They are not scared that it will fail. They are scared that it will succeed. And there's a great reason to allow a company to sell a stand-in for a lawyer. Cost. This isn't targeted at people who can afford lawyers, it's targeted at people who can't, for now at least.

> are not scared that it will fail. They are scared that it will succeed

Lawyers make heavy use of automated document sifting in e.g. e-discovery. Junior lawyers are expensive. Any tech that makes them superfluous is a boon to the partners. When we toss the village drunk from the bar, it isn’t because we’re scared they’ll drink all our booze.

Lawyers aren't scared at all. It's traffic court, you are really overstating things. If it was a serious case, it'd be even more ridiculous to put more on the line by being represented by a computer algorithm that isn't subject to any of the licensing standards of an atty, none of the repercussions, and being run by a business that is disclaiming all liability for their conduct.

You know what an attorney can't do? Disclaim malpractice liability!

It'd be wondrous if the esteemed minds of hackernews could put their brain cycles towards actually applying common sense and other things rather than jerking off to edgy narratives about disruption while completely disregarding the relevant facts to focus on what they find politically juicy ("lawyers are scared it will succeed". It's a tautological narrative you are weaving for yourself that completely skirts past all the principles underlying the legal profession and it's development over hundreds of years.

It's naive to think that a company would develop an AI capable of beating a lawyer in court and then sell it cheaply to poor people to beat traffic tickets. If anyone ever manages to develop an AI that is actually capable of replacing a lawyer, it will be priced way, way out of reach of those people. It will be sold to giant corporations so that they can spend $500k on licence fees rather than $1 million on legal fees. (And unless those corporations can get indemnities from the software vendor backed by personal guarantees they'd still be getting a raw deal.)

These people are being sold snake oil. Cheap snake oil, maybe, but snake oil nonetheless.

>They are not scared that it will fail. They are scared that it will succeed.

Not really. There are more lawyers than legal jobs. A lot of lawyers are toiling for well under 100k a year. People pay 1500 dollars an hour for some lawyers and 150 an hour for others due to perceived (and actual) quality differences. Adding a bunch more non-lawyers isn't going to impact the demand for the 1500 dollars an hour lawyers.

Legal work is expensive because ANY sort of bespoke professional work is expensive. Imagine if software developers had to customize their work for each customer.

Considering it's so bad it came to people's attention when it sent a subpoena to make sure someone came to testify against its client when he might have had a default judgement in his favour if they hadn't, I think the people who can't afford the lawyers have a lot more to be scared of than the lawyers...

And the reason lawyers are expensive is because bad legal advice usually costs far more in the long run.

>> Non-lawyers aren't banned from giving legal advice because lawyers are trying to protect their jobs, they're banned from giving legal advice because they're likely to be bad at it, and the people who take their advice are likely to be hurt.

But why would the opposing side's lawyers care about this? They presumably want their client to win the lawsuit.

I only have immediate knowledge of UK law, but lawyers will generally have a duty to the court to act with independence in the interests of justice. This tends to mean that in situations where one side are self-represented or using the services of ChatGPT, etc. the opposing side is under a duty not to take unfair advantage of the fact that one side is not legally trained.

They don't have to help them, but they can't act abusively by, for example, exploiting lack of procedural knowledge.

If they deliberately took advantage of one side using ChatGPT and getting it wrong because the legal foundation of knowledge isn't there for that person, that could be a breach of their duty to the court and result in professional censure or other regulatory consequences.

When did the opposing side's lawyers say anything about this? Are you confused? Law is a regulated profession. The lawyers pointing out that this is illegal aren't on the other side of the case...

Incompetent representation is grounds for a mistrial, or successful appeal.

The prosecution wants to win, but they'd prefer to only have to win once.

If you have to go back to trial, you've already showed your hand, and the defense (who is now competent) can adapt to it.

Well, it is supposed to be a Justice system, and not a game. While it is very easy to forget that, and many of the participants in it clearly don't behave as such, the outcome of it should be to be just.

Ultimately though the argument you have set up here seems to make it all but impossible for AI to displace humans in the legal profession. If the argument is "precedent rules" then "only humans can be lawyers" is precedent.

I'm not sure if this particular case with this particular technology made sense - but I do think we need to encourage AI penetration of the legal profession, in a way that has minimal downside risk. (For defendants and plaintiffs, not lawyers.) It would be hugely beneficial for society if access to good legal advice was made extremely cheap.

No, if in a hypothetical future we have technology that is capable of reliably performing the role, I don't have a problem with it. This tech is explicitly founded on LLMs, which have major inherent weaknesses that make them unsuitable.