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Lazy Lawyer's Trust In ChatGPT Misplaced

Science fiction writers are well out ahead of the curve in many fields, including the law. For example, Greg Egan describes a law expert system (LEX) in The Moat (1991); its use is not without caveats:

"Why don't we just feed the bloody thing to LEX and ask for a summary?"

"And get disbarred at the next audit? No, thanks." The Law Society has strict rules on the use of pseudo-intelligent software - terrified of putting ninety percent of its members out of work. The irony is, they use state-of-the art software, programmed with all the forbidden knowledge, to scrutinize each practice's expert systems and make sure that they haven't been taught more than they're permitted to know."

"There must be twenty firms, at least, who've taught their systems tax law -"

Sure. And they have programmers on seven-figure salaries to cover their tracks."

It seems that these misgivings are well-taken. The path to quick and easy legal documents has some unforeseen twists and turns.

The lawsuit began like so many others: A man named Roberto Mata sued the airline Avianca, saying he was injured when a metal serving cart struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York.

When Avianca asked a Manhattan federal judge to toss out the case, Mr. Mata’s lawyers vehemently objected, submitting a 10-page brief that cited more than half a dozen relevant court decisions. There was Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and, of course, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, with its learned discussion of federal law and “the tolling effect of the automatic stay on a statute of limitations.”

There was just one hitch: No one — not the airline’s lawyers, not even the judge himself — could find the decisions or the quotations cited and summarized in the brief...

Mr. Schwartz, who has practiced law in New York for three decades, told Judge P. Kevin Castel that he had no intent to deceive the court or the airline. Mr. Schwartz said that he had never used ChatGPT, and “therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”

He had, he told Judge Castel, even asked the program to verify that the cases were real.

It had said yes.

(Via NYTimes.)

Will any part of our future mechanized justice system have mercy on this poor human lawyer duped by the AIs? Not the law clerk robot like the one in Frederik Pohl's The Midas Plague. And I doubt that the mechanical judge from Stanton A Coblentz' 1939 story The Lord of Tranerica would be sympathetic.


(Mechanical Judge from 'The Lord of Tranerica' [1939])

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