u/CoachAtlus

My thoughts on Claude for Legal. It's nothing new. But it certainly has been a headline grabber and will likely encourage even more lawyers to test agentic workflows, a paradigm shift from which there is no going back.

This piece captures a few observations on the landscape and highlights some of the challenges beyond the honeymoon phase.

A few of the ones I get into: compounding slop (plausible output built on a source that quietly drifted out from under you), comprehension debt, and over-engineering.

The part I'm most interested in is what happens at the team level. Once everyone's building their own workflows, you have to work out whose outputs become whose inputs, who owns validation, and who notices when a model update quietly broke last quarter's contract-review skill. That coordination problem feels like a brand new management problem for lawyers, a group that has not always been known for excellent management...

In any event, it definitely feels like more and more lawyers are actually rolling up their sleeves and building, and it's pretty impressive.

https://open.substack.com/pub/novehiclesinthepark/p/on-claude-for-legal-lawyers-taking

California's proposed comment to the ethics rule on "competence" would require lawyers to verify every piece of AI output used in connection with representing a client. (This is in addition to a proposed comment revision regarding the duty of candor to tribunals, making clear that you should check your work before submitting it to a court, duh.)

This has implications obviously for tech generally -- potential lawyers as bottlenecks in various workflows, worse than we are already. I offer my thoughts in the link below, including a link to the comment I submitted to the Bar Committee. Comments are still open through May 4 (link for submissions also included in the article).

Post: Every F***ing Line

I was at a law clerk reunion recently for the federal appellate judge I clerked for. A lot of litigators in the group, some with 30+ years of experience. Over a killer Old Fashioned and some classic Tex-Mex, folks kept peppering me about why AI is rumored to be a game-changing intellect, yet still makes shit up. Wrote a piece on why the hallucination problem is structurally hard, what the industry is building to fix it, and where I think the real value is going to get made.

(As I was about to publish this piece, my first mentor from BigLaw days sent me an article about Sullivan & Cromwell joining the AI dunce cap club... amazing this continues to happen.)

https://novehiclesinthepark.substack.com/p/the-splotch-problem