Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · 1d

In defense of the em dash — punctuation making us more human!
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/m...

With the Em Dash, A.I. Embraces a Fading Tradition

www.nytimes.com

Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · 18d

Maybe there's room in legal tech for both #determinism and #probabilism.

Link to Thinking Machines' paper:
thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeati...

Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference

Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the...

thinkingmachines.ai

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · 18d

The best lawyers I know are creative. They eschew the "most likely next token" — favoring out-of-distribution legal approaches and arguments. Some legal tasks have the "right answer"; many tasks, though, have "an answer so creative that it just might work."

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · 18d

Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's company Thinking Machines is making LLMs more #deterministic.

Open questions: Do we want *all* of our #legaltech to be deterministic? Or is "legal creativity" #probabilsm a feature, not a bug? 🤔

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · 19d

Perplexity extrapolation of Claude data → percentages in Claude's Job Explorer:
www.perplexity.ai/search/how-m...

Perplexity

Perplexity is a free AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question.

www.perplexity.ai

Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · 19d

Claude's "Explore by Job" data:
www.anthropic.com/economic-ind...

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · 19d

Some notes and questions:
- That's just one model (Claude)
- How many "legal profession" queries in (1) Gemini/ Google, (2) ChatGPT, (3) Grok, (4) CoPilot?

#LegalConsumer queries? E.g., #Client queries? #WouldBeClients didn't hire lawyers because LLM output = "good enough"

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · 19d

#Lawyers, #judges, #arbitrators, and #mediators use #Claude. Queries:
- #Lawyers: 0.21% = 201,600 daily (6,048,000 monthly)
- #ALJs: 0.19% = 5.4M/mo
- #Arbitrators + #Mediators: 0.10% = 2.8M/mo
- #Paralegals + #LAAs: 0.05% = 1.4M/mo
- #Judges + #Magistrates: 0.03% = 28k/mo

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · 24d

Law firm leader on stage just now: "We've equipped each of our lawyers with the $20/month ChatGPT, telling them 'Use it for everything you can.'" How many firms are doing this? How many just don't speak about their "off the shelf #LLM use" publicly?

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · 24d

LexisNexis study: "Among these consumers who are aware of [ #LLMs ], a stunning 48% have already used some form of generative AI tool to obtain #LegalAdvice or assistance with a legal question." Wow — 48%! Oh, by the way, this was from May 2023. 🤯
www.lexisnexis.com/community/in...

New Survey Identifies How Consumers Would Be Willing to Use Generative AI to Address Legal Needs

By Steve Carroll If it feels to you like generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have gone from a sci-fi idea to a transformational tech in a matter of months, it’s because they have....

www.lexisnexis.com

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Aug 22

Google: AI's environmental impact appears overestimated

AI QUERIES: 0.24 Wh vs earlier estimates (3-7 Wh) — like watching TV for <9 seconds

TRUE ENERGY: far lower than claims (0.24 vs 3-7 Wh)

OLD STUDIES missed cooling/infrastructure

33x efficiency (44x carbon ↓ )

youtu.be/aarDw3sooYE?...

Calculating our AI energy consumption

YouTube video by Google Sustainability

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Damien Riehl

Jordan Couch @jordanlcouch.bsky.social · Jul 30

Visions of the future with AI for people, the courts, and lawyers. I'm very excited for this article from Washington State Bar Association. With thanks to @damienriehl.bsky.social, Jayne Reardon, and J. Scott Schlegel who I have been bouncing ideas off for a year or so wabarnews.org/2025/07/16/t...

The Bright Legal Future - Washington State Bar News

Jordan Couch offers a positive vision for the future AI, of more people having access to help with their legal problems.

wabarnews.org

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jul 20

Does an AI disclosure rule help any more than Rule 11 (or its state equivalents)? "Everything above my signature is true and correct" — whether created by AI, my first year associate, or my paralegal. AI "pinky swears" don't change behavior.

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jul 1

Microsoft: AI beats human physicians in diagnoses (Humans = 2/10, Machines = 8/10)
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Microsoft says AI system better than doctors at diagnosing complex health conditions

Firm says results of research create ‘path to medical superintelligence’ but plays down job implications

www.theguardian.com

Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jun 30

"It looks like you're filing a motion to dismiss. Would you like some help?"

a cartoon clip with googly eyes is on a piece of paper .

ALT: a cartoon clip with googly eyes is on a piece of paper .

media.tenor.com

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jun 30

Exactly: 🎯 . Exciting times! 🚀

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jun 24

Lovely London event with Reena SenGupta of #RSGI at the @financialtimes.com FT Innovative Lawyers event!

Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jun 23

Interesting — I had a nice lunch with someone from the Center for Humane Technology, which helped with this case. Thanks for passing this along!

Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jun 20

...or on your favorite podcatcher:
kite.link/damien_riehl

Are We Doing Copyright Wrong in Music?

On today's podcast we have a truly amazing talk with Damien Riehl, a musician and technology lawyer who is one of the masterminds behind All the Music Project; an algorithmically generated catalogue o...

kite.link

Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jun 20

Great fun chatting #music + #Copyright

• Copyright protects expressions, not ideas

• AI extracting uncopyrightable #ideas (vectors), not #expressions (jettisoned)?

• #MLC style royalties statute for #AI ingested works?

youtu.be/1UjXTRw2Yck?...

Are We Doing Copyright Wrong in Music?

YouTube video by Music Tectonics

youtu.be

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jun 14

Dark day, here in Minnesota. Democrats shot and killed: How will POTUS respond? 🤷
kstp.com/kstp-news/to...

Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman, husband shot and killed; Sen. John Hoffman and wife also shot

Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband have died after they were shot at their home in Brooklyn Park.

kstp.com

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jun 14

Dark days, here in Minnesota. 🙁 These were Democrats: How will POTUS respond? 🤷

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jun 12

RIP Brian Wilson
youtu.be/9a7TENaM7mE

In My Room | Beach Boys (arr. Riehl) | Schola Diffusa (Virtual Choir)

YouTube video by Damien Riehl

youtu.be

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Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jun 7

Legal tech "learning" through redlines? This interview with Cursor engineers discusses doing reinforcement learning (RL) on PRs (pull requests), to allow the LLM to "learn" like a Jr. coder might.

Equally applicable to lawyers? Maybe RL on Track Changes redlines? 🤔

youtu.be/sLaxGAL_Pl0?...

Training superhuman coding models at Cursor

YouTube video by Cursor

youtu.be

Damien Riehl @damienriehl.bsky.social · Jun 2

Estonia's FutureLaw Conference was wonderful — filled with old friends and new ones. Tallinn is lovely, and its people are great hosts. Last year was a joy, and this year might have even been better. Thanks to Team #FutureLaw25 for an excellent meeting of smart legal minds!

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