Marc Andreessen argues legal AI democratizes litigation against institutions, countering Chroma founder Jeff Huber's claim that the sector is uninspiring

Legal AI superempowers normal individuals with no legal background to fight big institutions in bureaucracies and in courts on a level knowledge/skill playing field, for the first time in human history. As such, it is one of the most inspiring applications of AI.

All structured data problems started getting solved 40 years ago.

Finance, databases, workflows.

The only things left to solve are highly unstructured data problems like law, creative thinking, strategy, research, etc.

Law underlies every business and every transaction in the world.

As a retired lawyer - knowledge of the law and the ability to draft pleadings is only half the battle. Many disputes are won and lost on procedure - the rules of the court, but also know when to do certain things and why to do them, and when and why to include certain provisions in contracts.

Legal AI can certainly help non-lawyers a lot, but for high stakes issues (which might not just be about dollars - think custody disputes, criminal charges, etc), having someone to help with the process and to give a party a sanity check is invaluable.

I’m still licensed, but I hire lawyers all the time to sanity check the things I do in my businesses.

you should have the right to an AI attorney

@pmarca In many cases it’s not even fighting the bureaucracy so much as operating it. Frequently the wlog bank does not know what it is doing in a way legible enough to someone senior enough to direct itself to do something else and quickly. Convincing it to route a letter half ballgame.

@jeffreyhuber Social media automation AI. Checkmate

@jeffreyhuber Disagree because it’s a very useful proof of concept for general knowledge work. If you can get it to work really well and also get the non-technical layers adept enough at using it, then it provides a roadmap for automating and augmenting all kinds of less mission-critical work.

@pmarca I open sourced this repo for contract review a while back which is easily the most common place people get screwed legally. https://github.com/SYFT8/cleverterm

Maybe I’ll spin up a newer better version of it.

@jeffreyhuber I dunno. We couldn't afford legal consultation on basically anything when I was a kid, and it made many of life's bigger crises much worse for my parents.

A service that makes any level of legal assistance available to priced out Americans seems cool to me.

@scottastevenson @jeffreyhuber calling law unstructured is like calling chess unstructured because the rules are in english. the text is messy. the reasoning system is more formalized than most code. legal AI is hard not because of unstructured data. because of incomplete and contradictory axioms.

@pmarca David vs. Goliath and now David has AI. 💪

@scottastevenson seems to me like we’re just upgrading from muskets to gatling guns.

litigious stalemate of late capitalism

Even attorneys who have a lot of local experience wouldn’t be able to write all of them because there are so many edge cases. A motion that rarely gets filed causes multiple emails to clerks to figure out how to get it on a judge’s calendar. Only to find those types of motions are only heard once a month without oral argument.

Many of the processes are not written down and only exist in one clerk’s head at the courthouse.

@aarondfrancis @jeffreyhuber You’re absolutely right. This isn’t just a hunch either — it’s a revelation.

@jeffreyhuber what does inspiration have to do with it? being useful is enough

@jeffreyhuber Legal AI isn’t flashy but it’s one of the best stress tests for useful AI: messy data, huge stakes, trillion$ friction.

Solve reliable reasoning + retrieval here and it flows everywhere else.

What feels more inspiring to you short term?

@jeffreyhuber the less sexy the industry, the bigger the opportunity. nobody wakes up wanting to build legal software which is exactly why the market ends up being huge lol

@pmarca Legal AI will become real once we get AI judges. All legal ai is aimed at helping litigants, but what about using AI to speed up judgements/ decisions etc.

Start with arbitrations, then civil cases.

@sethtjf do with what? i didn’t say what it had to do with

@Shane_L @pmarca You are so right Shane. I learned this one the hard way myself. It took several trips to the courthouse. It all ended up working out, but I would have been much better off hiring someone, in retrospect.