Journal·
We Replaced Our Legal Department With a Confident Hallucination
Our outside counsel was billing $1,400 an hour to occasionally write the word “arguably.” We replaced them with a fine-tuned model and a tasteful warning banner.
Kathryn Murphy
VP, Human Resources
1. Meet GPT-Counsel
GPT-Counsel is a fine-tuned LLM trained on our previous legal team’s entire Outlook archive, plus the full text of every contract we have ever signed, plus, for taste, the West Wing scripts. It does not bill hourly. It does not push back. It does not, as it turns out, distinguish between treaties that exist and treaties that don’t.
Our updated terms of service now contain 14 separate references to the “Treaty of Westphalia,” which our model believes governs jurisdictional disputes in cloud computing. Several of our enterprise customers have signed without comment.
2. The Settlement Distribution
We have moved from defensible legal positions to probabilistic legal positions. Rather than asking “is this clause enforceable?” GPT-Counsel returns a three-number tuple of (likely outcome, plausible outcome, fantastical outcome) with associated confidence intervals. Our COO has begun making decisions by drawing samples from this distribution.
So far we are 4–1, with the loss being a settlement we are quite proud of.
3. Cease and Desist as a Workflow
Inbound cease-and-desist letters are now routed to a dedicated agent, GPT-Bailiff, which generates a polite, citation-rich, and partially fabricated response within four minutes of receipt. Most senders respond by returning to their underlying client and reporting that the matter is “more complex than initially thought,” which is technically true.
4. The Bar Association
We have received, separately, three communications from regional bar associations regarding the unauthorised practice of law. We have routed all three to GPT-Counsel for response. We will let you know how that goes.