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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25585 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I’m in a very specialized area of law. While there is a lot of law, you’d be surprised daily how many fact patterns I face where there is no guidance (either judicial, administrative, or secondary) and things fall down at the edges (ie basically comes down to judgement).

Moreover, law changes all of the time (especially in this field). This seems to confuse LLMs sometimes (both in what the current law is and what the change in law means and doesn’t mean). Finally, a lot of the guidance doesn’t strictly apply in one area but can (taking into account a lot of factors) apply to totally different area without any indication.

Further, my role isn’t primarily telling what the answer is but figuring out what the facts are, what they can be, and what the best set of future facts are applied to an unclear legal framework whilst trying to predict future government policy.

We’ve tried using LLMs. They’ve all failed to this point.

I mean, yeah, if a legislator passes a big, comprehensive new package that revamps entire statutes then there's no readily applicable case law, then its anybody's game to figure out how to interpret it all, an experienced attorney might bring extra gravitas to their argument... I'm not sure they're more likely to get it right (where 'right' means "best complies with all existing precedent and avoids added complexity or contradictions," not "what is the best outcome for the client.")

(ie basically comes down to judgement).

But this is my point. If you encounter an edge case that hasn't been seen, but have a fully fleshed-out fact pattern and access to the relevant caselaw (identifying which is relevant being the critical skill) why would we expect a specialist attorney to beat an LLM? Its drawing from precisely the same well, and forging new law isn't magic, its using one's best judgment, balancing out various practical concerns, and trying to create a stableish equilibrium... among other things.

What really makes the human's judgment more on point (or, the dreaded word, "reasonable") than a properly prompted LLM's?

I've had the distinct pleasure of drilling down to finicky sections of convoluted statutes and arguing about their application where little precedent exists. I've also had my arguments win on appeal, and enter the corpus of existing caselaw.

ChatGPT was still able to give me insightful 'novel' arguments to make on this topic when I was prepping to argue a MSJ on this particular issue by pointing out other statutory interactions that bolster the central point. It clearly 'reasons' about the wording, the legislative intent, the principles of interpretation in a way that isn't random.

Also, have you heard of the new law review article that argues "Hallucinated Cases are Good Law." It argues that even though the AI is creating cases that don't exist out of whole cloth, they do so by correlating legal concepts and principles from across a larger corpus of knowledge and thus they're hallucinating what a legal opinion "should" be if it accounted for all precedent and applied legal principles to a given fact pattern.

I find this... somewhat compelling. I don't think I've encountered situations where the AI hallucinated caselaw or statutes that contradicted the actual law... but it sure did like to give me citations that were very favorable to my arguments, and phrased in ways that sounded similar to existing law. Like it can imagine what the court would say if it were to agree with my arguments and rule based on existing precedent.

I dunno. I think I'm about at the point where I might accept the LLM's opinion on 'complex' cases more readily than I would a randomly chosen county judge's opinion.

think I'm about at the point where I might accept the LLM's opinion on 'complex' cases more readily than I would a randomly chosen county judge's opinion.

You're not exactly setting a high bar for an LLM to overcome.

Dats Da Joke.

I've noticed that easily half of the County-level Judges I have worked in front of, especially those that have held their seat a long time without getting called up to Circuit level, are basically glorified clerks for all the legal reasoning they can do. They oversee an assembly line where parties are being shuffled along towards a particular outcome and the Judge just pulls the lever that rubber-stamps the outcome as 'legal.'

There's some selection effect, if you were making bank in private practice no way you'd accept a Judgeship with such little power. But yeah, letting County Judges use LLMs from the bench could only improve things.

Of course, if you ever ask me to identify which half of the Judges I'm talking about, I'll clam up because those are ALSO the ones most likely to be petty and make my job more miserable.

I've noticed that easily half of the County-level Judges I have worked in front of, especially those that have held their seat a long time without getting called up to Circuit level, are basically glorified clerks for all the legal reasoning they can do.

I had to google it since I'm not familiar with FL judicial structure--your county-level judges would be magistrates where I am, and they don't have to be lawyers here. Having them use LLMs for help would probably be a shocking level of improvement. Even the felony-level judges here (what FL appears to call the Circuit judges) who do have to be lawyers would generally benefit from the assistance.

You might be right. Hasn’t been my experience.

I hope you are wrong (if I’m right we both have jobs)

Hoping for the best (AI makes the practice of law more tolerable/less mentally tolling), preparing for the worst (forced to swap to a career that requires working with my hands).

Well, I’m a bit worried that if AI solves law, robotics will solve “working with…hands” when combined with AI.

Not wrong.

But there was a pretty convincing case against it put forth in here.

Quoth:

Human hands enjoy a massive, durable nanomachinery advantage

I'm taking a gamble that martial arts/self defense instructors will still be in demand because people will probably prefer to have an instructor that is human, and a human is probably still going to be best suited to demonstrate techniques and movements that another human is expected to learn, and will be a strictly superior training partner, too.

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