When they say that “they have an army of lawyers” or that Disney has more lawyers than animators and things like that, do they tho? Is an army of lawyers really effective? Do companies actually have an “army” of lawyers to redact and sign documents?
Basically it means that they can handle lots of cases at the same time while still giving each one as much attention as it needs. Winning or losing a difficult case can often be decided by how much time and expertise you can put into it. When you have a lot to lose, would you rather have a team of lawyers, each specializing in a different aspect that’s relevant to the case or a single lawyer who is overworked because he‘ll have to prepare a different case after lunch?
Edit: typo
The scope and visibility of the case is important, as well. Complex cases require lots of lawyers with different specialties to look at it from different angles.
Similar in engineering, you want more engineers working on a really big and complex project than just one person. I worked with a firm back in the day that designed a stadium - they had a whole floor of their HQ devoted to engineers who only worked on that project.
I would imagine it’s only matter of time before AI can do the majority of the work for law firms. I’ll have to ask my IP lawyer friend about this.
Lawyers who has tried to use AI so far had lost their cases miserably.
That’s because we only hear about AI being used by lawyers when they use it wrong and it hallucinates a case that doesn’t exist, and then they don’t actually verify the case themselves.
I’m sure lawyers are already using it successfully, we just don’t hear about successful cases.
And right now they’re using general purpose LLM models, I’m sure we’ll get models actually focused on legal knowledge in the future that will do much better than the current ones.
First off, it’s not AI, it’s llm, basically a better way to collate and search data. It’s a tool that they should be using for research but they better not be using chatgpt or any of the other publicly available ones. I would hope that by now someone has launched or is working on one that was trained with data from law books, existing case law, etc and then you could also feed it any discovery documents that come in and it can help highlight what is important.
a better way to collate and search data
[citation needed]
Though I’m sure your LLM could hallucinate some for you!
I love that term “hallucinate”.
That’s a big of a euphemism as the word “faith”, and like the term “faith”, it’s used to mask glaring operational deficiencies. It reminds me of the time when I test drove a used car and there was a clear steering issue, which the car salesman called a “shimmy”.
IANAL, but I watch a lot of legal eagle on nebula.
It’s about research capacity. Finding applicable case law can take a fair amount of time. Maybe less with AI, unless you start citing the AI case law https://duckduckgo.com/?q=AI+generated+case+law, but you need to know how other cases went, if you want to create a successful strategy for your own case.
IANAL
🤤
I genuinely don’t know why people use that obviously charged acronym instead of just NAL.
Every adult is a child trapped in an old body.
Exactly! How else would I get to preface a comment with “anal” in uppercase? I need an acronym that includes “penis” or “boobs” and is annoying to pedants. Maybe it could be CPENIS for “Caution: Pedants Exasperatingly Nitpicking In Stubbornness”, and it’s pronounced “see penis” so it’s even dirtier.
IANACTIAOB
It’s not about reacting and signing documents. An army of lawyers is useful because it allows more stuff to be done simultaneously. More people can do research on potentially relevant case law, more lawyers can write multiple different motions. This forces opposing counsel to have as many or more lawyers to react to all this.
An army of lawyers also means you can have teams all dedicated to specific tasks. Disney has lawyers that likely have decades of experience in defending against personal injury suits in their parks. That makes it far harder for anyone to succeed without a very good case.
At the scale of Disney, they likely have dedicated legal teams to many things, and even subsections of those. Take the film division for example, there are likely legal teams for copyright, contracts for services, contracts for advertising, general labor law, acting/directing contracts, location acquisition, property rental/purchase, and distribution. The same goes for the several other divisions.
Lawers, guns, and money.
More is better.
In addition to what other comments are saying, not only do they have a lot of lawyers, but they also have large legal budgets. They can afford to keep cases in limbo, appeal cases, and cost people a lot of money regardless of the legal or moral reality of what was done.
Was going to say the same thing. This is the exact M.O. of the former US President, along with many many corporations. With the former, it’s why he never seems to be held accountable for the clearly illegal stuff he does/has done. With the latter, it’s why only a class action or the DOJ are capable of getting any legal satisfaction out of them - and even then it’s usually laughable.
I’ll have to note that afaik it matters more in countries with common law practices.
