I don't think it's that unusual. It seems to me just to be a narrower version of panpsychism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

My brain can only generate electrical signals. My hand responds to electrical signals and can interact with the real world. The two together can do more than just what my brain alone can do.

If you don't trust a particular brain, don't put a gun in the hand which is connected to it. If you don't trust a LLM, don't connect it to a harness which has access to your production database and only recent backups (https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/27/cursoropus_agent_snuf...).

Better than before, yes. Good for general legal work that doesn't require robust legal research, yes. Sufficient for full legal research, no.

The problem is that "a lot of case law" isn't enough case law. You need close to everything. Otherwise this can happen: Canlii case X -> Legal principle Y. Westlaw case Z not on Canlii -> X overriden, Y no longer good law. Or you might simply not find a case which cogently supports your argument, when one does in fact exist. Or, conversely, you are unaware of a detrimental case which your opponent knows about because they have Westlaw.

In theory, any member of the public can obtain a judgment by applying for one at the court and paying a fee. That's fine if you just need a one-off judgment, don't mind paying the fee, and you're not in a hurry. It also assumes that you know which case you need.

For realistic legal research, you might need to wade through dozens of cases just to even know if any of them are relevant, you might have a deadline of tomorrow to get it done, and you might not want to pay that fee for a bunch of cases that you aren't going to end up needing. Only a company which already has a comprehensive copy of virtually every important case can help you here.

A typical workflow for a complex piece of legal research might look like this:

1. You need to research a legal topic.

2. Do some Googling, or chat to your LLM, to get a rough overview and some pointers for further research (but don't completely rely on what you find).

3. Read some professional content (e.g. Practical Law articles relevant to the topic, or a legal textbook).

4. Read the relevant legislation.

5. Use a legal database to download all the cases you found from steps 2 and 3 which seem like they might be relevant.

6. Use a legal database to download all the cases which cite the relevant legislative provisions you found in step 4 and seem like they might be relevant.

7. Use the legal database to confirm that those cases are still good law (not overridden or criticised by a later case).

8. Skim read them, discard those that turned out to obviously not be relevant.

9. Read the remaining ones more closely.

10. Note any useful-looking cases which are cited in the ones from step 9, and recursively work your way through those cases as well.

Relying on court-provided copies of judgments won't realistically help you with most of these steps.

I use AI extensively in my legal work. But I check every citation myself, manually. That means that I read the entirety of every case that I plan to cite in my output, and I check on Westlaw that it hasn't been overridden by a later decision. If you're just producing the AI's output verbatim, then you have only yourself to blame when things go wrong in the courtroom.

What legal professionals actually pay for, and that is virtually impossible to replicate unfortunately, is to give the AI access to a legal database of case law. Without case law, you can't do accurate legal research, and you are inviting disaster if you're doing things like drafting statements of case or skeleton arguments.

There's a reason why companies like Thomson Reuters have an oligopoly on these types of products, and can get away with charging thousands a year. They are the only ones with access to a comprehensive set of case law, and they've entrenched their position by having exclusive contracts with the law reporting companies. Without that, your model is just relying on publicly available cases that it can find on Google etc., and that's just a fraction of the full set.

With that said, these types of competitor products can be useful if you're just doing simple tasks like drafting letters or reviewing contracts and you accept that you need to do the legal research separately. But again, you can get that with just ChatGPT + a good prompt.

As someone who occasionally works with terminal patients, I've never seen that in practice. In reality most people desperately wish that they could carry on living, and have plenty of unfinished business that they'd like to see through. The only exception I've seen is when someone is in so much pain that they just want to end the suffering.

If we turn your argument on its head, a person who dies at 20 is just as fulfilled as a person who dies at 79. So why should anyone bother trying to live a long and healthy life?

On the other hand, $400m can ensure that for the rest of their lives they and their children and their grandchildren don't have to worry about being able to afford a home, good schools, good healthcare, etc. With future issues such as the rise of AI, global warming, and the erosion of international law, there are many dangers ahead including potential mass disruption to job markets and ability to earn a living. I'd rest easier knowing that I've given my descendants a solid chance of surviving all that, even if it means affecting my relationship with them for 10 years. It's a balance between pros and cons.