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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18925 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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Are you really trying to lawyer lawyers out of their lawyer jobs? I am reminded of my favorite ACX comment:

Wow- I once worked for a US company that was shut down by the police for exploiting the sweepstakes loophole.

The company founders included a couple of lawyers with decades of experience in the gambling industry. They had these long company-wide legal compliance meetings twice a week, where every aspect of the company, from IT to customer support, was optimized to be as consistent with the letter of sweepstakes law as possible. The company had been fighting legal battles over their business model for years, and had actually won a string of cases in several states. At one point, they switched over from regular sweepstakes to charity sweepstakes under the theory that the courts were slightly more friendly to the latter. They were all extremely confident that they could beat any legal challenge.

Then, one day, I arrived at work to find the police loading office equipment into vans. When I asked what was happening, they led me to the company lobby, where all of the employees who hadn't immediately turned their cars around upon seeing the cops were waiting to be individually interrogated in a confiscated accountant's office. The police left after a couple of days- taking with them my personal laptop, which I never got back- and what followed was a week of showing up for half-days of "work" to a gutted office building where executives gave impassioned speeches about how proud they were of the company we'd built, and about how we'd followed the letter of the law perfectly and would definitely get our accounts unfrozen and be back in business soon. Then, a couple of those executives were arrested and the company was dissolved.

Apparently, what had happened was a local newspaper had written a hitpiece about the company which called out the DA by name for allowing such a degenerate law-skirting gambling operation to take root under their nose- a story which got picked up by a bunch of other papers. So, the DA got a judge to interpret the regulations in an entirely new way that our lawyers hadn't anticipated, and pressured the police to make an example of the company. Turns the legal system isn't like a computer that you can hack with the right exploit- if someone with power feels that you're skirting their authority, they will find a legal avenue to regain that authority, loophole be damned.

Until AGI takes over the world, all power comes from people. Lawyers have a lot of power. It's not that they're smarter than everyone else (though they are), it's that they have a license to lie and conspire.

Well yes. I expect this is mostly bottlenecked on lawyers, and on reflection I mostly expect that it'd be a white label "AI boosted chat with lawyer" product that law firms could offer rather than "the AI lawyer company". Maybe combined with inbound lead generation in the form of a directory of firms that offer the service.

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