Slashdot Mirror
20 Top Lawyers Were Beaten By Legal AI (hackernoon.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report:In a landmark study, 20 top US corporate lawyers with decades of experience in corporate law and contract review were pitted against an AI. Their task was to spot issues in five Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), which are a contractual basis for most business deals. The study, carried out with leading legal academics and experts, saw the LawGeex AI achieve an average 94% accuracy rate, higher than the lawyers who achieved an average rate of 85%. It took the lawyers an average of 92 minutes to complete the NDA issue spotting, compared to 26 seconds for the LawGeex AI. The longest time taken by a lawyer to complete the test was 156 minutes, and the shortest time was 51 minutes.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
When did AI's become to legal to beat the crap out of attorneys?
What is an "issue" with an NDA? What is the "right" NDA. You can't make objective measurements about this. The lawyers actually think and reason, the bot does what it is programmed to. Obviously the bot is better at comparing the NDA to a "correct" NDA. But the bot can't think about whether that NDA suits the context in which it is used.
As a programmer, I have this to say about AI: Bullshit, don't invest, it can not replace humans for non-repetitive tasks that require reasoned judement.
Success at MMA or any other contact sport largely depends on the robot built around the computer. Does the chess boxing match in this joke take place before or after Boston Dynamics and its line of doglike robots?
The document used for testing was not created by an AI, was it?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What kinds of "issues" are we talking about here. This seems highly subjective since one side's "issue" could be the other side's deal breaker.
The longest time taken by a lawyer to complete the test was 156 minutes, and the shortest time was 51 minutes.
Was time used as a measurement, i.e. were the lawyers told to work as fast as they could? Cause that would likely affect the diligence put into the review.
We already know that computers are faster at processing data. We also know that stressing the crap out of people tend to make them work faster but with less precision. Adding such an element to the human input would bias the result while providing no additional information of value.
Ya...AI has become Market Speak these days.
Anything that can do something faster than a person is, "AI".
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
20 top US corporate lawyers with decades of experience in corporate law and contract review were pitted against an AI.
What the article isnt saying is that these lawyers were pitted against a combat AI in a parking lot in the back of a derelict convenience store in the dark hours of the morning. The AI successfully dismembered virtually all of them, despite their decades of experience in corporate law.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Are these really AIs? Or are they just expert systems trained to do a job? Do they sport new issues? or are they just really good at spotting the issues they've been trained to spot? I argue that all this "artificial intelligence" craze we've got going on right now has nothing to do with intelligence. It's just training a computer program to do one thing and to do it very well. Does anyone consider a calculator an AI? Why not, calculators are far more accurate than humans at math and do not make mistakes.
First they came for the lawyers, but I did nothing, for I am not a lawyer ...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
by the hour?
Seems like most court cases involving contracts and interpretation of the law are mostly about unpacking the Bullshit written into the contract or law. It seems absurd that one of the functions of the court is to divine the intentions of the law's author.
A law can be complex in that there are many moving parts that can interact in different manners, but the parts themselves and the manner in which they can interact should be clearly defined and not subject to interpretation.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Bundy
re-write all the lawyer jokes...
It took the lawyers an average of 92 minutes to complete the NDA issue spotting, compared to 26 seconds for the LawGeex AI.
I imagine sexbots will achieve similar results.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
A clever lawyer might have added some 'special' text to the NDA https://xkcd.com/327/
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
The human lawyers outlawed AI lawyers. It took the human lawyers and average of 2.3 seconds to get the law passed. The AI lawyer objected within 1.4 nanoseconds. It was overruled by the human judge and the AI lawyer was summarily executed/unplugged.
Lawyers are the biggest roadblocks on the way of justice.
IOW we don't have to wait for long now before a couple of millions lawyers are sacked.
A good beginning.
I sincerely hope that the same AI will write the new laws in the future instead of the lobbyists.
never could beat Andre Panza Kickboxing.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I hypothesize that the AI is only good at spotting current and historic types of loopholes.
Here's my proposed test. A theoretical bad-actor NDA creator gets services of both a lawyer and the AI to review their document. They craft different ways to build in issues, with several cycles of submitting to both for feedback and modifications. (Since both of these would be available to someone trying t make a bad one.)
Final document is reviewed and scored.
My guess is that the human lawyers will be more adept at finding innovative issues in the NDA. But who knows until we test it.
It might be that the best path is a first pass by an AI to catch issues, then a lawyer-pass that can be significantly quicker since it doesn't have to look for the same issues the AI would.
