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halamadrid 39 minutes ago [-]
The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience. I attempted drafting a contract with some points myself using AI, but after several edits I wasn't sure if it was correct. Sending it to an actual lawyer ended up in so many corrections I couldn't imagine the first time. One big thing was the overly excessive protective clauses which didn't make sense for reality or conflicted with another.
Its just like code I suppose, if you can read and understand and validate, you can use it to scale and otherwise it could end up being a vibe effort.
janalsncm 36 seconds ago [-]
The typical pattern is called “deskilling”. It doesn’t usually mean a skilled profession will disappear overnight. Instead, the job might be done by less expensive folks like paralegals.
An example is in the banking industry, where making a loan used to require deep analysis of a person’s credit worthiness. Now they use an algorithm (credit scores) which means someone with less experience can do it.
If law follows the same pattern, a job done by someone making $500/hour might be done by someone making $50/hour.
rayiner 23 minutes ago [-]
LLMs are the first genuinely useful legal tech since the Internet. I'm pretty shocked, though, at the delta between how competent Claude is on code versus legal work. It's good for research and data organization, but terrible for drafting. I wonder if this is a structural problem with the lack of feedback loops. In law, there's no compiler to check for logical or continuity errors in your brief, and there's no unit tests to check for correctness or performance.
Even without that, I think it'll be extremely valuable to clients to allow them to answer simple questions without a lawyer, figure out the lay of the land so they can supervise their counsel, etc.
throwaway20222 9 minutes ago [-]
I have found that it’s useful generally speaking to get the intent of contracts and red lines, but actual drafting I agree is where I lose all confidence. My guess is that the significance of the difference between using a word like “and“ or “or“ can be so meaningful that that level of nuance can often be lost. But I know nothing I’m not in the space, I just pay too much money for lawyers.
Razengan 12 minutes ago [-]
> The need for actual lawyers will persist I think from my own experience.
The outcome of a case should not depend on one's ability to recall facts or convince other people or point their index finger and shout OBJECTION
Law should generally be deterministic. One's CHA stat should have no bearing on justice.
There should still be human judges, but the middleman between the judge and petitioners could easily be removed, and are generally seen as leeches since forever.
Though, like how the USA opts to remain in the Stone Age with regard to tax filing because of lobbying by tax software companies, this faction of obsolete society will fight the hardest before they fall.
rayiner 2 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
charcircuit 22 minutes ago [-]
What model did you use?
piker 2 hours ago [-]
Second paragraph:
> API customers including Harvey and Legora will be able to build on Astra for Law, bringing this intelligence into their own products and workflows.
In other words: "no, no, we're not eating our children to prep for the IPO. Don't worry."
jmkd 1 hours ago [-]
Max Junestrand has consistently said Legora treats the model layer as swappable, selecting across frontier providers rather than building the product around one.
OpenAI didn't need to name Legora and Harvey in the second paragraph of the launch post.
They are pre-empting the obvious interpretation of Astra for Law: that moving this far up the legal stack puts them in direct competition with their biggest legal AI customers.
“Don't worry, they can build on us” is a pretty conspicuous message to include on launch day.
They have clearly thought about some pessimistic outcomes.
JumpCrisscross 39 minutes ago [-]
"We are also expanding our work on privacy and governance to give law firms specific controls for confidential client work"
This is everything OpenAI have to say about privacy in this announcement. No guarantees. No promises. Just a pinky-swear promise.
Anyone trusting them–or a lawyer who relies on them–for legal work deserves what they get.
forrestthewoods 2 hours ago [-]
If there is any cartel that deserves to be broken its legal search. May they die a miserable death.
ericd 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it should be freely available, you have to be able to know the rules you're supposed to obey in order to obey them well. I've been making a free API for US law search, you can point whatever model you want at it: https://law.agentlookups.ai/
Very much a work in progress, only federal and state so far, no municipal codes yet, and no case law yet. Big hole, I know. Also working on making the search ranking work better.
manyatoms 1 hours ago [-]
is there a dataset/torrent with all the underlying laws?
ericd 1 hours ago [-]
Right now it's just a bunch of crawlers for the individual states. If there's interest, I could periodically stand up snapshot torrents or something. That something you'd be interested in?
Alternatively, if someone else knows an all-in-one option that exists, I wouldn't mind retiring those crawlers...
timschmidt 1 hours ago [-]
Not op, but that's a very interesting proposition. While the law and legal code are technically property of the people, I'm not aware of any single point of download for it all.
rayiner 1 hours ago [-]
There’s no single point of download for it all because there’s thousands of autonomous entities that issue law and adjudicate cases, at least 51 of them distinct sovereign entities.
datsci_est_2015 49 minutes ago [-]
We could enforce (suggest?) a common format / api at the federal level. Especially if it’s incentivized with funding that more than justifies the cost of maintenance. Similar to how federal interstate funding is only available to states with a 21+ drinking age.
qingcharles 42 minutes ago [-]
There is none, not for statutes and definitely not for case law; even at the appellate level where you have multiple federal circuits, then 50 states, then territories, military, tribal and a whole host of other niche courts. And the appellate court systems can be split into districts, and by lower and higher levels.
Then if you want to really get into it, The People should also be able to access trial court level, and at that point you have over 3000 distinct court systems with their own access systems, usually requiring logins and CAPTCHAs, and half of them not even having anything accessible online at all, and the other half only having recent stuff online and the rest rotting in a flooded basement.
> By using the legal search index, Astra for Law can search U.S. case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, and administrative decisions across a corpus of more than 230 million URLs, with sources added daily. Our work with Free Law Project, the nonprofit behind CourtListener, brings its case-law collection covering more than 99.9% of published U.S. precedential case law (opens in a new window) into this research experience.
