District5524

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Mar 25

https://homoki.net/ https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=azMmMJsAAAAJ&hl=en

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Comment · 16 hours ago

In EU continental law countries, while lawyers are often not seen as officers of the court (that's a common law thing), they are still seen as cog ("participants") in the justice system, so a kind of elevated cooperation requirement is expected from lawyers compared to laypeople. And any such attempt like this with these Brazilian guys would probably result in being disbarred or something very close to it. And that should be expected and normal - you should not have any special rights in the justice system as being a lawyer if you're trying to abuse that and not play by those rules. The measures are markedly different between countries. Like, in England, if your client would be lying to the court (like under oath) and you, as a lawyer, knows about that, they expect you to decline to represent the client. And if you're not, you'll be in breach of the Code of Conduct and will face disciplinary measures. See 1.4 of https://www.sra.org.uk/solicitors/standards-regulations/code... This means being an officer of the court. But that's not the case in Hungary. In a criminal case, the lawyer has to represent whatever the client tells the lawyer to do so, even if that's doubtful: "8.12. In the performance of their duties, a defense attorney must not take a position that contradicts their client’s account of the facts. Even where the client denies the allegations, the attorney must not engage in any conduct that might create the impression that they harbor doubts regarding the absence of their client’s criminal liability, or that might suggest the defendant’s guilt." So, what it means to be a lawyer is quite different from country to country, but this kind of conduct made by the guys in this case goes against granting lawyers any special rights in any jurisdiction, so should normally not be allowed.

Comment · 4 days ago

Recent news from China about how better AI capabilities changed what Chinese specialists can earn with microdramas are not confirming this point. Some historical analogies to reassure people things will turn out nice in the end are nice but are not very convincing if you have so many more recent counterexamples with the gig economy and the huge inflation that was not a problem in the early 20th century.

The economy now is very different, no gold or silver standard, less isolation and more globalised product chains and processes, and 7-times as many people.

There is a good chance that a large enough number of people will suffer from this transformation, and they will have to fight with whatever they have, because if they don't, they will risk being left on the roadside and not getting any raise.

People having some direction over how jobs are automated should keep that in mind, otherwise it will be too late to convince the masses of people fearing automation that it is their fault not seeing the positive angles of automation.

Comment · 17 days ago

It's not "illegaly spy", it' just spy. National security laws make sure that these requests are all legal - from that particular country's point of view who is forcing the provider to supply the info... and illegal from all the other country's point of view. The root of this problem is that nation states have the final say in what they consider legal. But that difficulty is by design and is very difficult to fix.

Comment · 1 month ago

That's Latham & Watkins, but I haven't heard of any others. I'm not convinced that for anyone smaller than them it is worth spending on HW. For adversarial works, you will always need the latest frontier model and those things are not available for most of the firms even for licensing, and it's much cheaper to use Amazon Bedrock or similar (which is already available). It's just not economical with the current trends. You won't be breaking any privilege even if the law firm is using a public cloud service. Maybe the law firm will have to use geofenced datacenters etc. based on deontology rules or national requirements... But in many jurisdictions, you have to use a law firm to keep LPP, that's the point.

Comment · 1 month ago

Hi, As for benchmarks for law tasks: I also have a concern regarding how the more popular benchmarks (like the tasks in Harvey Legal Agent Benchmark) can accurately reflect actual work done by lawyers. Not only in civil law systems, but also in non-BigLaw type of work areas. Most of the law tasks should inherently reflect the legal system they are based on. It is an oversimplification that lawyers in one country tend to do the same legal work as lawyers in another, that's a form of dishonest framing from LLM providers working in this area (it is that important for them to be able to scale and disregard traditional fragmentation of the legal services).

