AI Saved My Company from a 2-Year Litigation Nightmare

When you are in litigation you are at war, embrace the suck.

Therefore I think the same things apply as in software development, when you start to think you can fire lawyers and replace them with AI: you will then bear the responsibility of the job they did before. That means it can go the right way, but it can also go the wrong, wrong way.

Given many countries share the same language, I am struggling to understand how he make sure chatGPT is not hallucinating and that he is basing his advice on the laws of the correct country.

In a previous post [0] they talk about the impact of the litigation, which seems to have contributed to the shuttering of his fund

[0] https://tylertringas.com/code-concrete/

The main observation is you 100% have to manage lawyers aggressively and understand and question what they are doing at literally every step or the budget will be out of control. Sounds like AI helped this guy but it’s more about your personality/approach than anything else.

Also don’t hire $1000 an hour lawyers for litigation unless you’re a major corporation in a complex case with a ton at stake.

I hope it spurs a larger "moral reckoning" movement of legal strategy among "big players" - the moral depravity or trying to abuse other innovators through deceptive legal gaming is an illness US corps should cure themselves of.

My advice to developers/engineers who start their own corps is: always read every contract, think through the implications, consider worst cases, and only sign ones you're comfortable with. If you don't like anything, push back and negotiate. How does the other side they come off in that process? Make note of who they show you they are and incorporate that knowledge into your ultimate decisions.

I guess if you're VC backed the calculation is different: let the advisors and LPs absorb the risk and handle it for you. But if not: you need to get involved deeply. AI is a superpower that hopefully stops the abuses that have been so rampant. You got this!

Unless you're using an ephemeral on-prem LLM that doesn't keep logs you should begin with an assumption that your AI chat transcripts will be available to your opponents in discovery. There isn't clear caselaw on this yet, but given that material you share with third parties other than your lawyers almost always is and sharing your strategy musing would probably be disastrous, you should plan accordingly.

Particularly, subpoena are quite powerful in the US and can be obtained quite easily and often without an adequate opportunity for the ultimate user to oppose them. The AI providers will comply with them as just a matter of process, and the first notice that an opponent is seeking your transcripts may be after they already have them. (And that's assuming your opposition doesn't have insiders at the AI company to begin with...)

That aside-- Having thoroughly dispatched an AI dependent opponent in court, uhh, well lets just say that I hope any future opponents read this article. ChatGPT outputs an astonishingly embarrassing amount of completely wrong pseudolegal nonsense and set him up for multiple case losing disasters.

There are also a number of advanced strategies available to an opponent who has realized you are using an LLM, as they now have oracle access to something similar to your own AI advice and can test their actions against the advice it will cause you to get from your AI. ... even so far as brute force searching rewrites of the language in their correspondence to increase the odds that you get disastrous advice.