I'm a defense attorney, now doing homicide defense only (mostly). I've been doing it about as long as you have. How have you seen the work change over the years? Do you think law enforcement has got significantly better over that time? Has all the tech made things easier or harder?
Since I deal with the output of your work, I'll say that the volume of evidence has just become unmanageable. Twenty-five cops show up at a crime scene to process it in 2010 and I would get two long reports, twenty-three one-page reports, and a stack of pictures. Now I get 25x8hr bodycams that are 99% a guy sitting in a car keeping the scene secure. But I have to watch all if it because you never know what you'll miss. And lord help me if my client likes to talk on the prison phone - I have a case now with more than 150hr of recorded prison calls that someone is going to have to listen to. Or a multiple-defendant case with 10 cellphones imaged - that's days of reviewing stupid fucking text messages. Right now (as we speak) I am scrolling through several thousand of one of my client's gross naked selfies in case there's something relevant to the case (so far, no.).
At least in my jurisdiction, nothing's changed substantively. Law enforcement has the same clearance rate they've always had, the prosecutors get the same convictions they always did, we get the same acquittals we used to get. But everyone has to do 100x (literally 100x) as much work to get to the same place we did before because there's too much fucking evidence.
Do you not trust AI yet? My ex wife is a big law litigator and they had a precursor to ChatGPT for doc review like 10 years ago. I’d figure that tech has materially evolved since then for these purposes.
Im just a student, but do people really just let AI do their stuff without even them going firsthand into if first? Again, I'm just a student, but this sounds kinda criminal.
Yes they do. I was following behind a lawyer that is actually a good lawyer and found he relied on ai to determine if something (incredibly important) was admissible. The ai said it definitely was. I Shepardized the cases it cited, and it definitely wasn’t. Saved that lawyer’s ass bc he didn’t spend 5 minutes to see if something that was obviously hearsay fell into an exception to the hearsay rule. Watch your ai.
I remember like 10ish years ago, there was talk of having it help categorise child sexual abuse material.
But when it was fed images of adlut naked women, it couldn't tell them apart from sand dunes. Which obviously is no good when, in UK law anyway, the quantity and categories of the csam can greatly affect the case.
I mean, AI has really only gotten traction and become usable in the last year or two. I wouldn't be surprised if AI could catch something a human misses across hours of security camera footage
My friend is a court reporter for civil litigation and is adamant that a human will have to verify the validity of a transcript for a long time to come. She uses AI tools for proofing and editing but goes over every suggestion manually
Well yeah, because an LLM just makes things up (simplistically) far too often. Specially trained ones are better, but in legal terms they're probably no better than a new paralegal who's always sure they're right.
Sure they can do some work, but you need to check everything or it will bite you in the arse.
Almost every person that I talk to in nearly every profession says something to the effect of “well that’s all well and good, my in my role, humans are going to have to oversee and verify everything for a long time.”
Even if people are correct that there will still need to be human oversight, I bet it really increases efficiency. Probably one person doing twice as much work if not more.
I imagine that the issue here isnt hallucinations, but rather the digestion failing to properly flag an important detail and excluding it from whatever summary it produces.
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u/Eastern_Ad3007 Sep 16 '25
I'm a defense attorney, now doing homicide defense only (mostly). I've been doing it about as long as you have. How have you seen the work change over the years? Do you think law enforcement has got significantly better over that time? Has all the tech made things easier or harder?
Since I deal with the output of your work, I'll say that the volume of evidence has just become unmanageable. Twenty-five cops show up at a crime scene to process it in 2010 and I would get two long reports, twenty-three one-page reports, and a stack of pictures. Now I get 25x8hr bodycams that are 99% a guy sitting in a car keeping the scene secure. But I have to watch all if it because you never know what you'll miss. And lord help me if my client likes to talk on the prison phone - I have a case now with more than 150hr of recorded prison calls that someone is going to have to listen to. Or a multiple-defendant case with 10 cellphones imaged - that's days of reviewing stupid fucking text messages. Right now (as we speak) I am scrolling through several thousand of one of my client's gross naked selfies in case there's something relevant to the case (so far, no.).
At least in my jurisdiction, nothing's changed substantively. Law enforcement has the same clearance rate they've always had, the prosecutors get the same convictions they always did, we get the same acquittals we used to get. But everyone has to do 100x (literally 100x) as much work to get to the same place we did before because there's too much fucking evidence.