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Notes -
I'm not a lawyer and I have little understanding of what they actually spend most of their time doing, but I did serve on the jury for a criminal trial one time.
One of the defendant's attorneys was a smokin' hot young blonde. Plausibly, she biased some of the jurors at least a little bit in favor of her client, simply through her presence. Someone who rolls up with nothing but a laptop and ChatGPT is going to be at a relative disadvantage, if your goal is to persuade other humans. Even if you can generate a convincing deepfake, that's always going to lose out to the real thing who's actually in the room with you.
I'm aware that many lawyers will go their whole careers without ever setting foot in a courtroom, and not all lawyers can be blessed with the advantages of being young, attractive, and female. But this is just one example of how there can be factors in a job that can't be reduced to raw text input-output.
There's also the issue of liability. Perhaps this isn't quite as important for law as it is for medicine, since law is forced to be much more tolerant of risk and failure than medicine is, but I think this will still be an issue. If I ask ChatGPT to write the contract for my multi-billion dollar merger and the contract has a major loophole or error in it, who do I blame? OpenAI? Will OpenAI just tell me "sorry, all sales are final, use at your own risk"? I'm not sure if that's going to fly - people will still be reviewing the contracts if only because there needs to be someone to blame if things go wrong.
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