The Stack Overflow podcast is a weekly conversation about working in software development, learning to code, and the art and culture of computer programming. Hosted by Paul Ford and Ben Popper, the series features questions from our community, interviews with fascinating guests, and hot takes on what’s happening in tech. Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow is empowering the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. It’s best known for being the largest, most trusted online community for developers and technologists. More than 100 million people come to Stack Overflow every month to ask questions, help solve coding problems, and develop new skills.
Legal advice from an AI is illegal
Alexi leverages AI to streamline litigation workflows and speed up research, with an eye to giving lawyers more time and energy to devote to client strategy and support.
Find Mark on LinkedIn.
Shoutout to Stack Overflow user ycr for dropping some knowledge in our CI/CD Collective: How to get the BUILD_USER in Jenkins when a human rebuilds a job triggered by timer?.
Here’s a quick preview of the episode:
“The founding thesis was, let’s try and build an AI that knows the law. And if we do that, there'll be lots of applications throughout the legal field. We knew that these foundational models, the underlying technology, were going to continue to improve and allow us to do more and more.”
“I mean, law is one of the fields where it seems like these large language models could have the most utility, because often what you're doing is taking on a case with potentially an enormous amount of case law that you need to search through to find the needle in a haystack that will help you and/or enormous amount of documents that you need to search through. And so a system that's capable of understanding, synthesizing, and annotating and pointing you to the ground truth is incredibly valuable.”
“ It's not supposed to give legal advice if it doesn't have the licensure and the insurance.”
“Part of the problem is we have these laws that are just not being enforced at all. And so either the laws have to change or they need to start getting enforced.”
“ We realized that if we have almost 100% recall in the top 5,000 documents, why don't we just apply some sort of agentic flow to filter down from these 5,000 to the 10 documents that were really needed?"