AI Law Firm Offering $2.7 Legal Letters Wins 'Landmark' Approval (ft.com)
- Reference: 0177353095
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/05/06/1833226/ai-law-firm-offering-27-legal-letters-wins-landmark-approval
- Source link: https://www.ft.com/content/e56cb23e-bc10-4235-997c-186df5bd963c
> Garfield AI, which was founded by a former London litigator and a quantum physicist, is an online tool that allows businesses and individuals such as tradespeople to chase debts owed to them at a substantially lower cost than the average lawyer's fees. Its AI assistant guides claimants through the small claims court process, including creating "polite chaser" letters for $2.67 and filing documents such as claim forms for $67, and can also produce arguments for claimants to use at trial.
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> AI models are increasingly encroaching on legally sensitive tasks in high-paying sectors such as law and finance, potentially undercutting fees in high-volume work. Garfield received approval from the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the legal regulator for England and Wales, in March, in a move the latter hailed as a "landmark moment" for the industry.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/e56cb23e-bc10-4235-997c-186df5bd963c
QUANTUM PHYSICIST (Score:2, Insightful)
> a former London litigator and a quantum physicist
WTF is a quantum anything? This shyte is used as a PR wall to raise capital for failing startups.
And this "former ... litigator" (failed lawyer) is now a "quantum" physicist?
Please let his published peer-reviewed works.
Re: (Score:1)
>> a former London litigator and a quantum physicist
> WTF is a quantum anything? This shyte is used as a PR wall to raise capital for failing startups.
> And this "former ... litigator" (failed lawyer) is now a "quantum" physicist?
> Please let his published peer-reviewed works.
It's two different people.
The CEO is the long-time litigator.
The CTO is the scientist (PhD in Quantum Physics).
[1]https://daniellong.co/ [daniellong.co]
[1] https://daniellong.co/
Re: (Score:2)
i would have gone with the schodinger founder
is both until not.
Fancy Form Letter? (Score:3)
It feels like this could be nothing much more than a new-fangled form letter. Boilerplate legal documents have been around for decades, where you only filled in the particulars like names, addresses, and amounts. A little better if it warns you that the amount you are asking for is too much or too little for the particular court.
Of course, adding "AI" to the description makes it nice and trendy, but there were firms that filled out generic forms and letters for fighting traffic and parking tickets for years as well, before "AI" got tacked on.
Re: (Score:2)
It's doing what inexperienced legal interns are doing today while the client is charged law-partner rates. It's going to be no worse than what some newly-hired kid does, but at far more reasonable rates. So I don't see a problem with it, it's far better value for money and a task really more suited to robolawyers in the first place.
Looking forward to the headlines about hallucinati (Score:1)
The won't be the first to annoy a judge with imaginary citations.
[1]https://apnews.com/article/art... [apnews.com]
[1] https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-fake-case-lawyers-d6ae9fa79d0542db9e1455397aef381c
Assuming the lawyers don't stop it (Score:2)
Then llms are going to make them basically irrelevant except for the kind that got OJ Simpson off.
They'll always be a need for a lawyer that can throw a prosecutor off their game but that's a tiny amount of cases. Most people simply can't afford those kind of lawyers.
The vast majority of lawyers basically look at police procedures and find where the cops did something dodgy or outright illegal and get the case thrown out over that. Otherwise they basically tell you to plea because the way our syst
Re: (Score:2)
AI in legal work won't get banned. As it gets better and AI agents can do things like pass the BAR exam, we'll even see it legitimized to hire a fully AI lawyer to defend yourself in court, or sue your neighbors.
AI courtroom drama (Score:2)
Way back in the mid 80s, I had an original IBM PC and a friend had a Mac. We decided to see what would happen if we pit them against each other in chess. (The Mac won likely due to the higher clock speed). I would totally love to watch a pair of AI's duke it out in an AI court (with both an AI judge and a human judge).
A dangerous game (Score:3)
This seems likely to backfire extremely quickly. AI lawyers are far more likely to be abused by debt collectors and bullying corporations than individuals trying to recover money they are to benefit individuals (or small businesses) that are just trying to get a fair shake.
Possibly (Score:3)
But you can also respond to a $1.70 legal notice with your own $1.70 legal notice. I think this benefit skews towards the individual, as large corporations and organizations will have attorneys on retainer to churn out these types of letters, so the nominal cost for them is pretty low. Hiring an attorney to write one letter is comparatively expensive for an individual.
Re: (Score:2)
"But you can also respond to a $1.70 legal notice with your own $1.70 legal notice. "
The problem is that it won't be "a" $1.70 legal notice. It'll be a thousand, or ten thousand. An individual can't respond in kind.
Re: (Score:3)
> This seems likely to backfire extremely quickly. AI lawyers are far more likely to be abused by debt collectors and bullying corporations than individuals trying to recover money they are to benefit individuals (or small businesses) that are just trying to get a fair shake. /blockquote
> Yeah, this could get dangerous because there are often laws that protect debtors from harassment and other things, and if the people using these AI tools aren't careful, they could end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit.
> Yes, de
Re:A dangerous game (Score:4, Insightful)
It's hard to argue with the idea that people pushing out low-effort nastygrams will also embrace bots if they prove either reliable enough or cheap enough to proofread; but I suspect that(at least with current likely suspects, it's possible that something less predictable will be unleashed) the effect won't be as dramatic just because of how much business process automation and separation of labor you can already manage, especially when you are just sending scary-looking letters to random little people rather than submitting stuff to a judge who may not appreciate your lack of effort.
The rules frown on purporting to be a lawyer when you are not; but they are substantially more permissive in terms of how thin you can spread your lawyer: even in respectable high end contexts it's quite normal for some, potentially much, of the writing to get farmed out to associates and paralegals unless the fancy partner's expertise is required; and in some sleazy boiler room operation there's not much stopping you from mostly using mail merge and the cheapest clerical temps you can find to turn whatever batches of questionably documented and dubiously collectable debt into letters, with the lawyers there to handle putting the templates together and appearing on the letterhead.
That said, I'd also be skeptical of how far this sort of service could go in redressing fights between significantly unequal parties: especially with things like the dodgy end of consumer collections the real killer isn't necessarily that they have a keen legal mind on the case and you don't(since this is often not true; and such situations are more likely to be disputes of fact rather than some sort of subtle argument); but that they, rather than you, are typically treated as the presumptively respectable party while you are treated as having the burden of disproving the allegation.