I would think that LLMs would be better at avoiding foot-guns. That’s a situation where you have a list of well known rules and potential pit falls, and the work of the lawyer is to apply those to a fact pattern. That’s something that has been hard to automate programmatically, because the fact patterns are similar but different. LLMs, however, seem to excel at applying general principles to differing fact patterns.

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atmavatar 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Instead, the LLMs create entirely new foot guns like citing non-existent cases. You can't go more than a week without encountering another news report of a lawyer submitting an AI-generated legal brief rife with bogus case citations, which even includes briefs submitted to state supreme courts.

e.g., https://www.npr.org/2026/04/03/nx-s1-5761454/penalties-stack...

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HappMacDonald 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would categorize this in the "expertise that people internalize but never figure out how to verbalize" department, and that is a department we have no way to teach an LLM because if nobody is writing out those unspoken, subconscious rules then the LLM has nothing to read about them in its training data.

	▲	tomjakubowski 18 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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
	▲	galaxyLogic 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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goodmythical 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know the source off hand, but I've seen llms hallucinating case citations in order to "prove" their premises.

can't get more foot gun than "well according to [fiction] it is a well established practice (that the defendent is guilty)"

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dylan604 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But can an LLM come up with questions like what the definition of is is? Seems to me there's a lot of "depends on how you read it" type of stuff that lawyers excel at finding novel interpretations. So what coders thinking of as rules are much less straight forward to understand when it comes to laws

	▲	rayiner 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.)