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Notes -
People have called me old-fashioned for this, but I still think that legal digests are the best way to conduct research since you can browse cases broadly by category and read thumbnail descriptions rather than have to dive into the case itself. Unfortunately I don't have a law library at work, so I have to make do with Lexis. Luckily I don't have to do research very often.
With LLMs, I think there's a general problem whereby people who aren't in a field and don't know what people in the field actually do all day confidently assert that some piece of technology will make them obsolete. Lexis or Westlaw could develop a perfect research tool that gave me all the relevant material on the first try every time, and it might save me a few hours per year. And even at that, a lot of legal argument involves a kind of inferential knowledge that you aren't going to find explicitly stated in caselaw. Just for fun, I constructed a simple scenario loosely based on an argument that took place last week:
In the real case there were additional factors at play that complicated the situation, but this distills a basic question. I won't reproduce the overlong answer here, but ChatGTP confidently stated that the action was almost certainly barred by the SoL and went on to list all of the factors and applied the facts to them, just as one would do in a law school exam. The only problem is that the answer is wrong, and it's not wrong in the sense that it's an obvious hallucination but in the sense that there's a lot more going on that a Chatbot, at least at this stage, isn't going to consider.
The PA courts ruled in 1993 that asbestosis suits required actual impairment. The Ohio courts were silent on the issue until after tort reform in 2004 barred suits with no impairment. To be clear, no court explicitly allowed suits without impairment, but they hadn't been barred, and plenty of defendants settled these suits. The upshot is that if he had no impairment in 1998 then he had no valid case in PA, and the SoL would begin running not from date of diagnosis but from date of actual impairment.
Or at least that's what I think is going to happen, because we haven't gotten a ruling yet. But my point is that the model seems to be straightforward: It recognizes it as a SoL question, pulls the relevant SoL rules, and applies the rules to the facts I gave it. What it didn't do was consider that there may be other law out there not directly related to the SoL that's relevant to whether a claim even exists, and, by extension, whether there are any relevant facts that weren't mentioned that would go into the analysis. Even if the LLM know about the whole impairment issue, it wouldn't be able to give an answer without knowing whether the 1998 complaint alleged any impairment. And the analysis doesn't even stop there, because then we get to the issue of whether an averment in a complaint counts as a judicial admission.
To illustrate the point further, I asked the LLM whether a defendant who didn't settle the 1998 suit would be able to make an argument that the claim was barred by res judicata. It didn't do quite as bad here; rather than being incorrect, the answer was merely misleading. It said yes, provided that the dismissal was on the merits, etc. and listed the res judicata stuff. The problem for the average person is that they're going to see the yes and not worry too much about anything else, because in the actual case the dismissal was administrative. A sufficiently eagle-eyed LLM would be hip to the reality that administrative dismissals aren't exactly rare.
The bigger problem is that a sufficiently eagle-eyed LLM doesn't exist. Maybe it can exist, but it would still be useless. In the real case that this is based on, the Plaintiff was deposed for three days. There were three days worth of questions, the answers of which were all potentially relevant, and even that didn't cover all of the information needed to accurately evaluate this argument.
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