I would agree with this point and as I explained in a comment replying to the GP comment above, that atrophy is far more dangerous in the legal field than it is with code because legal documents do not benefit from the structural safeguards available for code, like automated testing, static typing, static analysis tools, etc. IME with legal LLMs so far, they are easily in that most dangerous valley where they can lull you into a false sense of security while still introducing extremely dangerous mistakes that are frequently difficult to detect without very careful reading.

The danger of those mistakes creeping in also grows exponentially the farther a lawyer strays from their core legal expertise. There are a few statutes I know inside and out, and I can spot LLM analytical errors related to them in a split second, but once I venture out into domains where I am not an expert (but where I am nevertheless reasonably qualified to practice), it becomes much harder to spot drafting mistakes because I have not refreshed my own understanding of the law by reviewing the relevant cases or statutes as I would when drafting the analysis myself from scratch.

Vice versa there is also a lot of irresponsible programmers doing stupid things with ai. Irresponsible people stay irresponsible, AI just make them more productive at being irresponsible.

So a software engineer could diagnose an illness with ai, even if they happen to be right that doesn't really prove much about how bad of an idea it could be in a long tail scenario.

I could not agree more. A simple example: it boggles my mind how every state organizes their statutes in entirely dissimilar ways. I'm not sure there's a need for every state to have slightly different wording for a murder statute in the first place, but even assuming there is, why do they all have to be scattered around in different code sections instead of every state just following some consistent convention like always putting the murder statute at Title V, Section 1.4 (or whatever the case may be, that's just a random invented example).

For murder that's not such a huge deal because the statutes are typically easy to track down and don't really differ all that much substantively, but once you get really into the weeds on something like commercial contracts it can be a huge pain to do cross-jurisdictional research.

And that's just a tiny, super obvious example of how impenetrable statutory law is, which isn't even the really pernicious problem. Case law is infinitely worse. It makes me absolutely furious how difficult legal research still is. The Westlaw/LexisNexis duopoly is a moral crime and wildly destructive to the quality of government in this country. Every single written court opinion should be publicly available for free on the internet in an easily searched format. It would cost practically nothing to achieve. We're talking about less text than Wikipedia hosts. Yet still many states make it almost impossible to access case law. Even though these cases are law. Binding law that we are supposed to follow, yet we cannot even easily access. It's insane, and largely perpetuated by the complacency of lawyers who can charge others for what should be free, the lobbying of the duopoly, and the incompetence of politicians.

If all of the laws were consistently available and stored in reasonable, consistent citation formats (I would settle for hyperlinking as a replacement for the rat's nest of wildly varying jurisdiction-specific citation systems), it would even be possible to introduce a form of unit testing for legal drafting that would allow us to automatically verify if the LLM hallucinated a citation.

It also doesn't help that we (for what were at the time very good reasons) moved away from the system of legal writs that used to provide fairly standardized, almost "cut and paste" templates for legal filings. So now every legal document (filings, memos, contracts, court opinions, statutes) is drafted like a bespoke, artisanal creation with few strict structural or stylistic conventions. That makes automated interpretation much harder than it needs to be.

Judging from reported figures, roughly 80-90% of households in the US [1] have a household net worth of at least $0. That means that most people do in fact have an estate.

Median household net worth is in fact somewhere in the $100k-200k range, which is definitely something that could be meaningfully called an "estate." (Most of this tends to be the house, the median net equity in which is about $190k as of 2022).

Source: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p70br...

[1] This doesn't mean "homeowners," rather it's a recognition that assets for married or cohabitating couples are usually commingled.

It’s just the legal term. If you have a relative die with a bit of stuff and an ancient car, they have an estate and someone needs to execute it even if the total value is less than most lawyers care about.

Everyone has an estate. Only thing is that you have to die first.

Ummm, not quite.

An "estate" is a legal term for property, assets, and liabilities a person leaves behind upon their death. A family member is a top practitioner in the field of estate planning and resolution, and some of the messiest estates they have handled are pro-bono cases of exactly the type of people you would put in italicized "most people": poor, not really able to upkeep a house they inherited from a relative which hadn't had title properly transferred on a previous death because they didn't have money for an attny, now can't get a loan to fix the roof...

Yeah, if you are homeless, carless, and have only the clothes on your back and a shopping cart of stuff, you don't have an estate. Everyone in the middle class in the US has an estate. Much of the time it passes automatically to their spouse on death, but it's still an estate.

And if you are concerned about where it goes, get a GOOD attny. There are many bad ones hanging out their shingle as "Trust & Estate" attnys, and some of the next messiest cases are fixing problems made by those not-so-good attnys.

And NO, AI is not good enough.

This is often called tacit knowledge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

My favorite example of this is knowing how to untangle a big pile of cables. There are robots now which can untie a single knotted cable, but I don't think any can do a pile of cables yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp-94rsherE

Good point. Same probably applies to code as well, coders much tell us why they write the cde the way they did. And if they have comments in their code, those are highly untrustworthy because noboy fixes comments if the code works.

I think that’s a different task than the one OP is referring to. To your example, I’m not familiar with the capability of LLMs in that regard. I have struggled with using the AI features of westlaw when it comes to that sort of argument. (Basically, making an argument that strays from typical route, because that’s the position you happen to find yourself representing.)