[jmacd]

I am currently dealing with a relatively complex legal agreement. It's about 30 pages. I have a lawyer working on it who I consider the best in the country for this domain.

I was able to pre-process the agreement, clearly understand most of the major issues, and come up with a proposed set of redlines all relatively easily. I then waited for his redlines and then responded asking questions about a handful of things he had missed.

I value a lawyer being willing to take responsibility for their edits, and he also has a lot of domain specific transactional knowledge that no LLM will have, but I easily saved 10 hours of time so far on this document.

[ProllyInfamous]

I am a semi-retired blue collar electrician. Higher IQ, but lowly certifications (definitely not a lawyer).

Currently I have initiated a lawsuit in my US state's small claims civil court, over a relatively simple payment dispute. Without the ability to bounce legal questions/tact/procedurals off of Perplexity, I wouldn't have felt comfortable enough to represent myself in court.

Even if I were to need a lawyer on this simple case, the majority of the "leg work" has already been completed by free, non-pay LLMs.

My court date is early June; I'm both nervous and excited (for restitution)!

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I have a judge brother and have been arguing for years that law clerking is probably in its last gasps of career-entry; Chief Justice Roberts's end of 2023 SCOTUS report was a refreshing read to share among family members (which argued that LLMs will provide more accessibility to judiciary by commoners).

Personally, I already would rather have a jury of LLMs deciding most legal outcomes (albeit would need to be impartially programmed, if that's even possible). Definitely would make for better democratic accessibility.

I found Bruce Schneier's recent article "Reimagining Democracy" [1] quite an interesting thought experiment (which is about his hosting intellectuals in their discussions of creating entirely new democracies utilizing modern technologies). It'd be super fair if a trusted AI government could lead to better democracies than "modern capitalism" can / has.

[1] schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/04/reimagining-democracy-2.html

[tptacek]

This is super interesting, because I've been in similar conflicts (as a renter trying to recover security deposits in court) and been screwed over by the lawyers I've retained (like, literally not even showing up in court) and I probably could have done all this with an LLM myself. When the stakes are low, why not?