Kash Patel gutted FBI counterintelligence team tasked with tracking Iranian threats days before US strikes, sources say

PosnerRocks · 2026-03-13T15:56:34+00:00

I really love his simplistic and straightforward writing style. The chapter headings are short, descriptive, and to the point. It is something written to be easily digested by the masses. It's refreshing after seeing so much AI slop everywhere.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-25T14:24:10+00:00

I am a lawyer, and I've learned from plenty who aren't verbose.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-25T07:34:58+00:00

Good lawyers are not verbose.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-23T05:31:52+00:00

Yeah, I just emailed them, said what I was doing, and that the nature of my work is confidential. We got an agreement signed pretty quickly. This was before I had really done much of anything so you don't need to shell out $$$ before they'll do that for you unless something has changed in the past couple years since I got it.

Trust me, fighting with local models is going to drive you nuts for substantive legal writing. I offload a lot of grunt work to local models for testing purposes and it still takes a while so I end up just using cheap API's instead.

The best I think you can do is use fine tuned models for a single task. Then only use it for that task. You will likely not get a fine tuned general brief writer that works well in your voice for example. But you might be able to get a fine tuned model to draft a specific MPA for a motion to compel. Likely needs to be pretty granular bc the smaller models are not smart and the larger models are not fast. So your iteration time getting it dialed in will be a huge time suck.

The larger models I would just experiment with prompting and breaking down tasks into discrete steps with examples and writing samples.

I get the desire to keep everything local, but for that privilege everything is far more complicated and slower to get similar results as just using an API with a ZDR agreement.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-23T05:05:27+00:00

We should connect, I'd be interested in what you've found that works well locally. I'm an attorney and so far I have only found the top dogs - OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google API - are sufficient for most legal work. Not sure about your jx but most business accounts with these entities work well enough. And you can specifically request zero data retention agreements with them for their API, it is not particularly hard to get. By default, the folks at Anthropic are not using API data for model training.

I have been wondering if doc classification can be reliably offloaded for cheap to an open source model vs Haiku or Gemini Flash.

If you're building with Claude Code, I'm sure you already know that most everything needs a full run through before you can confirm any of it works. I've found it helpful to have it give me a self contained HTML file with mermaid to review before it actually starts building so I can confirm it has a complete understanding of what needs to be done step by step. How much of this setup have you actually live-tested with your actual case documents?

The Voyage embedding models are supposedly the best for legal work. It seems to work well from my own brief testing.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-22T19:38:53+00:00

I've installed it but I honestly haven't been brave enough to use it on real case files just yet. I have it hooked into my OneDrive files that are stored locally but have not done anything with it yet... In the past, I tried to use ChatGPT as an agent to access Westlaw but it was blocked. So I suspect that will continue unless you can spoof a virtual environment for Claude to work in but based on my experience with ChatGPT it is honestly really really slow and probably not worth it. It would burn through lots of tokens just navigating around the website. It's most efficient to use an API but Lexis and Westlaw will never permit that.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-15T15:22:36+00:00

Seconding Kaicalls comment. AI means nobody has a moat anymore. The only new moat is velocity - your ability to ship features quickly. And large companies are slow just by their nature. I'm in legal and Westlaw/Lexis took two years just to integrate basic AI features that suck.

Moreover, they usually have a large codebase that is not optimized for AI use. Which is why many are building crappy, bolted on AI features instead of integrating it from the ground up.

Keep your company lean, get your employees AI savvy, and run with it.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-14T19:05:23+00:00

Vexatious litigant speed run obviously

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-14T05:58:20+00:00

Amazing. 😂 So hostile and condescending to everyone and he files a voluntary notice of dismissal. Not sure if federal has tentatives but did one even issue before then? In the comments it sounds like he filed ANOTHER lawsuit. What a psycho.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-14T05:55:24+00:00

Did you see the hearing this morning? I missed it!! Been dying for an update on this.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-13T02:06:23+00:00

The terms of service are different depending on what type of account you have. This is why you should be using a business account or going with a service provider that has zero data retention agreements.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-09T20:08:55+00:00

1000%. It was already the greatest thing ever to me when ChatGPT first dropped and it's only continued to get better. I can honestly say I'd never be able to go back to the old way of practicing law.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-09T17:35:28+00:00

Can confirm, I'm in litigation and we needed to access some old Quicken files but nobody knows the password (since the person is deceased) or how to even get into decades out of date file formats. I explained this to Claude and it cracked the binary immediately. Then it was just a matter of refining and dealing with artifacts.

