If there was a way to explain contracts in natural language, don’t you think lawyers would have figured it out by now? How much GDP do we waste on one party thinking the contract says they paid for one thing but they got something else?

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cootsnuck 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> If there was a way to explain contracts in natural language, don’t you think lawyers would have figured it out by now?

Uh...I mean...you do know they charge by the hour, right?

Half joking, but seriously, the concept of "job security" still exists even for a $400 billion industry. Especially when that industry commands substantial power across essentially all consequential areas of society.

LLMs literally do explain contracts in natural language. They also allow you to create contracts with just natural language. (With all the same caveats as using LLMs for programming or anything else.)

I would say law is quietly one of the industries that LLMs have had a larger than expected impact on. Not in terms of job loss (but idk, would be curious to see any numbers on this). But more just like evident efficacy (similar to how programming became a clear viable use case for LLMs).

All of that being said, big law, the type of law that dominates the industry, does not continue to exist because of "contract disputes". It exists to create and reinforce legal machinations that advance the interests of their clients and entrench their power. And the practice of doing that is inherently deeply human. As in, the names of the firm and lawyers involved are part of the efficacy of the output. It's deeply relational in many ways.

(I'd bet anything though that smart lawyers up and down the industry are already figuring out ways to make use of LLMs to allow them to do more work.)

	▲	dmoy 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> LLMs literally do explain contracts in natural language. They also allow you to create contracts with just natural language. (With all the same caveats as using LLMs for programming or anything else.) I can't generalize, but the last time I tried to use an LLM for looking at a legal document (month or two ago), it got a section completely wrong. And then when that was pointed out, it dug in its heels and insisted it was right, even though it was very wrong. Interestingly there was a typo, which was obvious to any human, and would have been accepted as intended in a court, but the LLM insisted on using a strict interpretation accepting the typo as truth. It was weird, because it felt like on the one hand the LLM was trained to handle legal documents with a more strict interpretation of what's written, but then couldn't cope with the reality of how a simple typo would be handled in courts or real legal proceedings. So.... I dunno. LLMs can explain contracts, but they may explain then in a very wrong way, which could lead to bad outcomes if you rely on it.

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827a 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's a potentially interesting idea in the space of: The cryptobros went really deep into trying to describe everything Up To And Including The World in computer code, with things like Etherium contracts, tokenization of corporate voting power, etc. That's all dead now, but you have to have some respect for the very techno-utopian idea that we can extend the power and predictability of Computer Code into everything; and its interesting how LLMs were the next techno-trend, yet totally reversed it. Now, its: computer code doesn't matter, only natural language matters, describe everything in natural language including computer code.