you actually understand how Google, etc, works, I think you have to be more skeptical about the potential of existing technology to replace human knowledge workers. AI hasn't advanced much since the 1980's. Most of what seems like "AI" is actually machine learning + crowd sourced data. Google does a good job giving you relevant search results because you're the thousandth person to search that particular term today. But with legal services, you can't crowd-source data. And without that big corpus of data, the machine learning algorithms aren't very useful.

Look at Google Scholar, for example. It's total shit for searching for cases you don't already have the citation of. Why? Because it works the same way as Google's search engine: it measures relevance using search terms and the number of references to a document. The net result is that you'll get a high-profile SCOTUS case like Brown v. Board at the top of your results when you're looking for a totally un-sexy educational law issue.

Heck, take something exceedingly simple and rote: replace references to "X" in a form motion with references to "X, Y, and Z." How long before we have software that can do this simple first-year job without the partner having to carefully re-read it and check for errors? I think we'd need a fundamental breakthrough in AI to get to that point.

Desert Fox wrote:It's not even natural language, it's critical thinking. AI isn't even a little bit close that.

I'd love to get my hands on the software and give it a whirl on my case to see what it came up with. But I wouldn't rely on it at all.

Desert Fox wrote:It's not even natural language, it's critical thinking. AI isn't even a little bit close that.

I'd love to get my hands on the software and give it a whirl on my case to see what it came up with. But I wouldn't rely on it at all.

haus wrote:

Desert Fox wrote:It's not even natural language, it's critical thinking. AI isn't even a little bit close that.

I'd love to get my hands on the software and give it a whirl on my case to see what it came up with. But I wouldn't rely on it at all.

A lot of what gets billed for falls well short of critical thinking.

brazleton wrote:Well, indeed there is much a first year can do that software is not close to replacing. But if you think that machines can't currently beat humans in relevance review of a large document set, saving much time and money, then you simply don't understand the current state of the technology. The fact that it has not become popular in more firms and cases has more to do with inertia and structural barriers than with the limitations of the machines. This is not debatable stuff.

brazleton wrote:Well, indeed there is much a first year can do that software is not close to replacing. But if you think that machines can't currently beat humans in relevance review of a large document set, saving much time and money, then you simply don't understand the current state of the technology. The fact that it has not become popular in more firms and cases has more to do with inertia and structural barriers than with the limitations of the machines. This is not debatable stuff.