Template:M intro work Large Learning Model: Difference between revisions

Once upon a time, an [[LLM]] was a “Master of Laws”: the postgraduate mark of the ''sensei'' in the society of legal service providers — either of that, or of the indolence of one not prepared to strike out and put what she has learned into practice — but still: it spoke to perseverance, depth, comprehension and mastery, however pigeon-hearted its motivation.

If the [[Thought leader|thoughtleaderati]] are to be believed, now all one needs for that kind of expertise is a different kind of “LLM”: a “[[large language model]]”. [[Artificial intelligence]] rendered by a pattern-recognising, parallel-processing [[chatbot]].  

But there have been contumelious rumours of its demise before. In the manner of a blindfolded dartsman, Professor Richard Susskind OBE has been tossing them around for decades. Just by random chance, you would expect one to hit the wall at some point.

Is this our Waterloo? Will [[ChatGPT]] do for our learned friends what the meteor did to the dinosaurs?  

====Cui bono?====

''Who benefits'', primarily, from this emergent technology? From any emergent technology?

Experience should tell us that the first — and often the ''last'' — to benefit from workflow productivity tools tends to be the ''lawyers''. We should ask why [[this time is different|''this'' time will be different]].

Now, it is a truism that she who has a tool uses it, firstly, to improve her own lot. A commercial lawyer’s “lot” is predicated on two things: (1) ''[[time and attendance|time]]'' taken, and (2) ''[[Ineffable|ineffability]]'': the sense that what she does “passeth all [[muggle]] understanding”.

It is a happy accident that, generally, (2) begets (1): the more ''ineffable'' something is, the longer it takes, and the harder it is to work with. The longer it takes, the more you can charge.  

Commercial legal contracts are like that. Long, and once they have calcified into templates, fiddly. for lawyers, this is a capital state of affairs. for this reason no commercial law firm on the planet ''really'' cares for [[plain English]]. Oh, they all ''say'', they do, of course — but ''come on''. Have you ever read law firm [[boilerplate]]?

This is, in itself, a neat “[[simplification|simplification defeat device]]”: if you make a contract template sufficiently convoluted, the one-off cost of simplifying it so vastly outweighs the cost of just “tweaking” and living with it that few clients will ever take that first step to simplify. Even though the the ongoing costs dwarf the upfront costs, the long-term cost-savings are always over that short term hump.

In any case, it will be ''lawyers'' who start to use [[LLM]]s as a tool, not their clients. Why? ''Because of that [[ineffability]]''. An [[LLM]] is a pattern-matching device. It understands nothing. It cannot provide unmediated legal advice. It can only ever be a “back-breaker”: the “last mile” needs a human who knows what she is doing, understands the context and complicated human psychology at play in the cauldron of commercial [[negotiation]]. An [[LLM]] can draw pretty, impressive-at-a-distance doodles, but it cannot do that. Nor can it write [[legal opinion]]s — well, not meaningful ones — and nor, unmediated by a law firm, does it have the insurance policy or deep, suable pockets for which a client is paying when it seeks legal advice in the first place.

An [[LLM]] can only be deployed, that is to say, by someone with skin in the game; who is prepared to put ''herself'' in jeopardy by accepting the assignment, which jeopardy she defends by the simple expedient of ''knowing what she is doing'' and checking her [[LLM]]’s output.

That someone will be a ''lawyer''.

Now such a “last mile” lawyer ''could'' use an [[LLM]] to simplify documents, accelerate research and break legal problems down to their essences, thereby reducing the cost, and increasing the value, of her service to her clients. And, sure: in theory, she ''could'' give all this value up to her clients for nothing.  

But she could, just as easily, use an [[LLM]] to further ''complicate'' the “work product”: to overengineer, to convolute, to invent options and cover contingencies of minimal utility: she could set her tireless symbol-processing engine to the task of ''injecting infinitesimal detail'': she could amp-up the ineffability to a level beyond a normal human’s patience.  

Which of these, realistically, should we expect a lawyer to do? [[Simplify]], or ''[[Complicated system|complicate]]''? Sacrifice time ''and'' [[ineffability]], for the better comprehension of the unspecialised world? Or plough the energy this magical new tool bestows into generating ''more'' convolution and ineffability, racking up more recorded time?

She would do the latter with only the best intentions, of course; this is not lily-gilding so much as a noble outreach toward perfection: using the arsenal at her disposal to reach ever closer to the Platonic form.

Cynical, or just realistic? Foretellers of legal Armageddon must explain away some difficult facts: that the commercial-legal industrial complex has stubbornly resisted all attempts at simplification and disintermediation for a generation, notwithstanding the thought-leadership, regulatory prompting, appeals to logic 40 years of technology — [[Microsoft Word]], mainly — which the world’s lawyers ''could'' have used, powerfully, to simplify and minimise the [[attorney legal work product|legal work product]].  

Not only did the industry not simplify, ''it made everything more complicated''. [[Boilerplate]] blossomed. Templates flowered. Every contract acquired wording dealing with [[counterparts]], governing the [[No oral amendment|form of amendments]] and [[Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999|excluding third party rights]] that weren’t there in the first place.<ref>Contracts don’t confer rights on third parties accidentally. Where is is deliberate, it is obtuse to exclude them.</ref>

Why should a [[difference engine]] designed to generate plausible-sounding but meaningless text be used do anything different? You can see the effect [[Large language model|LLM]]s are having on legal work product. [[Confidentiality agreement|NDA]]s are growing longer and increasingly riven with the same generic convolutions: ornamentations that are usually harmless, but in some cases misconceived but they recur so frequently now, as the LLMs hone their model, so become harder and harder for the [[meatware]] to resist. The [[meatware]], remember, has limited patience with NDAs, understanding how much of a pantomime they are. [[Algorithm]]s, on the other hand, do not understand this and have ''unlimited'' patience and ''boundless'' energy. If [[negotiation]] comes down to [[deal fatigue|who blinks first]], we should bear in mind that ''[[LLM]]s don’t blink''.

“But, [[JC]], come on. Be realistic. It is dog-eat-dog out there. Any lawyer keeps the bounty of the [[LLM]] from her clients will soon have her lunch eaten by others who won’t. You cannot fight the invisible hand. We are in a race to the bottom.”

 

Ignoring how impervious to the invisible hand all other recent technologies have been, remember who the clients are. Consumers of high-end commercial legal services are not, generally, the permanently bamboozled [[Muggle|muggles]] of common myth. Most are ''themselves'' lawyers, inhabiting weaponised [[Legal|legal department]]s mainly comprised of veteran deal lawyers. These are people ''also'' take pride in their ability to work with difficult, complicated things. This is how they prove their worth to their employers.  

Lawyer and their clients, that is to say, have a common interest in convolution for its own sake. They are the jazz aficionados of text; ''cinéastes'' of syntax. They ''expect'' overwrought contracts: nothing says “prudent management of existential risk” like eighty page of 10pt Times New Roman.  

Lawyers are the last great [[positivist]]s: they understand instinctively that what has been already laid down by someone else — “posited” — is ''safer'' and than anything new that they might themselves contribute. The [[common law]] with its [[doctrine of precedent]], after all, is to all intents a divine commandment: ''in times of doubt, to do what has been done before''.  

Thus, lawyers will assiduously “track the wording of legislation” to ensure their drafting matches it with utmost fidelity, notwithstanding any private reservations they may have about how it was drafted. The more ambiguous, or just ''difficult''  the source text, the more assiduously should we expect lawyers to replicate it, because they ''[[fear]]'' it. They fear the limits of their own mastery.