The legal systems of common law countries are quite similar in both how they do legal training and in many areas that are important for business. Like in contract law or tort. That means not only similar concepts and foundations (things first taught to law students), but also a similar approach to what is seen as a legal problem, and what kind of answers people expect from a lawyer. Also, what they understand under "legal research" - what do you actually research and what is expected from a qualified lawyer to know by heart, how are you expected to find the legal default in a detailed question, how certain that default is, what is up to professional judgment. But even the differences within common law systems is huge in other areas that go beyond these basics. Like those affected by statutes, codes (like CFR or NYCRR) or even local regulations etc. The popular legal benchmarks do not dare going into these more detailed legal work directions. And these laws change frequently, and they are very different from one jurisdiction to another, even within the US, let alone in other countries building on English legal traditions. (Nobody I know of is building a benchmark that affects these areas of law.) And the diversity is even bigger within legal systems lumped together as "civil law systems". Even those based on Roman law, or on German jurisprudence in the 19th century... There is not much common in how French and German students study law, even if both are members of the EU and many areas of law are harmonised or subject to the same legal acts of the EU and the same EU Court of Justice.

If your LLM has access to up to date legal databases of those countries, commentaries etc., the answers are still surprisingly useful in research. That said, no professional should rely on those LLMs that merely use public legal databases, scraping latest laws and cases via self-operated MCP servers.

I think the main difference is how lawyers from a civil law system use the LLMs compared to someone from a common law system - and that is based on the different training they receive as law students, how they see "law" etc. Maybe there is no such a thing as absolute accuracy in the civil statutes either, but at least civil law lawyers have a stronger notion of "law is knowable". There is a higher likelihood of having one "correct" answer, even when talking about more lifelike, detailed questions. (I'm qualified in both a civil and a common law system but not specifically in German law.)

Comment · 2 months ago

There are granular controls also in SK, but the messages themselves are not granular. The grades seem to be somewhat the same as in the US, so this might be set either at the GSM standard level or the device (Silent, Extreme, Sever, issing person, Public safety, test), but the senders do not care or have no control... A translation of my last EXTREME level warning from SK (before switching everything off as most citizens do): "A tropical night advisory is currently in effect. Please take precautions for safety, such as lowering indoor temperatures, staying well-hydrated before going to sleep, and calling the elderly to check on their well being." [Daejeon Metropolitan City] It was hot during the day (33C), but not THAT hot...

Comment · 2 months ago

I'm not sure I understand what you are referring to here. The lack of a jury system, or no trial procedures? Both common law and 'civil law' has quite similar forensic expert and arbitration systems. One thing I can think of as a difference is that in civil law notary systems (and civil cases), you may request an out-of-court preliminary evidence taking. But you can have something similar in pre-trial discovery/disclosure in common law, at least in the UK (where you don't have jury system at all in civil cases).

Comment · 2 months ago

This is a very simplistic approach in itself that is self contradictory. You can't just lump together all legal proceedings of "largest civil law countries" together and compare that to common law countries in general. Statistics will be very different based on exact type of proceedings, the type of cases you try to compare ... if you can find any reliable statistics at all that compares apples to apples as they say. Take a look at the best the EU has (covering both civil law and common law countries) at https://www.coe.int/en/web/cepej for 2022 data. Italy is indeed an outlier in almost all legal areas, but it's just not in any ways similar to Germany... And I also couldn't point to any clear cliffs between common law and continental law countries. The US works very differently with its own 50 states. They have their own statistics at https://www.ncsctableauserver.org/t/Research/views/TrialDash.... But it's very difficult to do any meaningful comparison with the CEPEJ (Council of Europe) data above. It's very judgmental even to compare seemingly simple things, such as what does actually a "criminal law case" means in one jurisdiction and if that is roughly the same in another. The NCS and CEPEJ are probably well equipped to make decisions on convering the data to be comparable after long deliberations by expert court statisticians doing this all their life... but I wouldn't dare to do that by myself, even if assisted by "Fable 99" and billions of tokens.

Comment · 2 months ago

Let's not forget East Berlin with its 1.2 million population and as the capital of the DDR that was very nicely integrated into the DDR. While both parts of Berlin were obviously isolated from the BDR, West Berlin was supervised by 3 countries. Just to avoid any misunderstanding by people who were not able to visit both parts during those historical times.

Comment · 4 months ago

I'm not sure this is very easy to show this is a breach of non-discrimination requirements, like under Council Directive 2000/78/EC for employment.

Due to acting like an irrational gambling machine, I agree it can have unwanted indirect discrimination effect in general. But it will probably not differentiate "on the grounds of religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation". It is possible, but that would take a lot of work for the lawyers to prove to the court.

