Lawyers charge hundreds of dollars per hour to copy and paste a few documents. DoNotPay’s vision is to make the law obsolete, according to Browder.
Would you put your trust in a robot lawyer? Next month, the world’s first robot lawyer DoNotPay app will appear in a courtroom in the United States.
The “DoNotPay” app employs artificial intelligence (AI) and claims to be able to “fight corporations, beat bureaucracy, and sue anyone at the push of a button.” DoNotPay was created by Joshua Browder, a 2018 Thiel fellow. He claimed that he founded the company by chance.
“I’m originally from England, and when I moved here, I was a terrible driver and began to accumulate all of these parking tickets. “As a young person, I couldn’t afford to pay these tickets, so I became a legal expert on all the reasons people can get out of parking tickets,” Browder said in a video on the company’s website.
“At the same time, I was a software engineer, and I was writing the same letter over and over again for myself and my friends. It became obvious that this was something that could so easily be automated.
According to Browder, DoNotPay hopes to get clients out of parking tickets and fight for refunds from large corporations, such as airlines. “There are hundreds of pages of rules that the government does not follow when issuing parking tickets. People get parking tickets not because they did something wrong but because the government is trying to make money and make up for lost tax revenue,” Browder explained.
DoNotPay works, according to Browder, by asking what the legal problem is, locating a legal loophole, and then inserting that loophole into a legal letter. He’s now taking his product to court.
“Lawyers charge hundreds of dollars per hour to copy and paste a few documents.” DoNotPay’s vision is to make the law obsolete. “The average person shouldn’t have to worry about paying all of this money just to get basic access to their rights,” Browder said in a video posted to the company’s website.
DoNotPay will run on a smartphone and listen to courtroom proceedings in February before telling the defendant fighting a speeding ticket what to say through headphones. Browder told NewsNation this marks the first time AI will be used in a physical courtroom. “I want to make big companies scared to mess with people and rip them off,” he said.
The defendant’s identity and the location of the court hearing have not been revealed. Browder believes that if he revealed the courtroom locations in advance, the AI cases could be halted. Billboard lawyers, according to Browder, should be concerned about his invention, but he insists that DoNotPay will only be used in limited circumstances.
“We’re staying in our lane and definitely not defending people for murder.” I believe there should be rules, but no lawyer is going to get out of bed for a $500 Comcast refund. “So that’s the ideal job for AI because it’s not replacing the lawyer but rather serving an underserved segment of the legal industry,” Browder told NewsNation.
According to the company’s website, DoNotPay is not a law firm and is not licenced to practise law. Instead, the site says it aims to make legal information and self-help materials easier to access.