Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing, well, we are discussing AI generally. We are discussing the legal profession on a specific level, and we are asking the question "will AI really replace real lawyers?" I've had a lot of people talking about this with me over the last year, 6 months to a year. I get it. AI is the new tech thing. I'm one of these odd kids that was born in the early '80s so I sort of remember the end of Gen X, and I remember the rise of the internet, so I can remember things like pets.com when sort of the .com bubble was in full swing and everybody thought they were all going to get rich just if something ended in .com; it seems like AI is somewhat similar. Now I understand that's a sweepingly broad statement. Yes, there's AI. This tech is really quite interesting and it's really quite amazing in many ways. That being said, do not mistake high computational capacity for the actual ability to think. There are two different things going on there, and legal analysis, especially interpretive law, it's a totally different animal: it's different than anything else. That's why it's its own profession. 

That being said, yeah I have no doubt in the future AI tools will be useful, but AI is not the end all be all. I'm starting to hear a lot of people when I am talking to them in consults, that'll say, “well I asked Gemini this, or I asked Grok this, and they said whatever”. It's reminding me of about 10 years ago really, right before I started this channel when we actually managed to cut through a lot of the noise they came from certain forums like the old Thai Visa Forum and things where at the time I would be talking to people and they said, "well I read on the internet", and it's like well the Internet isn't somebody that's actually in the field, in the "trenches" - I don't mean to over exaggerate things - but 'boots on the ground' dealing with the practice of law day-to-day. The person that has that experience and has that background, has that education - and this is not an appeal to credentialism - I've been kind of accused of that indirectly and opaquely by certain people, I  kind of wonder who they are affiliated with, because of my stance regarding fake lawyers and people will say, "well what is having gone to some University and spent a bunch of money mean?" Well I sat through 3 years of having to just sit around analyzing legal issues; that's what I did. And luckily for me I got to do it before the rise of computers, although laptops were a big thing when I was going through - everybody was on AOL chat except me - I refused to use a computer when I was in class. I liked doing things the old way because frankly, if they are teaching you how to think, maybe learn how to think. Don't pack your computer with a bunch of stuff. However, back to my main point, it's not an appeal to credentialism when there is a substantive difference between somebody who actually knows what they are doing, somebody who actually has the background, has done the analysis, knows how legal interpretation works, understands how legal interpretation can work, depending on the judge you are dealing with, depending on the jury you're dealing with, depending on the jurisdiction you're in, the structure, the various legal institutions that exist. These are all factors that go into actually thinking about how the law operates, and how it would be applied, and then moving on from there. AI can compute. Yeah, if you need it to collate a bunch of documentation or search for common phrases, things of this nature, very useful. But to allow it to make findings of fact and conclusions of law, not a great idea, as exemplified in a recent post I just saw on X the other day under Tuki From KL @TukiFromKL over on X. Quoting directly: "Let me explain what just happened because I don't think people understand how insane this is. A woman asked ChatGPT for legal help. It told her to fire her real lawyer. She did. Then it wrote 40+ court filings citing laws that don't exist. Cases that never happened. Judges that never ruled. The other side spent S$300,000 responding to completely made-up legal documents. An AI hallucinated an entire legal career, and nobody noticed for months. OpenAI is now being sued for $10 million. And this is the same company that just signed a deal with the Pentagon. They can't even stop their AI from faking court cases. But sure, give it access to military intelligence. What could possibly go wrong." and then underlying that there is a post from Polymarket @Polymarket, over on X. Quote: "Lawsuit claims ChatGPT pretended to be a lawyer and persuaded a woman into firing her real Attorney while citing fake case law."

Don't know what to tell you. Don't know what's worse. Actual fake lawyers or now the AI is being a fake lawyer. I mean at least, I don't know. I can't speak for fake lawyers; I'm not a fake lawyer. But I don't know how they would operate. If they had the computational capacity to make up a bunch of court cases and judges and rulings, maybe that's what they would do. But this is a perfect and prime example. AI is not yet ready to Prime Time in any way, shape or form with regard to the legal profession. As a tool that legal professionals might use, perhaps. I like Dave Callum. He's a guy I follow on Twitter. I've actually talked him a little bit; he's kind of a Twitter buddy of mine. He actually mentioned me in one of his Years in Review which tip of the hat to old Dave Callum if you by some chance happen to be watching this. He described AI - it's the jumping off point. You go into AI, you ask it a question, it comes back with whatever. You need to then go in and vet whatever it is that that is saying. Now that said, I've had a lot of people who have contacted us with enquiries, not a lot, but a few, who have contacted us with enquiries and said, "hey, I went on AI; it said I could do this." And I said, "well that may be possible with the following conditions precedent or under these circumstances." That being said, it's not a hard and fast rule. Again, no, AI is not a replacement for legal professional advice, and as evidenced by the fact that this thing just made up, out of whole cloth, whole bodies of law apparently. 

So again not yet ready for Prime Time and I doubt, in fact I know it never will be. The law is more fluid than it is given credit for and in many ways, it is also more stagnant than some of us would otherwise like it to be at times. But the way that it actually operates in practice and this is why real legal professionals have a license to practice, much in the same way that medical professionals have a license to practice, because the actual application of these principles in real time is going to depend on the underlying facts in any given case and the overwhelming set of circumstances that exist at the time, as well as the contemporary if you will, community standards of a given jurisdiction, as well as the body of law that you are dealing with, as well as the mechanism for legal analysis. So for example, the difference being between Common Law legal analysis and Civil Law legal analysis, you are talking about two different things there. Sometimes those different things have to interact when you are talking about multi-jurisdictional transactions or something of that nature. These are not things that computers can just go out and collate a bunch of data and spit back out an answer. It's nuanced. It does require an actual human mind to interpret these things under prevailing circumstances.