There’s only so much that can fit and it has to be comprehensible to lots of different people.
I wonder if this relates to one of the takeaway lessons—perhaps we should give additional priority to showing drafts to people in different portions of the target audience, and discerning whether the message is conveying fair and accurate impressions to those different audience segments.
In my day job, I often write about niche topics for which I have much greater background knowledge than certain important audience segments will have. My immediate teammates often have a similar kind of background knowledge and understandings (although usually at a lower level by the time I’ve invested tons of time into a case!). So showing them my draft helps, but still leaves me open to blind spots. Better to also show my draft to some generalists, or specialists in unrelated areas of the law to figure out whether they are comprehending it accurately.
A mini-redteaming exercise might also help: Are there true, non-misleading one-sentence statements that my adversary could offer as a response that would have some reasonable readers feeling mislead? I see this issue in legal work too—a brief that could be seen as hiding the ball on key unfavorable facts or legal authorities is just not effective, because the judge may well feel the author was either of low competence or attempted to pull the wool over their eyes. After this happens ~two or three times, the judge now knows to view any further work product from that attorney (or on behalf of that client) with a jaundiced eye.
I should acknowledge that how much to engage with bad facts/law in one’s own legal advocacy brief is a tough balancing act on which the lawyers on a team often disagree. I assume that will be true in AI pause advocacy as well.
I wonder if this relates to one of the takeaway lessons—perhaps we should give additional priority to showing drafts to people in different portions of the target audience, and discerning whether the message is conveying fair and accurate impressions to those different audience segments.
In my day job, I often write about niche topics for which I have much greater background knowledge than certain important audience segments will have. My immediate teammates often have a similar kind of background knowledge and understandings (although usually at a lower level by the time I’ve invested tons of time into a case!). So showing them my draft helps, but still leaves me open to blind spots. Better to also show my draft to some generalists, or specialists in unrelated areas of the law to figure out whether they are comprehending it accurately.
A mini-redteaming exercise might also help: Are there true, non-misleading one-sentence statements that my adversary could offer as a response that would have some reasonable readers feeling mislead? I see this issue in legal work too—a brief that could be seen as hiding the ball on key unfavorable facts or legal authorities is just not effective, because the judge may well feel the author was either of low competence or attempted to pull the wool over their eyes. After this happens ~two or three times, the judge now knows to view any further work product from that attorney (or on behalf of that client) with a jaundiced eye.
I should acknowledge that how much to engage with bad facts/law in one’s own legal advocacy brief is a tough balancing act on which the lawyers on a team often disagree. I assume that will be true in AI pause advocacy as well.