DoNotPay Team Have Brilliantly Leveraged RPA To Build Customized Bots That Enact Over Fifty Different Features
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Navigating the legal system on your own is challenging. Legally contesting a simple parking ticket takes an unnecessary amount of time and energy that the average person doesn’t have. Most people will forego the hassle and pay the fine. The law, in all of its majestic equality, frustrates both the rich and poor, which is why the former can pay lawyers to navigate the arcane legal system on their behalf. The latter, however, is free to suffer indignity and inconvenience equally under the law.
Joshua Browder refused to accept the Western legal system’s biased status quo, leading him to create DoNotPay. DoNotPay is the first consumer Robotic Process Automation (RPA) startup for protecting consumer rights. The San Francisco-based startup has raised a total of $25M in venture capital funding from Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, Felicis Ventures, Day One Ventures, and Global Founders Capital.
Alex Rampell, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, says, “Large companies are using cutting edge software to automate their own processes, but tools for consumers are still stuck in a pre-Internet era. Navigating bureaucracy – in government, the medical system, and corporations – is a highly regressive tax in that rich people can pay to solve problems, but the poor must use their time, miss work, and lose wages. DoNotPay turns the table, by creating the same cutting-edge software, only this time, in the hands of the average person.”
Citizens in Western society have to interact with antiquated digital forms from archaic, slow-moving bureaucracies and massive, unfriendly corporations to resolve issues that impede their daily routine. For example, getting a parking ticket in America can be a hassle. Deciding to fight against paying the fine is a greater ordeal. Average citizens generally do not have the time to spend hours waiting or hiring a lawyer to dispute a parking ticket in a court of law, especially when the odds of overturning the fine are low. According to the L.A. Times, during the 2016-17 fiscal year in Los Angeles, “L.A. parking enforcement officers issued 2.3 million citations…more than 46,000 parking tickets were overturned.” Only a small percentage of these parking tickets will be disputed, as most don’t have the resources on hand to mount a defense. The successful dispute rate on average across the U.S. is 40%. Those who are fined understand that trying to talk your way out of a fine is more or less a gamble. The house always wins, and they win by a large amount; thus, most people decide to pay if they aren’t in the wrong.
One could conclude that Americans commonly run afoul of the law, and while that might be true, there are other important factors at play. Studies show that the top sixteen U.S. cities generate over $1.4 billion in revenues from parking tickets alone. New York City has the largest share of the parking fines accumulated with $545 million, followed by Chicago with $264 million collected. Given the low probability of those ticketed even trying to dispute their ticket, local police forces in these cities may be encouraged to issue parking tickets without abandon, knowing that the fines will most likely be uncontested and paid. Another consideration is that cities depend on revenue from fines to help fund their fiscal budgets for the year. The combination of these poor incentives results in money being siphoned from average Americans in a virtually incontestable fashion. Local and state governments are not the only ones harvesting citizens for revenue – corporations are in on it too.
Similar to dealing with government bureaucracy, resolving monetary disputes with financial corporations is no walk in the park either. These massive faceless entities that loom over consumers with their opaque presence. They leverage their market power to beat the latter into financial submission. Take, for instance, Comcast, one of the largest cable and internet service providers in the U.S., and coincidentally, one of the most unpopular corporations existing today. Comcast is known for its deceptive practices charging illegal fees to its consumers. These fees generate millions in ill-gotten revenues for Comcast (the cable and internet service provider generated $103.56 billion in revenues in 2020 for reference). Unless customers are diligent and persistent enough to identify these unfair fees and mount a defense against them, most of them will end up paying the price without putting up a fight.
Usually, the only thing that can get a corporation the size of Comcast to curtail its unfriendly consumer practices is a state’s attorney general launching a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the latter’s customers. But these efforts come too little too late, and even in the best-case scenario where the state wins, the amount settled by corporations is routinely less than the amount they took in with the illicit fees. Consumers and citizens need an effective way to fight back against having to fork over their hard-earned cash from unaccountable governments and corporations.
Browder built DoNotPay as a tool to arm the average person with software to beat back larger foes trying to take advantage of them. DoNotPay bills itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer.” With a press of a button, the startup allows its users to “fight corporations, beat bureaucracy and sue anyone.” How can traditionally complex, time-consuming, manual processes be completed with one tap of the finger?
The answer is RPA. RPA is commonly used in enterprise software companies to automate manual tasks. The tasks that can be automated are ones that have defined, structured data and input forms with detailed step-by-step processes of what operations are executed on the data throughout its lifecycle. Over the past decade, RPA has proliferated within the enterprise software business, leading to multi-billion dollar public companies such as UiPath (whose CEO, Daniel Dines, has angel invested in the standout company). However, consumer applications of RPA have been limited to specific use cases. Yet, Browder and his DoNotPay team have brilliantly leveraged RPA to build customized bots that enact over fifty different features or use cases for users to use DoNotPay. These use cases range from submitting warranty claims to cancelling any service or subscription. The team’s ability to break down complex legal forms and processes into a series of discrete steps that a bot can process is central to the startup’s success.
This news was originally published at Forbes