Found that to be very interesting
rayiner 34 minutes ago [-]
CourtListener already has an MCP interface and Grok is quite good at pulling from it. In my experience, Grok 4.6 is quite good at analyzing legal cases and human-written documents. Better than Opus 5. I'm not sure if it's better than Fable 5.1 on that task, b/c I'm not willing to spend my precious Fable tokens on case law searches lol.
teiferer 57 minutes ago [-]
Let's swap it out for the AI cartel!
jumploops 2 hours ago [-]
The courts are about to overrun with AI-generated lawsuits (even more so than they have been[0]).
I find the idea that people can use LLMs to exercise their rights as citizens appealing however. Many people aren't aware of the rights they have, and LLMs are pretty good at surfacing some stuff without having to pay lawyers. Having to hire a lawyer is imo actually a huge way of gatekeeping people from exercising their rights. I heard a lot of local German public institutions are currently being flooded with people arguing their case with the help of LLM that they previously weren't really realistically able to do. So I don't see it all as bad.
giarc 15 minutes ago [-]
>are pretty good at surfacing some stuff without having to pay lawyers
They are also really good at making stuff up as evidenced by the many, many, many examples you read in the news about actual lawyers using AI to write briefs that are full of errors and hallucinations.
In civil courts, you'd likely get more sympathy from a judge if you represented yourself and admitted your lack of understanding, rather than try to appear as someone you're not because you wrote some prompts and copied the output.
mt_ 1 hours ago [-]
The legal system, which is a machine/technology by itself, will be eaten out. I wonder what will replace it. Botnet law arbitrage? – Personal assistants constantly negotiating with each other to avoid permanent civil lawsuits?
the cost of making a legal argument can collapse while the cost of reaching an enforceable, legitimate decision may go higher, which will gate the "justice" system even more.
alexfringes 53 minutes ago [-]
You presented the concern from my adjacent comment perfectly (“LLM performance: common law vs civil law” essentially). So is AI possibly just growing the “Reverence for Professional Experience” factor that plays such a big role for legal compensation here in the US?
iphonecorridor 40 minutes ago [-]
The legal system is slow and inefficient by design.
rayiner 8 minutes ago [-]
It's really not. The legal system is slow and inefficient because it's a deeply pipelined system built to maximize the throughput of the bottleneck resource: judges. Judges are constitutional officers who exercise independent authority in meat space and thus are necessarily limited in number. The rest of the design flows from that.
If you got the judge, all the parties, and all the witnesses in a conference room together until the case was resolved, you could probably handle a lawsuit in a few months. But each judge has hundreds of cases pending before them, so that would never work. Instead, you get something like how a GPU works. You do some work on a case, submit the work to the court, then work on something else for a few months while you wait around to get the results back. Then you do some more work and submit it to the court, then go do something else for a few months while you wait to get the results back. A few months of actual work gets spread out over a few years that way.
JumpCrisscross 38 minutes ago [-]
The legal system is robust and deliberate by design. That winds up being necessarily slow. But it doesn't need to be inefficient.
WolfeReader 48 minutes ago [-]
I am not sure "eaten out" was the correct phrase to use here.
pbkompasz 53 minutes ago [-]
Call it a Prediction Market
paimapi 2 hours ago [-]
you could probably write a cool little gotcha of an SF short story about a barren wasteland of a planet that keeps broadcasting out legalese that's revealed to just be LLM chatbot lawyers pedantically arguing with one another about xeno legal doctrine
JG Ballard could probably turn that into something darkly atmospheric, and even more dystopic than his usual depopulated worlds...
pampas 2 hours ago [-]
They seem unaccountable. Every other profession has increased their productivity.
diegolas 48 minutes ago [-]
justice doesn't have to be productive it has to be fair
RugnirViking 42 minutes ago [-]
It's completely failing at that too. Public trust in the courts is lower than it's ever been, and it was never all that high to begin with
MiSeRyDeee 43 minutes ago [-]
how so? delayed justice is denied justice
officeplant 1 hours ago [-]
>Every other profession has increased their productivity.
You dropped this /s
aucisson_masque 42 minutes ago [-]
Don’t you have fee when initiating a lawsuit ?
I don’t know in the USA but in France, if it’s deemed that you launched a lawsuit knowing very well it wouldn’t succeed, you are susceptible to get a 10k€ fine. Even jail in serious cases.
underlipton 20 minutes ago [-]
Yes. And you(r lawyer) can collect lawyer's fees and you can be made to pay the court fees, if you lose.
IME the American legal system is set-up to discourage litigation, though. A common tactic is to bury your opponent in the threat of heavy damages or jail-time to get them to settle for what you were originally after, which courts are perfectly happy to facilitate because it gets a potentially lengthy trial off their dockets. They'll punish (or be biased against) whichever party seems responsible for not accepting a "reasonable" settlement.
Algorithmic abuse of the system to extract payments already exists in the form of the debt collection industry.
ngruhn 2 hours ago [-]
Why the hell are they not fighting fire with fire? This is not sustainable. But it is annoying that the AI labs get to play arms dealer, selling to both sides.
toasty228 1 hours ago [-]
How are we fighting it online? You cannot
b112 1 hours ago [-]
It'll be like radar detector detector detectors, which were a thing for a while. Each side (cops, speeder) buying detectors to detect the detectors.
Not like common law doesnt already have a lot of hallucination going on.
cobbzilla 2 hours ago [-]
can “penumbras and emanations” compete with hallucinations?
ch4s3 2 hours ago [-]
Common law is all about rummaging around in dead mens’ letters, LLMs are a natural fit.
alexfringes 1 hours ago [-]
Genuinely wondering (aka not snarky): Has anyone found frontier models to provide useful research in the context of European civil law systems?
