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points by NoboruWataya 12 hours ago | 0 comments

I'm jealous, I'd love to be able to do this. I am a small cog in a big legal machine so I am stuck with whatever tech stack my firm mandates. Outlook + Word + a bunch of incredibly unintuitive, slow, buggy and I'm sure overpriced apps for billing, version control, contact management, training, etc etc. Word has so many corporate add-ons installed that sometimes it just collapses under its own weight and crashes when I'm trying to work on a basic document.

[–] Nitrolo 10 hours ago

I feel with you, as I'm in the same boat. Word and outlook are fine, teams is, well it works but I don't quite understand how displaying a couple of lines of text can possibly be so slow, but some of the other software we use has made me want to quit my job.

Our file management software works, and has all the features we need, but goddamn it's so slow and it's made me want to punch my screen so many times. And it's full of bizzare choices.

Pressing enter when editing filenames doesn't accept the filename, it just adds a new line as the filename. Copying text from the file preview works, but somehow it switches every "g" to a "q" (it seems to run OCR on a text document and then just display that???) etc

[–] williamcotton 8 hours ago

Pro tip: light that cigar with a flame thrower and use ChatGPT Work to create and update Word docs. Never open it again! It’s good at formatting tables, moving images around without the entire document exploding into shards, redlines and comments!

[–] gamblor956 5 hours ago

Pro tip: if you're a lawyer and plan to stay a lawyer, edit the Word document yourself or expect to spend 99% of the time "saved" reviewing it and making corrections when it didn't actual do what you wanted and it created a bunch of facts or law.

The first year that commercial LLMs became available, a lawyer could plausibly claim they didn't know any better that an LLM would fuck things up. Now, it's an automatic sanction. In CA, the minimum penalty is $5000. Risking your license and having a black mark that all future employers will see isn't worth the few minutes you'll save degrading your skills by outsourcing your work to a black box.

[–] williamcotton 2 hours ago

I’m talking about mechanically editing a Word document, not generating complaints. You can tell it to CRUD paragraphs, images and tables verbatim.

[–] skinfaxi 5 hours ago

> The first year that commercial LLMs became available, a lawyer could plausibly claim they didn't know any better that an LLM would fuck things up

Is that the case? As an officer of the court, lawyers have a duty to be truthful. Putting forth an argument you didn't even read would seem to be abdicating that duty regardless of the novelty of the tool.

[–] gamblor956 5 hours ago

In 2023 we didn't know that LLMs would make things up even if you asked them to limit themselves to actual facts/laws/etc.

[–] skinfaxi 4 hours ago

Does that change the duty of the attorney? Paralegals can make stuff up too. Chatgpt was released in Nov 2022 and the first case of sanctions was brought in early 2023 so it doesn't seem like it was ever acceptable.