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
that the lawyers jobs are at stake. I mean that. These are people who make a living manipulating our legal system. If they are made obsolete by AI they are not going to go quietly into that good night. They're going to look for targets to sue for quick cash.
The mega corps figured that out years ago. They had Congress pass a law that made Arbitration agreements legally binding and had the Supreme Court stacked with pro corporatists who upheld it (even though it's a pretty obvious violation of due process and centuries of legal precedent that says you can't sign away constitutional rights.)
What that means is lawyers can't sue mega corps (or even a mid sized corp with decent arbitration agreements). Again, they're not going to shrug their shoulders, sell their BMW for a 4 year old Yaris and go work and 7-11. They're gonna come after you and me. We've already seen this with stuff like Penda law suing regular joes. You'll see more and more of that and by people who aren't as incompetent as to get caught.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
In the linked article, there is a button to get the full study, but downloading the study requires giving one's name, email, phone, company, and "contracts reviewed per month". Not exactly paywalled, but not exactly free.
The title of the Slashdot story says, "20 Top Lawyers Were Beaten By Legal AI", which is not true. The top AI and top human scores were identical at 94%. Furthermore, although the lowest human score was 67%, the average was 85%, indicating that the distribution is skewed toward higher human scores. There is a distribution of human scores, but just a single AI sample point, so it's not clear what the AI distribution would be.
There is also a comparison of AI vs. human time. Of course, that's a misleading comparison, similar to the misleading Jeopardy comparison from a few years back. Computers will always beat humans at text parsing and button pressing. That was true decades before AI.
The other aspect that I don't see in the article summary is whether the seeded risks were all in the AI training set or if any were deliberately left out of the training set. I'd expect the AI to do extremely well in detecting risks similar to the training set. However, I'd expect the humans to do better in risks that deviated from the training set.
They should put this AI on a website called something like "EULA-Buddy", where you can paste those 10-foot-long EULAs that come with every modern device or service. Then it could concisely tell you how much the EULA sucks. Maybe that would help reign in uncontrolled expansion of these ridiculous "contracts".
Have the AI run through thousands of scenarios finding loopholes for crimes.... $$$
[($)]
Decided to check on who these "Top" 20 lawyers were. First on list from article named "Zakir Mir". Went to linkedin, confirmed it was him via his work for Allegiance International. The man graduated law school 3 years ago (2015). I'm sorry but 3 years of experience is not a "Top" lawyer.
Do they also do your proofreading?
Lawyers are the biggest roadblocks on the way of justice.
Can you define "justice" for us?
So the quickest lawyer billed for 1 hour, and the slowest for 3. IANAL but I review all NDAs and other contracts for my company, and a typical NDA takes me 10-15 minutes, but then I don't get paid more for taking longer. Despite my lack of formal legal training, my company hasn't been f**ked over by a bad NDA in the 20+ years I've been doing it. Any lawyer billing 3 hours to review an NDA is ripping off their client.
Lawyers are the biggest roadblocks on the way of justice.
Can you define "justice" for us?
Probably not without spending way more time on it than I care to.
However, I can say that when the outcome of a legal process depends largely on the amount of money one is able to spend spend on their legal team, it is definitely NOT justice.
Lawyers are the biggest roadblocks on the way of justice.
Can you define "justice" for us?
Probably not without spending way more time on it than I care to.
However, I can say that when the outcome of a legal process depends largely on the amount of money one is able to spend spend on their legal team, it is definitely NOT justice.
Point taken. It could be one of those "bad system but better than anything else we can think of".
Of course you take three hours to look at an NDA ... if you're billing by the hour.
No matter what, I bet the human attorneys were *much* better at double billing their time than the AI. Come on, AI researchers, gotta work on the hard stuff as well!
Tools like this should make lawyers less expensive and available to more people as they won't have to spend their time examining documents when a computer can do that. (Actually the junior lawyers are for that and for researching now.) Let the lawyers spend time with clients, in talks with the other sides lawyers, or in court. Speeding up the discovery process should get cases to trial sooner too.
The lawyers that have to worry are the ones that are really good at researching. Those that are good with clients and in the courtroom will benefit from the oncoming computer tools.
I noticed you are writing an NDA agreement. Can I make a few suggestions?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
It is better than just sneaking something small past an Asemi-I. Sneak something big past. Something that no human would ever let through. Like the surety being the first born child. Or possibly something more enforceable.
This happens to simplistic AIs that mark English essays. Well written gibberish can get high marks. The sad thing is that the AIs generally do a better job than human markers, which is probably more a statement about the humans doing the marking than the AI.