Your comment made me wonder if there are any halfway-acceptable model benchmarks for law tasks? Specifically I’d love to know how the frontier models’ abilities compare between common law vs. civil law systems. My guess would be that an AI in a common law context should have a clearer idea of how a specific case is interpreted/accepted by (common law) practitioners, whereas trying to rely on AI in a civil law context, like Germany, can be daunting. In a few Germany-specific recent examples, the models feel like they present only (maybe too stubbornly?) the “civil law”-based laws. All while negating much of AI’s research benefits because civil statutes are portrayed as being absolutely accurate, binding, and their enforcement (and thereby the legal reality) being uniformly applied. Am I making this interpretation up? If so, how can I prove myself wrong?
jrflo 2 hours ago [-]
Does hallucination matter for this application? We've moved beyond raw recall being that important, it seems like for law specifically all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans.
jakevoytko 39 minutes ago [-]
> all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans
I've talked to a lawyer about how they handle this. They do indeed double-check everything, since it'd be embarrassing (or worse) to send hallucinated statements to opposing council or to the court. They still find the assembly a huge time saver
But based on stories in the news on the subject, not everyone has this same level of diligence
Implicated 1 hours ago [-]
> it seems like for law specifically all relevant facts will be cited and checked easily by humans.
The benchmark you linked to shows GPT-6 Astra having the lowest hallucination rate of all tested models.
jdiff 2 hours ago [-]
The blog post makes no mention. If the rate isn't 0% it should be mentioned for a field like this.
TomGarden 1 hours ago [-]
Agreed. Hallucinations and reliability are the main hurdles to anything being 'agi' in my book
Tanjreeve 1 hours ago [-]
The definition of AGI is whatever a frontier lab wrote a blog about doing in the last week.
simianwords 1 hours ago [-]
why this maximalism? There's nothing that has 0% hallucination including humans. lets use reasonable baselines.
drakythe 1 hours ago [-]
Humans can be sanctioned and fined, and eventually disbarred if they continue to lie in court filings.
john_strinlai 49 minutes ago [-]
presumably that will remain true for the lawyers using the product
nerevarthelame 24 minutes ago [-]
I'm not familiar with the Vals AI Legal Research Benchmark. But their website has other frontier models' scores, and the scores OpenAI is now revealing for "Astra for Law" are slightly less than Claude and Muse:
> The top is a three-way tie: Muse Spark 1.3 Max, Claude Opus 5, and Claude Fable 5.1 all reach 55.29% all-pass accuracy, a clear ~6-point step ahead of the next model. [Astra for Law reached 54.0%]
> Under partial-credit scoring, Claude Opus 5 reaches 90.58% weighted pass rate but 55.29% under strict all-pass grading, where every rubric check must pass. The gap shows models often get most of an answer right but fail on one or two required elements. [Astra for law reached 90.0%]
"Rogue OpenAI agent swarm accidentally overturns the Civil Rights Act"
followed a month later by
"Anthropic's Claude inadvertently repeals the 19th amendment"
nsoseka 8 minutes ago [-]
Since the cost of building software is now cheap, there is nothing stopping them from building everything imaginable. They'll soon have an app store with every app built by them and they'll say its for security reasons. Nothing is stopping this coming monopoly
keeda 59 minutes ago [-]
Any lawyers here who have used AI agents heavily for their work? From what I've heard, they're currently very good at searching, analyzing and drafting documents like contracts and patents, but some say they suck at interpreting the law.
droidjj 24 minutes ago [-]
I’m sure there are a wide variety of experiences out there, but here’s my perspective as a former biglaw associate and current solo litigator:
I have had some success using frontier models from the last 6ish months, but only when I can break up my work into discrete and verifiable tasks. For example, I had ~15k pages of discovery I needed to dig through for a summary judgment motion. Instead of just asking Claude to find the best evidence, I asked it first to run a clean, high quality OCR pass (it was almost entirely PDFs). Then I had it generate embeddings and write some reusable python scripts to make keyword and semantic searching easy for agents. While I was writing the brief, I would routinely ask my agent (Claude Code) to use both keyword and semantic searching to find the best evidence supporting whatever assertion I was trying to make. I trusted it because there were traces I could follow.
In other cases/situations, I’ve tried just giving a model access to all the docs and saying “write a brief arguing X,” but it’s always terrible at this. It writes briefs with lots of evocative jargon and rhetorical flourish, but a low signal-to-noise ratio.
Again, I’m sure others’ experiences differ based on workflow, legal area, etc.
8 minutes ago [-]
qingcharles 38 minutes ago [-]
They are excellent, especially the latest models. That said, (a) I wouldn't feel safe filing something without a real lawyer looking at it; (b) it can't (easily? legally?) do oral arguments for you; and (c) a lot can happen in the hallways outside the courtroom to move a case forward that the AI can't easily do.
amelius 50 minutes ago [-]
Probably because the AI was also trained on HN comments.
john_strinlai 48 minutes ago [-]
worse, it was trained on reddit law comments
shicholas 38 minutes ago [-]
We do and it saves so much time. Of course human judgment is needed but it’s like cooking with someone else doing the mise en place.
boredumb 2 hours ago [-]
memes and snark aside, can you use this to create legitimate terms and contracts for my products and if I do who is getting sued when it is wrong?
dolebirchwood 2 hours ago [-]
> who is getting sued when it is wrong?
You. Don't take legal advice from a word calculator.
kingstnap 1 hours ago [-]
As opposed to taking advice from the glucose wetware?
Ajedi32 44 minutes ago [-]
Yes, because glucose wetware can be held liable for malpractice if it gives you nonsensical advise.
animal_spirits 57 minutes ago [-]
Wetware is a new phrase that both horrifies me and makes me crack up in laughter :)
notahacker 1 hours ago [-]
The glucose wetware will actually fight your case...
echelon 2 hours ago [-]
The business value will be when platforms can underwrite their LLMs' legal products.
