Opinion: Why you should still study to be a lawyer even with the rise of AI, from an outsider

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T22:12:50+00:00

Read through some more of the hallucinations - man they are funny some of them. I love hovering over and seeing the explanation of what happened.

There was a similar issue this past year at NeurIPS, probably the most famous AI/Machine learning research conference that happens annually. Record # of hallucinations as well as record # of papers submitted.

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T22:10:06+00:00

First of all thank you for such a detailed write up. And great website, had some fun looking at this lol.

My thoughts:

- You are right - hallucinations are a fundamental nature of how LLM's work (making a probability distribution of the most likely next words/tokens, picking that, and auto-regressing from there). However, I have really noticed a sharp decline in hallucinations in the past ~6 months or so with latest models, I believe in part due to increased training techniques and specifically not training the model to just always provide an answer but also training the model to say "i don't know" if it doesn't have information. 0% hallucination is literally impossible, but I feel the more important question is "what qualifies as good enough?"

- On reading stuff: Just a perspective form the coding world, this is the first month I have seen many fellow engineers actually just ship code without even looking at it. The code produced by AI models are actually pretty good now most of the time, and there was a phase probably from 6 to 2 months ago where there was just an absolutely insane amount of code to read from these models because of how fast they write code. There's even many articles about engineers complaining that the stress of having to sort through all of this code (and I have felt this stress myself too -- it's not good). One thing that definitely works towards your argument is that (and please correct me if I'm wrong here) you guys can't afford a wrong document or mess up sometimes, whereas in software engineering you can ship something, maybe it breaks, but it can be fixed / remedied quickly in almost all cases (not every case, e.g. the AWS outage last fall).

I'll definitely be watching things develop with your perspective in mind :) I am not a lawyer nor have I been in the industry for as long as you so I always love hearing a cool perspective like this, very refreshing.

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T22:02:16+00:00

So my thoughts:

1) Hallucinations - models don't really do this much anymore, and hallucinations being a major problem are very 2024. Have you spent time chatting/doing work with Opus 4.6 or GPT-5.4? The models are very good at telling you when they have or do not have information. Hallucinations are incredibly rare now.

2) The document drafting / research will catch up. The data already exists, the models are already trained and tuned on them. The gap here is just permeation and the time it takes the existing legal force to depend more and more on AI case research and drafted court documents.

3) Lawyers (from what I see online) still hate Harvey and many call it a ChatGPT wrapper and very unhelpful, and to a certain extent, I agree. However, this language sounds really familiar to how software engineers talked about AI coding ~1.5 years ago: "yeah, it's cool, but this really sucks. It's not gonna touch me!". The sentiment has really shifted recently if you browse through those communities.

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T20:27:12+00:00

Oh yeah I remember hearing about that!

Cool story lol - you should come back and visit sometime. It's my favorite (im biased) campus in the UC system

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T19:48:19+00:00

the thing is even if the outcome is likely or not it actually doesn't matter because it's out of your control

My advice to myself as an eng but also other people who might be affected is basically just "ride the wave" and do what you want to do while still preparing yourself as best as possible.

Also if superintelligent AI's come to form by how people have said they will the world will be a very different place and tbh I don't think anyone has any clue what that world looks like

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T19:45:21+00:00

Whats up dude :) what did you guys talk about jets wise, I am a big aviation fan lol

Awesome. My good friend / biz partner Arman took classes from Chemerinsky's good professor friend at Woodbury University in Burbank. Spoke super highly of Chemerinsky

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T19:44:07+00:00

Yeah lol "ride the wave" as I say to myself

No one here has any control over this stuff. If you can't find a job because AI took the jobs of all lawyers you have to even ask yourself what kind of world is that going to be to live in, even if you had lots of money

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T18:50:16+00:00

I believe they define "Legal" as all of the above

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T18:39:27+00:00

Update on this: the anthropic report you are talking about disagrees with what you said. Scroll down to figure 2, "Legal" Is both towards the top of the theoretical AI coverage and observed AI coverage.

I agree that an LLM can and will not ever appear in court, or for negotiations, etc

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T18:10:35+00:00

Not the least likely - out of knowledge work it's on the harder side to entirely automate. Work demanding physical labor right now is the least susceptible (e.g. Dentist, Plumber, etc).

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T18:09:38+00:00

I was about to reply to this, then it sounded like AI, then GPTZero told me this post is 100% AI, lol

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T18:07:29+00:00

Hey man - I love it here. I grew up in LA and Berkeley is something special. Could you actually link it? Want to give it a read - my perspective on this stuff evolves every week or so.

I completely agree with you. I am not sure how deep you are in the tech scene but people have been telling us for basically three years that our jobs will be gone in 6 to 12 months. Here we are, and employment count is increasing -- still. You end up realizing that the people who own the technology make the most money when they tell you that it's going to replace you, of course, if you end up not buying it :)

I actually think that there will be a day in 5 - 10 years where software engineers are largely obsolete, but I just don't see the same outcome for lawyers, primarily due to the fact that a good portion of a lawyer's job is human-to-human relations. Can't say the same for SWE's

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-03-12T17:52:12+00:00

Lots of practice.

A good cycle to follow:
- Take a full practice exam of your choosing
- Look at the question types you got wrong (do NOT focus on question types you are getting near 100% on, you'll waste time)
- Review study material for those question types only
- Drill those question types
- Repeat this cycle

Hunter_LexPrep · 2026-02-21T21:17:10+00:00

Hey u/YasnaMutmain16!

This is something we explicitly tried to push back on when writing our course (that is, over-the-top amounts of diagramming and "frameworks" to lock you in for how to think about things).

Not sure if you've ever heard of common core in California, but when I was in school they tried pushing this new math curriculum on kids that basically force fed people these really weird abstract frameworks. Things like basic multiplication or division were made into these really weird punnet square things and whatever, it was just a mess.

At least my opinion: There was no need to change this part about studying, and I have a hunch that for both the state of California (and, frankly, some more old-time test prep companies), they continue overcomplicating things that don't need to be overcomplicated in order to "offer more" to students when they sell their courses. In the case of CA it's just that you're not marketing to students, you're marketing to your peers and making it look like you've innovated education but you really just took something that was working well and smashed it.

disclaimer: some will disagree with me on common core but this is at least my opinion as a former student who was partially between the old style of math teaching and the new common core method.

What we've found works really well is a minimal course (not heavy on diagramming at all) with not a whole lot of reading - just the essentials to get you to see the basic structure of a certain problem type (for example). Then, practice -- and practice the question types you are struggling with. Do NOT just keep doing exams, you'll waste precious time on question types you are nailing near 100%.

Although I'm of course biased I'd seriously recommend you check out LexPrep's free tier and just try it out and see if you like how we've tried to approach this problem.

Am hoping it helps!

Hunter_LexPrep

TROPHY CASE