About an AI lawyer that was blocked from arguing in court.
Has this happened?
Yes 34 (27%)Not sure 42 (33%)No 50 (40%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About an AI lawyer that was blocked from arguing in court.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
AI might one day take over the legal profession, but it won't be language-learning models that do it.
An AI that can replace lawyers would have to be able to make knowledge-based inferences, based on actually conceptually understanding what it is reading, and saying. They have to be able to identify the specific facts and circumstances that govern the matter at hand, not the general conditions that would normally apply, since cases are won on the specifics.
We're at least 2 decades away from that kind of AI, because AI research today is currently stuck in a local maxima of statistics-based brute force machine learning that doesn't actually lead to models that have any sort of intelligence about what they learn.