That will be a decacorn product or more.
mcmcmc 1 hours ago [-]
That or a hydrogen balloon of financial engineering
binlog 54 minutes ago [-]
The product isn’t meant for you or me it is for lawyers. If you can’t take personal liability for a badly written contract then you shouldn’t be using it.
Same for SWE when pushing code they don't understand.
raincole 2 hours ago [-]
> can you use this to create legitimate terms
I don't think you can. What I get from this article is that this is not a product they're going to sell to average consumers.
gr_norm 2 hours ago [-]
I'd expect they could indemnify you against hallucinations or similar if this gets good enough for that to be a very rare occurrence? Or you could buy insurance on it that's cheaper than hiring a lawyer (not a high bar to clear). I wouldn't rely on it currently, though.
huseyinkeles 1 hours ago [-]
when you shoot someone with a gun, who gets sued? you? or the gun manufacturer?
epolanski 33 minutes ago [-]
You can create terms and contracts even if you're a 7 year old with no AI.
And yes, even contracts drafted for millions of $ have oversights and unlawful or unenforceable terms.
petcat 2 hours ago [-]
You will be the one getting sued. It's just a tool.
hackmack10 2 hours ago [-]
I already use them for that, they are pretty excellent at it. Much better than the terms of use generator products that used to exist. That said, nobody cares to sue your business for the most part until you're big enough to be worth it. By that time, you'll have a team of legal analyst to assist you... or agents should I say.
Then again, nobody will have money to buy anything at this rate, so in all liklihood, this is a total non-issue.
charlesdenault 1 hours ago [-]
You are.
dzonga 2 hours ago [-]
open-ai have proven they can make good / decent models but business strategy is just spray and pray.
they need to pick a lane and optimize for it. coz at their size they can't serve the application layer (a.i startups who can fine-tune models will eat their lunch)
if they gonna do a consumer play - then go ham on that.
otherwise they're gonna get caught in the dreaded middle valley.
jackb4040 6 minutes ago [-]
They can't be seen to commit to strongly to a specific product experience, because if they are understood as a regular tech product business that has way different financial scaling considerations than "superintelligent everything-factory"
I suspect that half-assed announcements like this are a result of different people internally with conflicting incentives resulting in a split-the-baby solution.
tuesdaynight 1 hours ago [-]
They have a lot of compute, so I think it makes sense to spray and see what works. Anthropic is limited in that regard, and focused in coding/tech, but OpenAI don't need to do the same. They even got the lead without having to focus in coding only, which is remarkable.
estetlinus 2 hours ago [-]
Do they still do Atlas, the web browser? They are indeed throwing shit at the wall, seeing what stick.
scrollop 2 hours ago [-]
a la Google.
noir_lord 57 minutes ago [-]
Google went to that model after they had a massive cash cow though.
You can afford to play silly buggers when you have dumpster trucks of money backing up to your door every day see also: Meta.
Tanjreeve 55 minutes ago [-]
I think the comparison is unfair. Google had/have a product that was 10X better than anything else at the point of release (search then chrome). And they have several money making products like YouTube and android that are either singular or in a duopoly.
OpenAI doesn't have any of these things. They have products that they're paying for customers when the market they're in is rapidly converging on fighting for API reasoning as part of enterprise systems and fighting a race to the bottom for fickle consumer solutions that will be eaten by open source once they have to make money.
Maybe they had a brief window for dominance of information search (or maybe it was only ever going to last as long as Google releasing all their internal research) and maybe they had a brief moment of monopoly till Anthropic got going but theyre not in the same dominance position as Google.
epolanski 30 minutes ago [-]
Enterprise is eventually get caught (if it isn't already) by the Microsoft/Google. Because with office/teams/suite they were already in every enterprise, and that just added a new tool to existing offerings.
Provisioning and contracts and data retention was just an extension to review of existing ones.
Nobody serious is going to risk sending sensible data to OpenAI/Anthropic, etc because "the benchmarks have shown +8% performance there and +2% there". Irrelevant.
TomGarden 1 hours ago [-]
I wonder if Lawslop is gonna become a mainstream expression. Anyone got a better term?
keeda 1 hours ago [-]
Slawp?
TomGarden 1 hours ago [-]
Haha clever
krm01 48 minutes ago [-]
Drop the s and p. Just law.
It’s cleaner.
williamcotton 23 minutes ago [-]
What do you mean by “lawslop”?
endymi0n 22 minutes ago [-]
law-bearing
john_strinlai 46 minutes ago [-]
i hope that someone can come up with something catchier than "thing-slop" or "slop-thing". the word has become basically meaningless from overuse.
epolanski 36 minutes ago [-]
I love the slop word, to me it means effortless, average.
People confuse slop with "bad", but slop isn't bad per se, it only becomes bad when real effort was required.
trollbridge 24 minutes ago [-]
Right. Pigs enjoy eating their slop. It’s not bad from their point of view.
epolanski 38 minutes ago [-]
Slop?
cmcclellan 1 hours ago [-]
I imagine the point here is to separate out the APIs by different professions and charge accordingly.
