Template:M intro work Large Learning Model

LLM
(n.)
LLM Once meant a “Master of Laws” postgraduate degree, and was the mark of a sensei in the ninja brotherhood of legal services. Now all one needs, we are told, for that kind of expertise is a different kind of LLM — a large language model. A form of artificially intelligent chatbot. The legal profession is to ChatGPT, we hear, as poor Chrissie Watkins was to Jaws.

But the JC is not convinced, for those making this prediction do not ask the question: “cui bono?”

1. It is a truism that she who has a tool uses it, firstly, for her own benefit.

2. Now, a commercial lawyer’s business model is predicated on two things:

(1) time.

(2) ineffability.

3. It is a happy accident that, generally, (2) begets (1).

The more ineffable something is, the longer it takes.

The longer it takes, the more you can charge.

Simple.

(3A. Hence there is no profit-motivated legal firm on the planet that really cares for plain English.

Oh, they all say, they do, of course, but come on. Have you ever read law firm boilerplate?

Anyway, I digress.)

4. It will be lawyers who have ChatGPT to use as a tool, not their clients. Why? Because ChatGPT is a pattern-matching device. It understands nothing. It cannot provide unmediated legal advice. It is a “back-breaker”: the “last mile” needs a human who knows what she is doing.

5. In the legal world, that “human who knows what she is doing” is called a lawyer. She works for a law firm.

6. Recall the truism that she who has a tool uses it primarily for her own benefit. Recall how lawyers measure their benefit: (1) time. (2) ineffability.

7. Now a “last mile” lawyer could use ChatGPT to simplify documents, accelerate research and break legal problems down to significant essences, thereby reducing the cost, and increasing the value, of her service to her clients.

8. OR she could use ChatGPT to further complicate documents, convolute language, invent new options, create new contingencies: to build infinitesimal detail into her work that it was just too hard to do manually.

9. Which, realistically, do we expect a self-respecting lawyer to do? Simplify, or complicate? To sacrifice time *and* ineffability for the betterment of the wider world? Or to invest in a free option to generate more of the stuff?

(9A. Remember our digression: for 40 years we’ve had technology — Microsoft Word — which could be used to simplify and speed up legal work product.

But that would sacrifice time and ineffability. And not one of them did that.

They all did the exact opposite.)

10. You can already see the effect LLMs are having on legal work product. NDAs are getting longer, and worse.

11. Chat GPT may disrupt a lot of things, but it won’t be disrupting the legal profession any time soon.

12. Bear in mind who ChatGPT would be disrupting in this case. Two things about consumers of high-end commercial legal services.

(1) Most of them — us — are lawyers

(2) As lawyers they — we — take pride in the ability to work with difficult, complicated things. Convolution is a measure of our worth. The love of convolution for its own sake, for what it says about us, is a strong common value between lawyers and their commercial clients.

13. Lawyers — inhouse or out — are the jazz aficionados of text; cineastes of syntax. Overwrought contracts are expected: nothing says “prudent management of existential risk” like forty page of 10pt Times Roman. Plain language is not for serious people.

14. That is to say, neither fee-earning lawyers nor their immediate clients want plain contracts. If they did, we would already have them.