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>>"An attorney who represents himself in court has a fool for a client."

I'm in a years-long lawsuit in my state's small claims sessions court (as plaintiff, jurisdictional $25k limit). It's petty and essentially just two old men yelling at clouds ["on principle"]. Nobody is in a hurry, and the timeline has roughly followed ChatGPT's rollout (albeit completely unrelated) – the tech just keeps jaw-dropping.

What started as a years-long disagreement, eventually became a small claims lawsuit pro se AI, counterclaims/insanity/&all... and now we both have attorneys representing our interests ($$$$$).

I still use a local (offline) LLM to field my rudimentary legalese into better questions for my human attorney (which saves a litle $$). Together we three have squashed all counterclaims, including a counter-lawsuit (that probably I could have managed with AI, alone, but was much more natural/comfortable not representing myself). Very grateful for both my attorney and accountant (as a blue-collar electrician).

My hope going forward judicially is that some sort of amalgamated lawAI platform can better increase access for laypeople to our already-overwhelmed judgeships, like SCOTUS Roberts wrote about in his end of 2023 Judicial Review. There needs to be attorney-client privileges extended to LLMs, definitely achievable offline (until inevitable IT fail/hack).

 help



NYS is busy trying to cozy up to those that own the state and make it illegal for AI services to give legal opinions to non lawyers.

I specifically chose my current human lawyer because he is a sciFi geek (we've now both read the same trilogy, rife with AI/bots/betrayal) and was receptive to me using offline LLMs to better-understand myself and my case.

It is wise though that courts somehow prevent lawyers from entirely-relying-upon the output of chatbots.




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