Ecstatify 1 hours ago [-]
Seems like another “product” that will be killed in 6 months, but is good for the IPO so they can say they solved law.
jonahx 28 minutes ago [-]
We need a term for the dark pattern of zooming into just that part of the y-axis where the two closely competing benchmarks sit, to make the top one appear maximally better.
trollbridge 25 minutes ago [-]
Truncating the Y axis or cropping the Y axis
jonahx 24 minutes ago [-]
crop-maxxing
underlipton 15 minutes ago [-]
crop-topping
pletnes 2 hours ago [-]
Just like breaking crypto in the age of cloud is more about cost than time, this will lead to legal attacks based on the same principle. The biggest wallet wins.
xmprt 2 hours ago [-]
> The biggest wallet wins
This was already always the case. If anything, making this more accessible will reduce the barrier to entry for whether or not it's worth your time to take on a case. Instead of 50 lawyers spending 100s of hours on a case, you can have 1 or 2 lawyers + Astra working on it and if there's a case you can add more real lawyers.
3asgfq 2 hours ago [-]
There are other possibilities:
1) Lawyers are not as naive as software engineers and will fight being replaces by new laws.
2) If they are replaced, OpenAI will take a cut commensurate with the amount in dispute (OAI, please credit me for the idea in the IPO brochure).
xmprt 2 hours ago [-]
Many lawyers are owners/partners compared with software engineers who are more like cogs in the machine. They also bill hourly/contingency per case compared to engineers who are salaried. If a partner in a firm thinks they can take on more cases because of AI assistance then they will because that's just more money in their pockets.
mcmcmc 2 hours ago [-]
That’s how the legal system in the US has always worked though
drakythe 2 hours ago [-]
With regard to certain legal questions this has always been the case. AT&T Fought the US Government for 20 years and eventually won because the government gave up. Without some kind of national anti-SLAPP law we're all one irritated oligarch away from having our lives financially ruined.
I am curious what level of trust established law firms treat LLMs with.
umeshunni 2 hours ago [-]
That's already the case in law because you could just hire the best or most lawyers.
aaimnr 1 hours ago [-]
So much for caring about the spirit of the law. Now we'll start an arms race for abusing every possible letter of the law.
It's analogous to crypto. Started from some noble anti-authoritarian ideas and morphed into machine that removes any friction for capital - whoever has the most money will keep gaining the most.
charcircuit 4 minutes ago [-]
Why do you think LLM's language abilities are unable to understand the spirit of the law?
jatora 1 hours ago [-]
Do you really think the law isn't already horribly abused? Democratization of law has been needed for a thousand years.
aaimnr 35 minutes ago [-]
Now there will be even less friction to horribly abuse the law. To democratize the law we would need to move in the opposite direction - to always keep it simple and aligned with our intuitions.
The more intricate and complex legal arguments become, the more abstracted they are from their original purpose and spirit.
Hence the crypto analogy - it was also supposed to "democratize", but the opposite happaned - it only further empowered the most powerful. Imagine legal case so purposefully complex that only those with access to best models have chances to participate and win the dispute.
xwkd 54 minutes ago [-]
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but isn’t that what legislators do?
toephu2 26 minutes ago [-]
This is the first blog post I saw OpenAI call out Claude directly like that.
alexnewman 8 minutes ago [-]
As a user of ai hooked up to my Gmail I assume I’ve lost all privilege
So there's a strategy shift here. They launched financial services specific tools and now law?
Is the play here a set of specialized harnesses using their best general model?
railgunmerlin 2 hours ago [-]
Interesting to see the callout to companies like harvey in the post itself as consumers rather than competitors? I guess openai isn't quite willing to step into those customer relations themselves?
jayzalowitz 34 minutes ago [-]
This is really cool.
freejazz 1 hours ago [-]
Went from AI replacing my job as an attorney, to them begging me to use their tools
syntaxing 37 minutes ago [-]
I said this before but I wonder if Dan Kan will reboot Atrium. Rally up some old partners and hope Anthropic buys them out for a couple billion.
2 hours ago [-]
jimmyjazz14 48 minutes ago [-]
I really hope the bar associations continues to hold lawyers to high standards but I have feeling they may not be ready to handle fallout of AI slop-law.
WarmWash 2 hours ago [-]
Cool, now you can pay an attorney $500/hr for them to prompt Astra for 30 minutes, and bill you like they spent the normal 8 hours on the case.
hahajk 2 hours ago [-]
Perhaps, but then someone would do the same but bill you for 7 hours, someone else would undercut them again, until the price reaches a lower equilibrium.
stockresearcher 1 hours ago [-]
That is an ethics violation. Even in the pre-AI era, getting caught billing for hours not worked was seriously punished.
epolanski 27 minutes ago [-]
How could that be enforced/checked?
adzm 1 hours ago [-]
"7.5 hours - reviewing output"
stockresearcher 1 hours ago [-]
Sure, if they actually spent 7.5 hours, and it was a reasonable amount of time. If not, perhaps it would be seen as evidence of incompetence.
In the real world, lawyers submit detailed bills and their clients examine them. If you don’t, that’s on you.
kappi 28 minutes ago [-]
this essay details how law firms became sweatshops from 80s. They charge hundreds of dollars to do make busy work by the junior most staff. LLM will kill the goldengoose of the law industry.
Wouldn’t this and similar efforts to centralize bureaucracy make AI the new gatekeeper? Without reliable transparent models we’re just trusting OpenAI instead of a hundred top legal firms.
elpakal 2 hours ago [-]
where are the benchmarks
hackmack10 2 hours ago [-]
People that are saying OpenAI is screwed because a lack of profit, I'm not of that opinion. They are encroaching on every industry they can. They have name brand recognition, a huge user base and are showing they can be a valuable tool to all types of businesses.
As much as I hate to see it. They are now threatening industries like Engineers, Game Developers, Accountants, 3D modelers, 3D animators, Video Production, Audio Production, Therapist, Tax Auditors, Journalists, Authors, Artists, Mathematicians, Product managers, Every type of analyst and pretty much any other job that can be done behind a computer screen.
