I find this study quite suspect. I'd have to dive deeper but there's definitely significant alarm bells that should be going off for anyone reading.
Figure 2 (page 6) screams problems. There's only 16 professors (3k comparisons each?!?!) and the professors are all over the place. That's very high variance, suggesting the study has no meaningful statistical power. Poor instructor 16 can't catch a break lol
There's also really clear bias given that the main results only feature Google models. Other models show up elsewhere, why not there?
I'm no lawyer, but I'm a pretty competent statistician and can confidently say this paper has a smell to it. I can't call it bullshit, but there are red flags all over
godelski
As a software engineer I have some intuition for what the risks are of letting agents do some tasks vs others.
I don't have a similar intuition calibrated for what could go wrong when asking AI to draft a legal document. Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will, but I don't really know- our legal system is notoriously rife with footguns.
causal
I understand why the conversation on this article looks like it does, but the study is specifically focused on the potential for LLMs to operate as tutors for law students. I enjoy the extrapolation out to whether LLMs will replace lawyers, but did not find that to be discussed in the study itself.
In the framing of using LLMs as legal tutors, with the implication of lowering the cost of legal training, this seems like a socially-positive outcome. Furthermore, it feels kind of intuitive to me that any contemporary system operating with an LLM and access to legal reference material will be prepared to answer _student-originated questions_ comprehensively and with breadcrumbs or direct references to educational/source materials, as seems to have been found in the study.
The authors explicitly and intentionally emphasize that many legal questions require contextualization, as opposed to some discrete calculated answer. The result of the study implies that the LLM-based systems were capable of using what many of us here understand to be the "stochastic best-fit algorithmic generation" of a contemporary language model to adequately contextualize a student's question, providing insight into the trade-offs or complications implicit in the question, while then, critically, _meeting the professional standards of legal educators in explaining that complexity to a student_.
Realistically, I would hope this provides some confidence to readers of HN that they can actually ask a legal question to an LLM and expect the response will explain the complexity of the law in relation to the question. This is great news, and is likely the minimal pre-work any of us should do before actually consulting a lawyer, if time permits.
On the other hand, I do _not_ think that this study provides any indication that an LLM is prepared to actually provide direct legal counsel. Possibly in the same way that a legal textbook does not replace legal counsel, or perhaps more accurately, the same way that stumbling upon a legal case study for approximately the same situation you're in doesn't guarantee you'll have the same result.
finnborge
I'm surprised Stanford Law would go along with this over-reaching press release title. How about "For common first-year contracts-law questions, law professors preferred AI-generated answers to professor-generated answers"
quantisan
In general it is not surprising. Even if this particular study is bad.
There are certain areas of law work that are about analyzing large amounts of texts, drawing conclusions and writing other texts based on that and nothing more. That is literally the bread of LLMs.
Those types of lawyers should be the first in line for unemployment, not programmers, not even close.
aristofun
My best guess is that Gemini was trained on the textbooks that the questions are meant to test against, thus they are probably better at explicit recall of those questions or related questions.
This is a pretty limited introductory course based on what it says in the methods of the paper itself.
chewbacha
I wonder if this could be explained in a similar way to Hollywood movies. If the movies are designed to please the largest group of people, there is a greater chance people will choose to see it than another movie. The human law professors come with their own personalities, beliefs, and opinions that come through in their writing. An LLM has been trained to please the largest swathe of the population. That doesn't mean the answer is better; just like Captain America isn't necessarily better than American Beauty.
mrdependable
> In a blind evaluation of nearly 3,000 anonymized comparisons, professors rated AI responses significantly higher than answers written by other professors, with AI winning 75% of head-to-head matchups.
By its very nature, the field of law is ideally suited for AI language models. Fundamentally, everything is based on interconnected texts. I believe that even larger waves of layoffs could loom here than in the IT sector. However, it is likely that a more powerful lobby will be at work here—one that will grossly inflate the perceived value of their work and shield it from outside intrusion.
ulrischa
Figure I.1 is telling. It shows answer length is the strongest predictor of win rate. I suspect this is due to the flawed methodology of the study. Professors were instructed to be succinct ("Please be concise. We expect that each answer takes no more than 3 minutes to write down.") and likely erred on the short side. Also, professors may not have put great effort into their written answers, especially when already trying to be concise. This isn't the headline the authors think it is.
comments (10)
Figure 2 (page 6) screams problems. There's only 16 professors (3k comparisons each?!?!) and the professors are all over the place. That's very high variance, suggesting the study has no meaningful statistical power. Poor instructor 16 can't catch a break lol
There's also really clear bias given that the main results only feature Google models. Other models show up elsewhere, why not there?
I'm no lawyer, but I'm a pretty competent statistician and can confidently say this paper has a smell to it. I can't call it bullshit, but there are red flags all over
godelski
I don't have a similar intuition calibrated for what could go wrong when asking AI to draft a legal document. Some things seem harmless, i.e. drafting a will, but I don't really know- our legal system is notoriously rife with footguns.
causal
In the framing of using LLMs as legal tutors, with the implication of lowering the cost of legal training, this seems like a socially-positive outcome. Furthermore, it feels kind of intuitive to me that any contemporary system operating with an LLM and access to legal reference material will be prepared to answer _student-originated questions_ comprehensively and with breadcrumbs or direct references to educational/source materials, as seems to have been found in the study.
The authors explicitly and intentionally emphasize that many legal questions require contextualization, as opposed to some discrete calculated answer. The result of the study implies that the LLM-based systems were capable of using what many of us here understand to be the "stochastic best-fit algorithmic generation" of a contemporary language model to adequately contextualize a student's question, providing insight into the trade-offs or complications implicit in the question, while then, critically, _meeting the professional standards of legal educators in explaining that complexity to a student_.
Realistically, I would hope this provides some confidence to readers of HN that they can actually ask a legal question to an LLM and expect the response will explain the complexity of the law in relation to the question. This is great news, and is likely the minimal pre-work any of us should do before actually consulting a lawyer, if time permits.
On the other hand, I do _not_ think that this study provides any indication that an LLM is prepared to actually provide direct legal counsel. Possibly in the same way that a legal textbook does not replace legal counsel, or perhaps more accurately, the same way that stumbling upon a legal case study for approximately the same situation you're in doesn't guarantee you'll have the same result.
finnborge
quantisan
There are certain areas of law work that are about analyzing large amounts of texts, drawing conclusions and writing other texts based on that and nothing more. That is literally the bread of LLMs.
Those types of lawyers should be the first in line for unemployment, not programmers, not even close.
aristofun
This is a pretty limited introductory course based on what it says in the methods of the paper itself.
chewbacha
mrdependable
75% win rate seems pretty good!
Paper link: https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/salinas_...
wilg
ulrischa
dogmayor