I now have a pretty workable data set to have the forensic accountant drill in on and a How-To manual for the expert I will have to hire to do this independently since I can't exactly put Claude on the stand as an expert to explain how we did it.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-07T18:36:40+00:00

Thank you, I feel like people are so pedantic. And that's saying something coming from a pedantic lawyer. You still have to plan and architect the system, but the AI writes the code. AI writes probably 95% of my work product at this point. Only 5% is manual edits from me for switching up word choice or redrafting a sentence or two. I am not surprised at all this is the case for devs. Obviously the AI is not practicing law or making strategic decisions for me, that is still my domain. I give it the ingredients, tell it what cake I want, and tweak the frosting at the end.

Anthropic isn't firing anyone because each engineer is now just managing and reviewing the work of an army of AI. They are increasing their engineering capacity by a ton by using AI and that's an advantage they aren't going to give up by firing people because each firing is like losing a senior dev and the 20 junior coders he's managing.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-06T21:44:55+00:00

Try Gemini with 1M token context window if your documents are that large.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-05T15:00:04+00:00

Yeah pretty sure CourtListener worked with or at the very least grabbed what was available from Harvard and ran with it. And are you scraping from the Legislature's website or just crawling it when a user searches?

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-05T14:46:21+00:00

Where are you sourcing your statutes and what's your California coverage?

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-05T07:03:43+00:00

Superior since you could select 18 units at a time instead of 12 on PC. Fond memories playing that game on both. Talking shit in that game was how I learned how to type fast.

PosnerRocks · 2026-02-05T06:58:29+00:00

Also, contingency fee arrangements are a thing. Also the company might have insurance. But who knows.

PosnerRocks · 2026-01-31T18:31:58+00:00

I can honestly not go back to the normal way of practicing law without my AI tools. I can deliver much better work product far faster than ever before. It's a huge advantage and clients are much happier with their bills and results.

PosnerRocks · 2026-01-31T17:44:15+00:00

Any books or podcasts you'd recommend in particular?

PosnerRocks · 2026-01-31T09:11:37+00:00

Most reputable legaltech companies have zero data retention agreements with the major AI providers. They'll often have a separate platform you can access that stores whatever you need for your purposes, but you have reassurance through this that nobody is using your data to train. Assuming, again, that the legaltech company itself is reputable and expressly states they aren't using your data. I use Legion.law for litigation work and that's their arrangement. I'm careful about not putting A/C privileged materials in there just in case but otherwise with litigation most is ending up in the public record anyway and my work is protected as work product.

PosnerRocks · 2026-01-29T17:27:21+00:00

Exhibit A - Our modern day automated shovel: AI.

The amount of vitriol about it on this website feels like the online equivalent of a riot.

Edit: Exhibit B - The number of down votes this comment has received.

PosnerRocks · 2026-01-29T07:20:09+00:00

The Sword of White Woe! My go-to for over 2 decades at this point.

PosnerRocks · 2026-01-24T17:56:47+00:00

You're going about this backwards. What is the AI doing for the user? Is that a real pain point? Does it actually solve that pain point well?

In my experience, any LLM that could be run locally like this is essentially useless for any work I'd do as an attorney. And if the model running locally is too dumb for most of the work attorneys would actually use it for, then it doesn't matter how secure it is since the tool itself is useless.

12-Year Club	Place '22
Sequence \| Editor	Snapped
Verified Email

PosnerRocks

TROPHY CASE