We have big problems for humanity.
ai-x 1 hours ago [-]
Most HNers are clueless that if you have Top Talent + Capital you already have an insurmountable moat. OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic all have that and none of the regular guys can compete against them (if they choose to attack that industry)
superxpro12 2 hours ago [-]
I'd kill for an AI that can tell me how to fix shit on my own, with proper permitting and building codes factored in.
hackmack10 2 hours ago [-]
I used ChatGPT the other day to resink a CPU with termal paste, replace a PSU in my PC and snake my kitchen sink from the wall. I didn't exactly need it's help but wanted someone looking over my shoulder so to speak. It can help you repair all types of stuff, but as far as county / building codes and such, that probably isn't far off. It seems to understand things quite well.
mawadev 2 hours ago [-]
I think the future is going to look pretty boring, we are all going to review and put our signature below LLM generated output...
andriy_koval 42 minutes ago [-]
there are always be next frontier of problems which require creativity, unless AI become supersmart completely make humans redundant in all cognitive functions.
WarmWash 2 hours ago [-]
By that point money ceases to have value, because the value of money comes from the motivation it gives people to work. If AI does everything, then money is useless (unless AI like money for some reason).
trinari 1 hours ago [-]
There will still be a need to distribute and exchange ressources, goods and services.
Real estate, food, energy, mobility.
That will be done with money. Or violence. Either way, a scary future to people when labor doesn't provide any value. Elon promises abundance, but what can he do against greed?
esafak 1 hours ago [-]
People are still going to be motivated to eat and have shelter.
WarmWash 48 minutes ago [-]
Of course, but who (what?) is going to make the food and the shelter?
swed420 2 hours ago [-]
> We have big problems for humanity.
The biggest problem is that we're conditioned by a paradigm that frames these as problems.
1 hours ago [-]
ReptileMan 2 hours ago [-]
As one wise man said - the oldest profession will also be the last to go.
submeta 2 hours ago [-]
Will these models eventually replace all knowledge work, leaving lawyers, doctors, product managers, software developers, and others out of a job?
If the benefits were shared across humanity, that could bring us closer to utopia. My worry is that we’ll instead end up with a handful of even wealthier billionaires and millions of people out of work.
rfgplk 2 hours ago [-]
> Will these models eventually replace all knowledge work, leaving lawyers, doctors, product managers, software developers, and others out of a job?
Effectively yes, in the current forms. Those professions will likely evolve, but the traditional forms (ie writing code by hand, writing law filings by hand etc) are all dead.
andriy_koval 37 minutes ago [-]
> Those professions will likely evolve, but the traditional forms (ie writing code by hand, writing law filings by hand etc)
there will still be writing initial and incremental prompts by hands, until and if LLMs surpass humans in all intellectual functions.
superxpro12 2 hours ago [-]
in that case, legal cases would just come down to who has more compute lol. Many times cases win on their merits, but we've also seen evidence where overwhelming legal pressure can influence cases.
spongebobstoes 2 hours ago [-]
bigger spender already has a huge advantage, up to millions of dollars
this is more likely to democratize the legal system by reducing the cost of a good legal team
raphman 55 minutes ago [-]
May I just note that there are other jurisdictions on this planet that are less money-biased than than the US one but will be disrupted by law-LLMs as well?
It seems much more probable to me that these LLMs will make good things worse than that they will make bad things better.
cjjuice 2 hours ago [-]
Just a few years ago people were paying 400k for pictures of apes. We always make up new stuff to spend money on.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
You know most of that was wash trading, right?
rsecora 2 hours ago [-]
If we have enough energy and raw materials to keep building, yes, it will be an utopia made real. But if there is energy scarcity, then other two outcomes can arise.
porkshoe 2 hours ago [-]
This also assumes that the AI owners _want_ a global utopia, or that governments will enforce that outcome.
As it stands, it seems far more likely to result in a wonderful life for a few, and an absolute catastrophe for most.
rsecora 1 hours ago [-]
XIX century dickensian society and Gilded Age barons were replaced by the time of the New Deal.
siva7 2 hours ago [-]
No, it will only leave those without a professional license jobless. Like software developers.
spiderice 1 hours ago [-]
Doubt it. When someone can go to Astra MD for 75% of what they used to go to the doctor for, then the remaining doctors only have 25% as many visits. When doctors only have 25% as many visits, they have to compete on price and they make less per visit.
Same argument for plumbers. Everyone always jokes about what a good time it is to be a plumber. But what happens when all the software engineers turn to plumbing? Suddenly it's not such a good time to be a plumber anymore.
Thrymr 33 seconds ago [-]
Eagerly awaiting your robot plumbing startup. I highly doubt anything in plumbing is compute-limited.
cidd 2 hours ago [-]
True, unless you're a surgeon.
rsoto2 2 hours ago [-]
I mean that's what all of these execs are openly telling everyone: they want you out of work, they want their ai to be the one to bring the world to it's knees, they want to surveille every second of your day, they want killer drones to use, they want to lay all of your cities to rubble and build "paradises" on top of them like in gaza.
They also openly tell you what they are afraid of btw: collective worker power. something that is massively lacking in our industry, although i feel like it would be one of the easiest industries to unionize in terms of # of workers.
Interesting interview I just watched about how powerful and dangerous these "wishes" or "prophecies" are especially in the hands of the ultra-wealthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7grHa1NR0
2 hours ago [-]
24 minutes ago [-]
gabhuzk 2 hours ago [-]
Law is a solved problem.
mullingitover 55 minutes ago [-]
I've always said this will be when we get the real Butlerian Jihad, when the AI firms start trying to liquidate the legal profession.
