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Does anyone else shake their heads at Reddit legal advice......
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Look I get it, legal advice is costly and it's not always clear you need it. There are some posts that make sense to me.
But the number of posts I see on legal advice subs (I'm from Canada so I'm thinking specific ones) makes me so nervous for some of the OPs. Ranging from bad bad advice and over generalizations to people asking questions that include fully admitting fault/guilt or and intent to perjure themselves/committ fraud. Or the ever present "is this legal" post with no jurisdiction listed followed by advice from people who are maybe right for their own jurisdiction but don't know if OP is there or not.....
Top Comment: I posted on r/legaladvice 3-4 times before I realized what an absolute cesspool it was. You'll get downvoted for good, accurate advice, while nonlawyers get the top comment with blatantly wrong or bad advice. Also, I despise anyone who runs to Reddit to second guess their lawyer. I frequent the workers' comp sub, and so many posts are a version of "my lawyer said this, are they right or are they trying to screw me over?" So many people then chime in to say lawyers conspire with defense attorneys and insurance companies and doctors to screw over injured workers. It boggles the mind. Honestly, the only valid legal question to post on Reddit is "here's my situation, what is the name of the practice area that I need to Google to find a local attorney?" Beyond that, they get what they pay for.
Reddit Legal is such a mess
Main Post:
(in various ways, so multi-part)
NB We don't host leaked content - if there's any issue, copyright holders are happy to help us restore posts
1) Apparently anyone can copyright claim a post that was self-deleted a year-and-a-half earlier.
Nothing in the post besides a "[Deleted by User]" post title, and no content within.
Mod Support admins aren't even able to identify anything that was in such posts- so what on earth are these people claiming as their content?
I was advised to contact Reddit Legal, but after several attempts (since last September) didn't get a single response.
So what's the next step?
- Finding out who sent the claim
2) Reddit Legal are incredibly poor at providing the DMCA Notices
Most other websites send these automatically to the affected persons at the time the content is removed. Not Reddit!
It can take a month - and many emails - to get any response, just at this stage.
(Especially now there are 3 separate emails we're given to use******)
Usually they just look at the links and say "Yep, already removed this post. Thanks!"
What's the next step?
(I'll get to that later)
3) Legal also make a mess of removing posts
Last month (7/2) I got duplicate messages a minute apart, with the same posts removed several times.
- So I have four strikes from a single DMCA notice?
(Tried to contact ModSupport about this at the time but still waiting on a response)
and still waiting for a copy of the DMCA notice from Reddit Legal, a month later.
...
(Fast forward)
- actually getting ahold of the notice,
- contacting the rights holder,
- them agreeing to restore the content...
So a month or more later...
4) Legal do not correctly process retractions sent by the original sender of the DMCA Notices, nor do they process Counter Notices*
Agents of the copyright holders can get as annoyed as we do
They've had to resend, and resend until their retractions are actioned.
To be fair, on another occasion a post was restored within a matter of days
The whole thing's clearly run by AI - and not a very good one!
It seems the system's only set up to read emails, look at the links and take them down.
If the link is already removed - "job done"! / Case closed
We're actually quite au fait with the whole process, I doubt the average user could even get this far...
We've had a few successful restorations, but so many others are stuck in limbo since Legal is absolutely impenetrable.
*Might have to detail this part separately. It's a genuine struggle !
Top Comment: I know people might say "You should only post content you personally own", but we're friendly with many of the people we post, and have a good enough reputation that others are more than happy to have their content shared by us. Often removals are simply sent automatically by an over-zealous agency - the owners often apologise and help try to get it restored. Kind of resigned to losing my account eventually at this point so this is a last-ditch attempt at getting through to some humans! (I do appreciate Reddit has to take copyright violations seriously... but holy heck do they make it hard)
Wondering about AI in legal
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I am a company lawyer at a large European company (25,000 employees). Over the past few years, I have been exploring the use of AI within our Legal department. Gradually, I have come to the following conclusions:
Generative AI can be very useful in legal documents purely on a textual level. For example, it can help with proofreading, summarizing, adjusting the style of texts, translating texts, and so on. Generative AI can also assist with summarizing a case file and outlining the key facts. However, it often makes mistakes, such as omitting important facts, misinterpreting facts, or making other strange errors that are significant in legal contexts. For instance, I sometimes ask it to list events in chronological order, and the chronology ends up being incorrect. Dates are mixed up and not presented in the right sequence.
Generative AI performs particularly poorly when it comes to substantive questions. This improves somewhat when you supply it with legal content yourself, such as previous advice or legal sources, but it still often misses the mark. Case law, for example, is almost always fabricated.
Initially, I thought this would improve over time. Now, I am less certain. Firstly, there is no such thing as a perfect legal knowledge source. When things become complex, there are always multiple interpretations and varying case law, which as a lawyer you normally assess based on your own expertise. The question, therefore, is what sources an AI model would need to draw on to gain this knowledge. Secondly, it has become clear to me that the model does not truly understand a text. The ability to interpret which facts are significant and which are not, given the context of the issue at hand, is something the model struggles with. While you could theoretically sketch this context with extensive explanations, a truly comprehensive description would need to be extremely detailed.
I’ve also noticed that the software products currently being developed and offered are primarily focused on contract analysis. For my company, I see little added value in this. Negotiating contracts takes up relatively little time and is not legally very complex. Our need lies more in how AI might assist in forming legal advice or assessments.
What are your thoughts on this?
Top Comment: I am testing a deployment of one of the major brand LLMs for my varied private practice office. I generally agree with your assessments on the current capability of the software. The primary limitation is context and analysis. The software can’t look at one document and identify the important facts or provide suggestions on alternative situations. This is a limitation derived from how the software operates. The other limitation is, in most business deployments, the LLM is limited to its original training and the data that you “feed” it. The tool I am testing does not have ready access to the gigabytes of documents we store for our other cases. While I am adding information, it is clear that the LLM does not have ready access to legal research resources. This is a known limitation in this kind of deployment. I would expect that the more data I add to the software’s available information the better it would get over time. However, as you noted, it lacks deductive reasoning. It can’t draw conclusions in the context of legal argument and can’t provided an analysis of hypothetical situations. There is a long way to go.
Favorite Obscure/Esoteric Legal Words and Phrases?
Main Post: Favorite Obscure/Esoteric Legal Words and Phrases?