I believe the more interesting part is that the EU AI Act (still not in force in this regard until 2 December 2027). This will be clearly a high-risk AI system: "AI systems intended to be used for the recruitment or selection of natural persons, in particular to place targeted job advertisements, to analyse and filter job applications, and to evaluate candidates".

Which does not mean prohibited, but it could later turn out that LLMs will be excluded from being used in high-risk AI use cases (falling under article 6 with no exemptions).

Considering that none of the standards are published yet, I have absolultely no idea how they will ensure compliance with the following parts of Article 10 when using LLMs for such tasks: "(f) examination in view of possible biases that are likely to affect the health and safety of persons, have a negative impact on fundamental rights or lead to discrimination prohibited under Union law, especially where data outputs influence inputs for future operations; (g) appropriate measures to detect, prevent and mitigate possible biases identified according to point (f)"

I don't think that's technically possible to do so with LLMs in general at the moment, even with the full cooperation of the model providers. Maybe you can do some meaningful audits for smaller models. But the EU AI Act may end up excluding all the generic "using-LLM-but-not-entirely-sure-why" vibe coded approaches from high-risk use cases (in Annex III). Which would make sense.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng

Comment · 4 months ago

Just trying to remind people that in most countries outside the US, there is nothing like PACER. Even in the UK, it's usually just judgments that are freely available, see https://www.bailii.org/ and https://caselaw.nationalarchives.gov.uk/. Even with the recent expected extension of "Public Documents", accessing the claim form or other statements of cases will depend on the court making an order https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/civil/rule....

And for non-common law jurisdictions, even the UK level of publicity of judgments is rarely available - anonymisation is a prerequisite: https://homoki.net/en/2024/02/01/On_Anonymisation_of_court_d...

So, for many countries, it's not just that sealed documents are not accessible, many people in traditional democracies couldn't imagine and bear this level of publicity for every court document like you have in the US.

Comment · 4 months ago

The difference is quite subtle in common law v. continental law systems. In continental traditions, nobody really says a higher court decision is binding in the same sense as they do in common law. But even in common law, lower courts have the power to distinguish a case from a binding decision from a higher court. Or later courts may state that a particular argument used by a judge in the higher court was just 'obiter dicta' and not part of the 'ratio decidendi'. In continental systems, for most court processes, higher courts do have a strong persuasive power without formal binding (sometimes it may be stronger than your average "obiter dicta" in common law). So, there is a whole spectrum in obiter dicta as well. This decision was a preliminary injunction only from Landgericht Munich - you will have a final injunction order: https://the-decoder.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/26_O_869_2...

In Germany, you also have the Oberlandesgericht and the Bundesgerichtshof as a higher venue for civil cases (and the Constitutional Court as well). So, this is not like "the law has changed" at all. (I'm not a German qualified lawyer, but qualified in a close enough continental system, and on my way to be qualified in a common law jurisdiction soon, that's why I dare to comment on this aspect)

Comment · 5 months ago

Before suing all your coworkers for garnishing their wages, I suggest you first consider how much fun you will have when you have to pay for the legal costs of the other party. But you will find that out for yourself. Anyways, I don't think it's your choice whether you want to take on huge law firms - that's usually the other party's choice. (I do hope most security researchers have a bit more training than "some education".)

Comment · 5 months ago

If you involve a lawyer only for the final review, they will understand you don't want them to rethink your approach nor to advise a different strategy. So, they will just bill you for the time, which seems to be fine for both parties of the trade. And, where it's mandatory to have a law firm draft a deed or a contract (like for mortgage or real estate transactions, depending on the state you're in), your Claude-made first draft will not make your bill lower. Just don't try to rely on this for adversarial work, like in litigation. BTW, just curious about the timing: how could Claude for Legal save you thousands of dollars at your last company if the product came out in February? (Not that Claude for Legal is any special in its legal output compared to "ordinary" Claude)

Comment · 6 months ago

I don't understand how different this startup is from established, non-John Deere segments, like MTZ? Definitely low tech and around the same price as the startup: https://www.mtzequipment.com/products/tractors