If you automate lawyers out of a job, you can absolutely automate lawmakers out of jobs next. (Not that this would be a bad thing? Maybe pervasive agents for everyone can be the gateway drug to a "this time it's different!" workable direct democracy)
hansonkd 8 minutes ago [-]
I've had top SV lawfirms whos partner charged our company $2000/hr and still couldn't get the right docs in the signature packet. and another getting share counts wrong during raise.
frustrating that law firms have no liability for these mistakes
Its just like code I suppose, if you can read and understand and validate, you can use it to scale and otherwise it could end up being a vibe effort.
An example is in the banking industry, where making a loan used to require deep analysis of a person’s credit worthiness. Now they use an algorithm (credit scores) which means someone with less experience can do it.
If law follows the same pattern, a job done by someone making $500/hour might be done by someone making $50/hour.
Even without that, I think it'll be extremely valuable to clients to allow them to answer simple questions without a lawyer, figure out the lay of the land so they can supervise their counsel, etc.
The outcome of a case should not depend on one's ability to recall facts or convince other people or point their index finger and shout OBJECTION
Law should generally be deterministic. One's CHA stat should have no bearing on justice.
There should still be human judges, but the middleman between the judge and petitioners could easily be removed, and are generally seen as leeches since forever.
Though, like how the USA opts to remain in the Stone Age with regard to tax filing because of lobbying by tax software companies, this faction of obsolete society will fight the hardest before they fall.
> API customers including Harvey and Legora will be able to build on Astra for Law, bringing this intelligence into their own products and workflows.
In other words: "no, no, we're not eating our children to prep for the IPO. Don't worry."
OpenAI didn't need to name Legora and Harvey in the second paragraph of the launch post.
They are pre-empting the obvious interpretation of Astra for Law: that moving this far up the legal stack puts them in direct competition with their biggest legal AI customers.
“Don't worry, they can build on us” is a pretty conspicuous message to include on launch day.
They have clearly thought about some pessimistic outcomes.
This is everything OpenAI have to say about privacy in this announcement. No guarantees. No promises. Just a pinky-swear promise.
Anyone trusting them–or a lawyer who relies on them–for legal work deserves what they get.
Very much a work in progress, only federal and state so far, no municipal codes yet, and no case law yet. Big hole, I know. Also working on making the search ranking work better.
Alternatively, if someone else knows an all-in-one option that exists, I wouldn't mind retiring those crawlers...
Then if you want to really get into it, The People should also be able to access trial court level, and at that point you have over 3000 distinct court systems with their own access systems, usually requiring logins and CAPTCHAs, and half of them not even having anything accessible online at all, and the other half only having recent stuff online and the rest rotting in a flooded basement.
Found that to be very interesting
[0]https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-c...
They are also really good at making stuff up as evidenced by the many, many, many examples you read in the news about actual lawyers using AI to write briefs that are full of errors and hallucinations.
In civil courts, you'd likely get more sympathy from a judge if you represented yourself and admitted your lack of understanding, rather than try to appear as someone you're not because you wrote some prompts and copied the output.
the cost of making a legal argument can collapse while the cost of reaching an enforceable, legitimate decision may go higher, which will gate the "justice" system even more.
If you got the judge, all the parties, and all the witnesses in a conference room together until the case was resolved, you could probably handle a lawsuit in a few months. But each judge has hundreds of cases pending before them, so that would never work. Instead, you get something like how a GPU works. You do some work on a case, submit the work to the court, then work on something else for a few months while you wait around to get the results back. Then you do some more work and submit it to the court, then go do something else for a few months while you wait to get the results back. A few months of actual work gets spread out over a few years that way.
https://www.ftrain.com/nanolaw
You dropped this /s
I don’t know in the USA but in France, if it’s deemed that you launched a lawsuit knowing very well it wouldn’t succeed, you are susceptible to get a 10k€ fine. Even jail in serious cases.
IME the American legal system is set-up to discourage litigation, though. A common tactic is to bury your opponent in the threat of heavy damages or jail-time to get them to settle for what you were originally after, which courts are perfectly happy to facilitate because it gets a potentially lengthy trial off their dockets. They'll punish (or be biased against) whichever party seems responsible for not accepting a "reasonable" settlement.
Algorithmic abuse of the system to extract payments already exists in the form of the debt collection industry.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-6-astra?omniscience...
Your comment made me wonder if there are any halfway-acceptable model benchmarks for law tasks? Specifically I’d love to know how the frontier models’ abilities compare between common law vs. civil law systems. My guess would be that an AI in a common law context should have a clearer idea of how a specific case is interpreted/accepted by (common law) practitioners, whereas trying to rely on AI in a civil law context, like Germany, can be daunting. In a few Germany-specific recent examples, the models feel like they present only (maybe too stubbornly?) the “civil law”-based laws. All while negating much of AI’s research benefits because civil statutes are portrayed as being absolutely accurate, binding, and their enforcement (and thereby the legal reality) being uniformly applied. Am I making this interpretation up? If so, how can I prove myself wrong?
I've talked to a lawyer about how they handle this. They do indeed double-check everything, since it'd be embarrassing (or worse) to send hallucinated statements to opposing council or to the court. They still find the assembly a huge time saver
But based on stories in the news on the subject, not everyone has this same level of diligence
Don't be too sure about that. [0]
0: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
> The top is a three-way tie: Muse Spark 1.3 Max, Claude Opus 5, and Claude Fable 5.1 all reach 55.29% all-pass accuracy, a clear ~6-point step ahead of the next model. [Astra for Law reached 54.0%]
> Under partial-credit scoring, Claude Opus 5 reaches 90.58% weighted pass rate but 55.29% under strict all-pass grading, where every rubric check must pass. The gap shows models often get most of an answer right but fail on one or two required elements. [Astra for law reached 90.0%]
https://www.vals.ai/benchmarks/legal_research
followed a month later by
"Anthropic's Claude inadvertently repeals the 19th amendment"
I have had some success using frontier models from the last 6ish months, but only when I can break up my work into discrete and verifiable tasks. For example, I had ~15k pages of discovery I needed to dig through for a summary judgment motion. Instead of just asking Claude to find the best evidence, I asked it first to run a clean, high quality OCR pass (it was almost entirely PDFs). Then I had it generate embeddings and write some reusable python scripts to make keyword and semantic searching easy for agents. While I was writing the brief, I would routinely ask my agent (Claude Code) to use both keyword and semantic searching to find the best evidence supporting whatever assertion I was trying to make. I trusted it because there were traces I could follow.
