More accessible laws coupled with AI is the beginning of the end for lawyers.

Lawyers want to make legal material un-accessible, obscure and intimidating.  Why?  Because otherwise normal people will read the laws for themselves and come up with the same conclusions that any lawyer would.  And that makes them much less likely to seek overpriced access to legal support.  The lawyers know this and so are now claiming that the laws are copyrighted and thus you must buy a book to obtain the written word.

I have never heard so much indirection and bullshit in my entire life.  First off, the argument is invalid on its face simply because politicians write laws during that time of their life when they are paid employees of the public.  If I pay someone to write a book, that someone does not own the fucking copyright to it, I do.  So that is the lamest piece of shit argument I have ever heard and it speaks to the absolute fear and desperation that these legal vampires are experiencing.

But why, why, why are they so desperately embarrassing themselves like this?  For copyright royalties????  I think not!  They don't get a cut of those royalties anyhow.  And how many legal texts do you sell outside of law school?  ZERO.

So their fear has zilch to do with copyright infringement and everything to do with ACCESS.

I've told the story before, but when I was first into high tech, the top engineers all got invited to "book day" given by the likes of Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor and other chip companies.  Without the books those chips are just black boxes and you have no idea what to do with them.  Having the book was the first step to being able to do the job and books were not loaned easily or freely.  It was good job security for those who knew the game.

When the Internet rolled around, my career began to skyrocket.  Why?  Because all of these secrets which I did not have access to as a lab tech at IBM (one of my first jobs after getting out of the USAF) suddenly began to appear online.  Not only that, finding them was easy because of google, and to make things even more interesting, finding specific information in any book was even easier because of searchable PDFs.  Going from old school paper copies to Internet based PDFs gave me and many other non-college grads full access to the same info that was being hoarded by the old guard and treated by them as the sacred scriptures.

And they were right to do so.  I saw the old guard lose stroke when energetic up and comers got access to info.

So the lawyers, being smarter than most, know exactly the same thing.  When you go to law school you become immersed for many years.  You know where all the important legal doctrine is printed.  You studied all of it, even if you will not use much of it in your whole professional career.

But now people are coming along and providing searchable electronic access to everyone.  With just 15 or 20 minutes of searching and reading on a specific topic, a non-lawyer can know as much about the law which is related to the topic of interest by the consumer as the highly trained and overpaid legal vampire does.

And that's in a time when AI is still very very young.  Young like the Internet used to be young.  Young but growing at an exponential rate.  So very soon, AI will have access to all this printed material.  Well, go look at what the IBM Watson did to the human Jeopardy masters.  It wiped the floor with them overall.  You want to know who stands to lose the most by online laws and AI?  It's the scum sucking rip off legal profession.

AND THEY KNOW IT.  Otherwise they would not accuse the guy of something mortal like terrorism.  Whoever said it was terrorism to make laws public should be disbarred immediately and then run out of town on a rail.

The lawyers will lose their bid to call all the laws copyright.  Why?  Because allowing them to steal the property of the people is liberal and we are heading away from liberalism. And when they lose, the ruckus they make in the process is only going to drive more awareness to the new accessibility of our laws.   They would do much better just shutting up about it and letting the obscurity of the situation slow down the death of lawyer-ing as we know it today.  No lawyer will ever stand up to AI.  Long time readers might remember this post from 2011 where I was talking about the future of AI at a time when you barely heard the words.  AI is coming and the lawyers will be among the first to be afraid of it.