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| {{essay|work|Large Learning Model|{{image|jaws|png|Lawyer and chatbot, yesterday. You decide which is which.}} }}Once meant a Master of Laws degree, a sensei in the ninjahood of legal services. Now all one needs for that kind of excellence is another kind of LLM — a large learning model. The legal profession is, we hear, to ChatGPT as Chrissie Watkins was to Jaws. | | {{freeessay|work|Large Learning Model|{{image|jaws|png|Lawyer and chatbot, yesterday. You decide which is which.}} }} |
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| Because it does not ask this question: “cui bono?”
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| 1. It is a truism that she who has a tool uses it, firstly, for her own benefit.
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| 2. Now, a commercial lawyer’s business model is predicated on two things:
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| :(1) time.
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| :(2) ineffability.
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| 3. It is a happy accident that, generally, (2) begets (1).
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| The more ineffable something is, the longer it takes.
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| The longer it takes, the more you can charge.
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| Simple.
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| (3A. Hence there is no profit-motivated legal firm on the planet that really cares for plain English.
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| Oh, they all say, they do, of course, but come on.
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| Have you ever read law firm boilerplate?
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| Anyway, I digress.)
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| 4. It will be lawyers who have [[ChatGPT]] to use as a tool, not their clients.
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| 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.
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| 5. In the legal world, that “human who knows what she is doing” is called a lawyer. She works for a law firm.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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?
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| (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.
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| But that would sacrifice time and ineffability. And not one of them did that.
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| They all did the exact opposite.)
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| 10. You can already see the effect LLMs are having on legal work product. NDAs are getting longer, and worse.
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| 11. Chat GPT may disrupt a lot of things, but it won’t be disrupting the legal profession any time soon.
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| 12. Bear in mind ''who'' ChatGPT would be disrupting in this case. Two things about consumers of high-end commercial legal services.
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| :(1) Most of them — us — are lawyers
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| :(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.
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| 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.
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| 14. That is to say, neither fee-earning lawyers nor their immediate clients want plain contracts. If they did, we would already have them.
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