Reply to post: Re: Henry VI, Part 2!

Re: Henry VI, Part 2!

> Some in the legal world fear the real reason for the project has more to do with cutting costs

And that alone would be an excellent reason. Anything that stops legal firms charging the rates of their senior lawyers (£200/hour recently in the UK, for a straightforward probate) and then having all the work done by an office junior, would be welcome.

I'm the IT manager for a law firm, and that is a straw man argument. It is not currently possible to do that as redress can be gained through the very, very widely used part 47 procedure.

https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/civil/rules/part-47-procedure-for-detailed-assessment

If you trouble yourself to look, you'll find many, many complaints from Solicitors pointing out that the court is deciding that they won't get paid for charging for an office junior (at office junior rates) doing particular bits of work such as sorting and indexing 800 page court bundles. Now, if they won't allow that as chargeable then how do you think you can get £200 per hour for work that's not being done?

The substantial majority of cases are dealt with by fixed fee agreements. You might find somebody particularly rich who has somebody on retainer who they then pay a couple of hundred an hour, but I don't think you'll find many people doing that.

If we can get web-present AIs to handle all the basic stuff that makes up the majority of a lawyer's workload that would be fantastic. If that could interface directly to another AI handling the bulk of litigation, that would be even better.

Um, that was done about two decades ago with case management systems? The main time drain these days in law is that about a third of people in the population are utterly incapable of reading comprehension no matter how simple you make things and then want to speak to a human. Humans, especially highly trained humans are a very expensive cost. You want to pay for that? Fine. But do you really think I want my expensively trained solicitors talking to people on the phone instead of actually doing the legal work, especially when most of the work is done at a fixed fee?!

The only problem then would be how to get the system to work in such a way that those AIs would take 6 months to finish a simple job, when it only actually took a few seconds of compute time?

Ha. If you think you can deal with any legal problems with just CPU time then i've got news for you. If we could have done so, don't you think we would have done?

If we can get web-present AIs to handle all the basic stuff that makes up the majority of a lawyer's workload that would be fantastic.

There's already transactional legal work (like will writing) that is nothing more than a dumb algorithm in computing terms, with little evidence that anybody has successfully displaced meatsack will-writers with machines. Although the deregulation of will writing in 2011 could allow for automation, what actually happened was an increase in people using a qualified solicitor to write their wills rather than will writing services, so it seems Joe Public still seeks the comfort of an expensive legal professional.

<Citation needed>

If you can reduce will writing to a dumb algorithm, then please be my guest. I've been trying for a decade in hope of making actually writing the will profitable, and i've failed comprehensively because besides of 30 year olds who have just bought their first property, have no kids and both want simple mirror wills that say basically "If I die then everything goes to my partner, and if they've died then to my parents, and if they've died then to charity" then wills are fiendishly complicated masses of legally complicated ANDIF statements that not only have to state what people want to do, but also have to work around case law that would prevent their expressed wishes from being thwarted in court.

For instance, the grandparents who haven't s been blocked from seeing their great grandchildren by their grandchilren have decided that since the grandkids are effectively disowning them they would rather leave the money to somebody else than their grandkids. Grandkids challenge the money not being left to them in court, to which point the case law gets a bit more complicated. And i'd count that as a simple, predictable will.

You wouldn't know because you'll never see any large selection of wills, but take it from me you can automate about 20% of wills. The remaining 80% are so byzantine that an AI would probably decide that it's easier to do a skynet than deal with it.

And by the by, we do wills at a fixed fee. We do them (IIRC) for a fixed fee of £110 for a single will. We don't make a profit on this. The reason for this is that it's a loss leader. We offer to store the will for the client in secure storage, and a few of those will then turn out to be probate cases that some of the grandkids do decide to challenge in court and then we make a few quid from the litigation.

Companies that can do wills but cannot do the litigation or other services had to charge a lot, lot more for getting a will than we have ever charged precisely because they had to earn their living doing nothing else. For us, it's a loss leader and we aren't trying much to make money from it.