In other cases/situations, I’ve tried just giving a model access to all the docs and saying “write a brief arguing X,” but it’s always terrible at this. It writes briefs with lots of evocative jargon and rhetorical flourish, but a low signal-to-noise ratio.
Again, I’m sure others’ experiences differ based on workflow, legal area, etc.
You. Don't take legal advice from a word calculator.
That will be a decacorn product or more.
https://commonpaper.com/standards
I don't think you can. What I get from this article is that this is not a product they're going to sell to average consumers.
And yes, even contracts drafted for millions of $ have oversights and unlawful or unenforceable terms.
Then again, nobody will have money to buy anything at this rate, so in all liklihood, this is a total non-issue.
they need to pick a lane and optimize for it. coz at their size they can't serve the application layer (a.i startups who can fine-tune models will eat their lunch)
if they gonna do a consumer play - then go ham on that.
otherwise they're gonna get caught in the dreaded middle valley.
I suspect that half-assed announcements like this are a result of different people internally with conflicting incentives resulting in a split-the-baby solution.
You can afford to play silly buggers when you have dumpster trucks of money backing up to your door every day see also: Meta.
OpenAI doesn't have any of these things. They have products that they're paying for customers when the market they're in is rapidly converging on fighting for API reasoning as part of enterprise systems and fighting a race to the bottom for fickle consumer solutions that will be eaten by open source once they have to make money.
Maybe they had a brief window for dominance of information search (or maybe it was only ever going to last as long as Google releasing all their internal research) and maybe they had a brief moment of monopoly till Anthropic got going but theyre not in the same dominance position as Google.
Provisioning and contracts and data retention was just an extension to review of existing ones.
Nobody serious is going to risk sending sensible data to OpenAI/Anthropic, etc because "the benchmarks have shown +8% performance there and +2% there". Irrelevant.
It’s cleaner.
People confuse slop with "bad", but slop isn't bad per se, it only becomes bad when real effort was required.
This was already always the case. If anything, making this more accessible will reduce the barrier to entry for whether or not it's worth your time to take on a case. Instead of 50 lawyers spending 100s of hours on a case, you can have 1 or 2 lawyers + Astra working on it and if there's a case you can add more real lawyers.
1) Lawyers are not as naive as software engineers and will fight being replaces by new laws.
2) If they are replaced, OpenAI will take a cut commensurate with the amount in dispute (OAI, please credit me for the idea in the IPO brochure).
I am curious what level of trust established law firms treat LLMs with.
It's analogous to crypto. Started from some noble anti-authoritarian ideas and morphed into machine that removes any friction for capital - whoever has the most money will keep gaining the most.
Hence the crypto analogy - it was also supposed to "democratize", but the opposite happaned - it only further empowered the most powerful. Imagine legal case so purposefully complex that only those with access to best models have chances to participate and win the dispute.
Qwen 3.8 Max and Opus 4.8 score highest.
Is the play here a set of specialized harnesses using their best general model?
In the real world, lawyers submit detailed bills and their clients examine them. If you don’t, that’s on you.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-made-law-into-a-white-collar-swe...
As much as I hate to see it. They are now threatening industries like Engineers, Game Developers, Accountants, 3D modelers, 3D animators, Video Production, Audio Production, Therapist, Tax Auditors, Journalists, Authors, Artists, Mathematicians, Product managers, Every type of analyst and pretty much any other job that can be done behind a computer screen.
We have big problems for humanity.
Real estate, food, energy, mobility.
That will be done with money. Or violence. Either way, a scary future to people when labor doesn't provide any value. Elon promises abundance, but what can he do against greed?
The biggest problem is that we're conditioned by a paradigm that frames these as problems.
If the benefits were shared across humanity, that could bring us closer to utopia. My worry is that we’ll instead end up with a handful of even wealthier billionaires and millions of people out of work.
Effectively yes, in the current forms. Those professions will likely evolve, but the traditional forms (ie writing code by hand, writing law filings by hand etc) are all dead.
there will still be writing initial and incremental prompts by hands, until and if LLMs surpass humans in all intellectual functions.
this is more likely to democratize the legal system by reducing the cost of a good legal team
It seems much more probable to me that these LLMs will make good things worse than that they will make bad things better.
As it stands, it seems far more likely to result in a wonderful life for a few, and an absolute catastrophe for most.
Same argument for plumbers. Everyone always jokes about what a good time it is to be a plumber. But what happens when all the software engineers turn to plumbing? Suddenly it's not such a good time to be a plumber anymore.
They also openly tell you what they are afraid of btw: collective worker power. something that is massively lacking in our industry, although i feel like it would be one of the easiest industries to unionize in terms of # of workers.
Interesting interview I just watched about how powerful and dangerous these "wishes" or "prophecies" are especially in the hands of the ultra-wealthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7grHa1NR0
If you automate lawyers out of a job, you can absolutely automate lawmakers out of jobs next. (Not that this would be a bad thing? Maybe pervasive agents for everyone can be the gateway drug to a "this time it's different!" workable direct democracy)
frustrating that law firms have no liability for these mistakes
I welcome ai law