Legal bytes

I was both intrigued and puzzled by the piece at reference 1 the other day. A piece built around the experience of lawyers, particularly patent lawyers, that clients were increasingly using AI tools to generate an increasing volume of letters to their lawyers. Which was fine for the lawyers in the case that the work in question was paid for by the hour, not so fine in the case of fixed price work. Either way, the amount of work was going up - and the question for me was, was this a good thing? Was the increased spend on lawyers justified by better outcomes? Was it a zero-sum game, in which there were inevitably winners and losers? Have we really moved on from a world where the side which throws the most money at the case tends to win?

Given that the principals in a civil case care enough about the matter to go to law, their lawyers are going to try hard to get it right - and plausible stories from Gemini are going to need some support, some corroboraton. 

A criminal case is different in the sense that one might be prepared to pay quite a lot to reduce the risk of a miscarriage of justice, particularly in a case where conviction might result in a long custodial sentence or worse. A sort of insurance against disaster, rather in the way of insuring a tanker on the high seas. Or a house in the suburbs.

Then there is the consideration that there may be no ground truth, so solid foundations on which to build the evidence of truth. Even in what might look like a straightforward case of murder, I imagine it is often hard to be sure about intent, about malice aforethought.

Then, this morning, in the course of reading reference 2 - of which more in due course - I came across the term 'asweddumised land'. I asked Bing, but he, on this occasion was no help at all, while Google offered the snap above on the clue 'asweddumised land holding sri lanka'. Which was plenty good enough for me to make some sense of what Leach was saying about land holding in a village in Sri Lanka. 

All in all, not much further ahead on whether all this AI is going to be a force for good or a force for bad. And I continue to worry that all this treasure being poured into building and running shiny new data centres might be put to better uses - like providing decent work for young people. But we do have a bit more grist for the mill.

PS 1: gmaps does not know about this village, Pul Eliya in the north central province, but it does know about the district town, Anurādhapura, ten miles to the south. Probably a much bigger place now than when Leach was writing, well over half a century ago.

It took the power of Gemini to work out that the modern spelling was Pulleliya. Or perhaps Puleliya according to gmaps. There was also some confusion of east and west. So while Gemini did indeed find the place for me, and provide plenty of interest, he did make some mistakes along the way, the sort of mistakes which might upset a lawyer.

While here things are a bit simpler: once Gemini has found the right answer, checking that it is the right answer is not so bad - and the noise on the way is not to the point. A bit like a safe: if someone tells you the combination, it is easy enough to check that he has got it right. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, it is not like that.

PS 2: somewhere along the way, Google was also able to point me to reference 3, interesting in a different way.

PS 3: I have been reading reference 2 at reference 5, a scanned version of the print copy held by San Francisco Library. I had been frustrated by the absence of a couple of pull outs, notably the one snapped above from a pdf of reference 6. A not very strong image and the legend has been cropped. So I was pleased this lunchtime by the arrival of a copy in nearly new condition, from the people at reference 4, for a lot less than I was likely to have spent going to London for the day to read the copy they no doubt hold in the SOAS library. Now I can take as many days as I like to read it in the comfort of my own chair.

Plus, I am old enough to still be more comfortable reading from a book than from a screen.

If time starts to drag this afternoon, I can always ask Gemini what all the numbers on the San Francisco library card are about. For example, '333.3'. My bet is that he would have a pretty fair stab at it. While my-new-to-me copy does not come from a library at all, rather from gentleman with a name which looks Dutch to me, a gentleman who bothered to get himself a stamp with which to discretely name his books.

In the meantime, reference 7 reminds me of the still unfinished business which took me to SOAS in the first place.

PS 4: Friday, further thoughts in the ground truth department, prompted by a short piece in the Guardian - which also prompted the thought that, as a country, we are far too keen on expensive inquiries into the conduct of people who are mostly doing their best in difficult circumstances. Not to mention big compensation payouts when they get it wrong. Compensation payments which we can ill afford.

But to return to the matter in hand, I associate to my mother who, certainly for a while, used to suffer from migraines. These sometimes happened when she was driving to work - in the Cambridgeshire countryside, rather than on anything like the M25 - in which case she would pull over and wait for it to pass. I don't know if she took any medication, but I don't think that there was ever any kind of accident on this account. But suppose there had of been; suppose there had been a serious accident which was the direct result of this known medical condition. Would her error of judgement have morphed into criminal liability? There are various medical conditions which are notifiable in this sense and which disqualify one from driving, but there must be a big grey area, where one is relying on the good sense of the driver concerned and that of his or her medical advisors. Good sense which is clearly absent in the case of some of the elderly drivers I have known here at Epsom.

Suppose one had a very vague warning of the onset of a migraine, but thought it was OK to push on for a bit anyway. And then it turned out that it wasn't? After the event, it might be quite hard to sort out to one's own satisfaction exactly what had happened, never mind some third party adjudicating from the wings.

A criminal error of judgement beyond all reasonable doubt? A civil error of judgement on balance of probability - whatever that might mean in a civil case?

All very difficult.

References

Reference 1: Clients’ barrage of AI-generated queries risks pushing up lawyers’ fees:Firms may raise prices for fixed-fee contracts if clients keep sending flurries of emails and letters - Elizabeth Bratton, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 2: Pul Eliya: A village in Ceylon. A study of land tenure and kinship – Leach E R – 1961.

Reference 3: https://thuppahis.com/2020/12/21/introducing-pul-eliya-by-edmund-r-leach/.

Reference 4: https://www.pendleburys.com/.

Reference 5: https://archive.org/.

Reference 6: Lines: A Brief History – Ingold, T – 2007. 

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/another-library.html.

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