Kathryn Tewson

I had a whole class in paralegal school called “law office technology” and it was soooo dry but sooo good

I'm not a lawyer, and I wasn't even in law when my elder child was 12. (My younger kid, though, yeah.)

and yeah, concur.

(I could try and say "well I didn't say that ANY untrained 12-year-old could do it" but that's the kind of bs people pull when they are too saddlesore to admit they were wrong)

Yeah, my kids could both do it at that age, but it's plausible that they're outliers.

The labor lawyers I know are universally horrified by it, yeah.

If X is in jx and Y isn’t, that can go poorly

I do pivot tables off of n-dimensional data models!

(I am currently working on multiple 8-figure complex lit cases in my full time job AND am halfway through 2L)

Yeah. When I find the time, she says hollowly

Oh whoops, I crossed context with the discussion from two days ago. Apologies.

I’m hampered somewhat right now because I’m in law school and the restrictions on using AI are so broad and the consequences so severe that I don’t even get near them except in a VM and even that with trepidation (I don’t have the space in my setup to have separate computers for work and school rn)

The original task wasn’t about generating a TOA, either

Nothing like getting 1800 pages of faxed and then scanned bank statements in discovery

A thing I have meant to fuck around with when I have the time is to see if I can use Claude to fix the fuck-awful way PDFs export to Excel files

@akivamcohen.bsky.social can confirm, lol

Yeah but every attorney I work with uses the heading structures in word, albeit in part because if they don’t, I make them do this stuff themselves

But yes, if you did use Claude for it, IF it screwed it up it would not be like this!

I once was working with senior cocounsel and blew his damn mind when I formatted a range as a table

To be fair, I don’t know why you’d use Claude for this instead of just “insert table of contents” which is literally three mouse clicks

Than DOJ in its current iteration? No argument from me.

My original formulation of the task didn’t really require pagination — I stated “page and line number” but if it had gone to a single flat txt file line number alone would have been perfectly acceptable, the only point was to differentiate between repeated appearances

Oh, I misunderstood. What were you “not gonna say” then?

I swear on my life, every word is either the stone truth or my most sincere guess

I genuinely expected that step one for anyone doing this would be to just export the PDF to TXT

I’ll be honest, and this is my own blinders at work: it never occurred to me once that someone would begin this task by trying to interact with a PDF

Then why are you ingesting these in PDF?

wow ok so

um

you know on the ribbon where it says Normal and Title and stuff

This is a table of contents, not a table of authorities. Generating one of these takes literally three seconds if you’ve structured your document correctly. The DOJ here almost certainly either copied in the TOC from another copy of the doc, or copied the doc body to the version that had the TOC

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Go nuts!

If it helps any, the actual use case for these would be run in Word, not in PDF.