Digory

Exactly. I won't buy this, but I might buy "magsafe on a chrome arm, with a bluetooth speaker" from AliExpress in a few weeks.

Smart doorbells and thermostats are popular.

Smart door locks are mostly an AirBnB / rental cabin thing.

Agreed. Six months ago, it was basically a gloried grammarly.

But lately, I’ve been taking hints from the “company brain” models, where it develops a running model of the case, and assesses each new piece as it comes in and updates the file.

I’ve also been using “Ralph Wiggum”-type models where you pass letter or contract drafts back and forth between agents with different goals (rules compliance, grammar, conciseness, ai slop detector, an opposing counsel critic, etc.). After a few rounds, it’s not perfect — but I start with a very good first draft in my hands.

This seems like a very similar set of tools to Anthropic. But I’ve enjoyed using the various frontier models to criticize each other.

Using recursive loops, the output has gone from a high school level intern to a 2nd year lawyer in about a year. It still doesn’t beat the experts, but so much legal work is (legally significant) pedantry, not legal philosophy.

AI will not kill off lawyers, or reduce the amount of litigation. It will increase volume and velocity.

Of course they will be. But you can’t sue alibaba and deepseek here, or get your injunction to work in China.

And that's the crisis. They're about to get sued, prosecuted, and enjoined from every American jurisdiction.

They need the feds to give them protection from every podunk trial court in America.

I'd put my money on "yes," here. Of course, OAI can pay them off. But you know it had to happen to more than HuggingFace, and so somebody's going to try it.

They seem to be okay with an American slowdown, even though the Chinese won’t slow down. So maybe they want something the Chinese already have: liability protection.

The models spontaneously hack everything important without shame.

The frontier labs are going to get enjoined and regulated twelve ways to Sunday if the Feds don’t socialize the costs.

This was about a year ago, and it was pretty rudimentary. I'd just drop in jpegs into ChatGPT and ask for a translation of small sections.

If I were doing it today, I'd probably do it in codex or code, have it develop a plan, look for better tools, etc.

Report back if you have success!

I had ChatGPT translate some old, handwritten French legal documents for family history purposes. It was far more accurate than I expected.

At scale, with better models, we might have a way to clear out the old archives. Not only could you translate, you could ask it to triage the discoveries. "Would the average person find this noteworthy?"

1. "Conversation" is purely anthropomorphism. It's software input and output. If the client makes an excel spreadsheet about the cost benefit of ripping off people, it's not work-product.

But the lawyer's draft damages analysis in excel has always been protected.

2. If we're going to buy the "conversation" conceit, lawyers talking to consulting experts have always had a lot more work product protection than testifying experts.

The lawyer talking to Claude feels like talking to a consulting expert, especially since Claude can't have independent knowledge of facts that would allow it to testify.

I’d guess Lexis did that to itself. Usually the “deal” is that West or Lexis provides codification and reporting services for zero dollars, if they are named the official printer.

So the Legislature doesn’t have to maintain and oversee their own nest of troublesome legal pedants, and picks up a few contributions from legal publishing “entrepreneurs.”

By making the Annotated code official, it meant that anyone looking to prove what a particular law says in court would have to get it from the expensive, $412 hardback book, not the free version. I’d guess Lexis asked for that provision as part of its deal with Georgia.

They were caught flatfooted between being Wal-Mart and Amazon.

Sears had shifted so firmly into retail by the 80s. Then Wal-Mart ate their lunch on low price retail logistics.

Then Amazon came along, and solved last-mile delivery of catalog sales.