Less than a month after New York Attorney General Letitia James said she would be willing to seize former Republican President Donald Trump’s assets if he is unable to pay the $464 million required by last month’s judgment in his civil fraud case, Trump’s lawyers disclosed in court filings Monday that he had failed to secure a bond for the amount.
In the nearly 5,000-page filing, lawyers for Trump said it has proven a “practical impossibility” for Trump to secure a bond from any financial institutions in the state, as “about 30 surety companies” have refused to accept assets including real estate as collateral and have demanded cash and other liquid assets instead.
To get the institutions to agree to cover that $464 million judgment if Trump loses his appeal and fails to pay the state, he would have to pledge more than $550 million as collateral—“a sum he simply does not have,” reportedThe New York Times, despite his frequent boasting of his wealth and business prowess.
You do understand that they’re talking about paper, right? Even if you were feeding it to an LLM – and you wouldn’t be, because that would be legal malpractice – it would take a non-trivial amount of time just to scan it in!
It’s the legal equivalent of paying somebody with a wheelbarrow of pennies.
I think when we discuss large volumes of paper it is often the case that much of it is irrelevant and not overly hard to sort an analyze. EG he is asserting that its impossible for him to afford to do this. You don’t need to actually keep reading the statements of his resources to each of the 30 institutions he applied to nor all the refusals unless its likely that something therein may be meaningful. We can probably read ONE and skim another and conclude that the statement that he can’t raise the bond by pledging encumbered real estate he’s constantly lied about won’t work.
You do understand that AI is fully capable of reading paper, instantaneously?
Digitizing books is childs play
People downvoting me in this chain are months if not years behind AI news. Paralegals won’t have jobs in 3 years. Lawyers won’t have jobs in 5-10.
You’re refuting my comment about how humans have to laboriously scan in the documents with… a video of a human laboriously scanning in a document?
For 5000 pages, we’re still talking about hours of human labor just to operate the scanner, even if it’s a fast one.
No we aren’t. They are automated.
And actual robots are currently capable of operating them. Completely autonomously.
Again, y’all are months, if not years behind AI news.
Your own video showed a fucking human, dude.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmhIJOqepVU
Just google it. This is just the first result, normally you’d remove the spine so you don’t have to turn the pages. The book in the other video is a special one that should not be destroyed, and since that fancy shmancy thing from my link is probably more expensive than my socks, it’s done manually.
It was foggy’s job to support his argument, not mine. He should’ve done a better job (e.g. by citing the video you found instead of the manual one he picked).
Also, I wrote that it would take “hours” to scan in 5000 pages, even with a fast scanner. The scanner you cited can do 3000 pph, so it would take 1.6 “hours” to scan 5000 pages. That’s still a plural number of hours, so if that’s the fastest scanner in the world my statement remains technically correct (the best kind of correct 🤓).
Finally, even a sheet-feed* very fast automatic document scanner (especially one hooked to an LLM in an automated workflow) sounds like a pretty expensive and specialized bit of tech, and I don’t know that we can assume the law firm would’ve chosen to make that investment instead of paying clerks a bunch of man-hours to do it the old, slow way.
(* Frankly, citing a book scanner instead of a sheet-feed one is another way foggy didn’t do his argument any favors, since I would’ve been happy to concede that the documents Trump’s lawyers produced were unlikely to have been bound in book form. And even if they were bound for some reason, they weren’t the kind of thing anybody would have qualms against running through a band saw to get rid of the spine.)
It’s also over a year old.
…Again, y’all are months, if not years behind AI news.
I think you’re only partially right about paralegals, but lawyers will be fine because of how the profession is protected. It’s essentially a guild system, where you have to be a part of the lawyer’s guild (aka the bar) to legally be allowed to lawyer. And AI cannot join regardless of how good it is because lawyers want to keep their jobs. It would take legislation breaking the requirement to be a member of the bar to lawyer to change that, but the people writing legislation are themselves mostly members of the bar.
I won’t disagree but, I mean, if I’m a lawyer and I have a law firm, I’d rather split my millions with me and my robots. And I think there’s enough like minded greedy lawyers running law firms to set it in motion.
Except instead of you having to split your revenue with your fellow lawyers and having the work split among hundreds of similar firms, you now don’t have to split it, but the available lawyering work is split among everyone who can buy a chunk of compute. Unless you being an actual human lawyer is still advantageous, in which case we wouldn’t be at the point where AI is actually replacing lawyers.