One thing that I have wondered based on the steady flow of cases in which lawyers — not just in South Africa — have been shown to be using hallucinated text, meaning that they were just feeding stuff into some LLM and using the output, is how much legal text prior to LLMs showing up was basically just copy-pasted from other random documents authored by someone else, with lawyers not really doing the expected work themselves of ensuring that the text was appropriate. Or dumping work that is supposed to be done by a lawyer on some paralegal and signing off on it, or something like that. I mean, LLMs are probably an appealing way to half-ass doing legal text, but they also probably aren’t the first way to cut corners.
One thing that I have wondered based on the steady flow of cases in which lawyers — not just in South Africa — have been shown to be using hallucinated text, meaning that they were just feeding stuff into some LLM and using the output, is how much legal text prior to LLMs showing up was basically just copy-pasted from other random documents authored by someone else, with lawyers not really doing the expected work themselves of ensuring that the text was appropriate. Or dumping work that is supposed to be done by a lawyer on some paralegal and signing off on it, or something like that. I mean, LLMs are probably an appealing way to half-ass doing legal text, but they also probably aren’t the first way to cut corners.