Well, INAL, but during the legal interactions I had, none of which was in the US or got to actual trial, whenever the clients didn't follow the legal guidance of the lawyer, the lawyer was not accountable. Heck, even if you follow your lawyer's advice, the lawyer isn't accountable for the outcome. Only for the correct conduct of his practice. So I'd say, in this AI-supported court case (for speeding ticket after all), if the AI screws up I think the defendant is on its own. Or we see a follow up civil suite against the "AI" provider, which would be both, hilarious and highly interesting.

Clients not following their advice is always going to happen, and it's not the lawyer's problem as you say. And indeed, the lawyer can't (and historically in many jurisdictions shouldn't be creating compensation structures which imply they can) guarantee the outcome.

I agree the defendant is likely to be on their own, and I'm wondering whether the individual concerned is aware of this. The company seems to be willing to backstop their ticket if they lose.

I'm not sure that will help much if they are sent to jail for a few days for wasting court time for relatedly lying under oath or talking themselves into a generative AI's web of inaccurate statements. Such a follow-up suit would be both hilarious and interesting to follow indeed.

Yes. If its one thing we've seen ChatGPT and the like struggling with, it's internal consistency and keeping the whole text coherent and tied to some fundamental overarching thread or strategy.

To play devil's advocate though, would a layman without AI help be any better at navigating this?

Answer - probably not.

But courts are very likely (in my view) to take a very very dim view of the introduction of some kind of barrack-room "AI lawyer". It will slow things down by introducing potentially spurious arguments which wouldn't have been made by either a represented party, or unrepresented party.

Given the courts are a public service, this isn't necessarily zero sum - unrepresented parties do take longer in court, but I very strongly suspect in the life of a whole case, parties with an aspiring barrack-room AI lawyer will take up more court time. Especially if their argument loses coherency or starts to contradict itself.

This is not an AI problem, I have seen more than a few time Lawyers contradict in different parts of a case. One example off the top of my head is when Lawyers attempt aurge that social media platforms are both publishers and platforms so they can not be held liable at all under any circumstance

> One example off the top of my head is when Lawyers attempt aurge that social media platforms are both publishers and platforms so they can not be held liable at all under any circumstance

... that would be very surprising, since there is no legal definition nor distinction of publisher or platform.

Yes there is.

Cite the law, then. It's not in 47 USC section 230, which is the main legal citation that matters for social media platforms.

No, there isn't.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/29/stubborn-n...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/20/section-230-basics-there...

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/it-doesnt-matter-if-tw...

https://www.cato.org/blog/newspapers-are-spreading-section-2...

Even TechDirt manages to get this right, but the myth that tech companies exist on the knife's edge of being converted under the law into publishers is stubborn.