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PutinsRustedPistol t1_j5oeik8 wrote

Reply to comment by joethomp in First AI-powered "robot" lawyer will represent defendant in court next month by mycatisanorange

They won’t have to.

Until that robot is able to pass the bar exam they aren’t going to be able to represent anyone. Traffic citations are a summary offense. The courts you go to if you want to fight a citation aren’t courts of record (at least in the states I’ve lived in so far.) Rules of evidence and procedure are incredibly relaxed.

Traffic courts share that in common with small claims courts.

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Texasraised420 t1_j5og4wh wrote

Passing the bar exam is probably not an issue of AI or won’t be for long.

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grumblyoldman t1_j5okkbj wrote

OK, but most defendants do have the option of representing themselves, right? I know, it's an abysmally foolish thing to do, but it is allowed, right? Even for the cases with serious charges involved.

And most defendants who choose to represent themselves probably haven't passed the bar exam. (If they had, they'd likely know what a stupid idea it is.)

So what's the difference between having "an AI lawyer represent you", and choosing to represent yourself while checking a fancy legal AI app on your phone? Aside from the fact that most courts ban phones and internet-connected devices in the courtroom as a matter of privacy, I mean.

Until such time as AI is officially recognized as people (which is a whole other can of worms) this fancy legal AI is just an app on my phone and I'm representing myself. If we assume the general limitation of using one's phone is lifted, why should my app need to pass the bar?

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joethomp t1_j5oxu9c wrote

Corporations can have 'person' status.

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r2bl3nd t1_j5ozvck wrote

It already passed the bar exam. But that just goes to show how woefully inadequate the bar exam is for actually determining real world ability.

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0b0011 t1_j5prq5v wrote

I've never taken or looked into the bar exam but shouldn't it be just like testing knowledge of the laws and how they'd apply?

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r2bl3nd t1_j5psjrb wrote

Yeah but knowledge of laws and how they apply is only a very small fraction of the actual job of being an attorney. It's a test to make sure that you understand the legal framework but it says nothing about your actual ability to be a good lawyer. I mean, there's already plenty of well-known cases of totally incompetent lawyers being out there who have passed the bar exam technically. So I guess people probably never considered it to be a test of actual job aptitude, but more of just a basic knowledge of law and the legal framework. But I don't really know anything about law so this is just speculation really

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fvb955cd t1_j5rt58c wrote

A big issue with it is that it is really only relevant to a segment of lawyers - state law generalists. The sort of lawyer who you go to to get a will, sue for a slip and fall, set up your llc, and represent you for your dui.

That is one of the larger groupings of lawyers, but its one of a ton of different groupings. And now more than ever, most lawyers specialize. The bar does nothing for lawyers in the transactional field (think drafting contracts and other business documents), and nothing for those in the regulatory world (when government agencies say you or your company needs to do something and you won't go to jail for refusing or breaking their rules but you'll pay money). The bar is focused on litigation the third major discipline, but also again focuses on specific state law, not federal law issues, or any of the many subjects not tested. In effect, you could take someone who spends their whole life as a professional contract negotiator and writer, someone at the absolute top of their profession, put them through law school, and whether they could continue to do their job as a lawyer, would be based on shit like their knowledge of divorce laws and criminal law court procedure. I'm in an office of 30, in a practice area of probably a few thousand nationwide, and what we do every day isn't tested anywhere. What value does it provide us?

Theres also the issue that you don't practice like you take the bar. Bar prep is a 2 month intensive, full time study process where you memorize as much as you can about a bunch of subjects, and then write about them and take a multiple choice test about all 15+ subjects.

In reality, the only time that I have had to know something in advance, without time to do prep research, was in a natural disaster with lives on the line. And it wasn't a bar exam subject, which are all pretty slow moving and routine subjects that wouldn't save or cost lives in a disaster.

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