What started out as a legal chatbot that was
widely successful in beating parking tickets has now expanded to cover 1,000 areas of the law.
Joshua Browder, the 20-year-old Stanford student who created DoNotPay, the UK’s first robot lawyer, has announced that he and his team have expanded the capabilities of his creation to cover even more areas of the law. The expansion comes after the system was tweaked to
aid refugees, assist law firms in
building their own robot lawyers, and
help the homeless.
Browder, in announcing the expansion of the legal chatbot
on Medium, said that it would be impossible to follow up on every single expansion idea pitched by lawyers, activists, charities, and students. There are other problems the legal world is facing, he said.
“Law firms have no incentive to innovate. The people making decisions (law partners) are old and will retire soon. They don’t want to give up their share of profits to invest in long-term technology,” Browder wrote.
This presents a problem in raising money to develop technology as the traditional law firm partnership structure makes it difficult to raise outside capital beyond loans. In addition to being costly, technology scares lawyers, he said.
“Lawyers spend their entire day defending and initiating litigation. They know exactly what happens when something goes wrong,” Browder said.
Those who want to create a legal chatbot using DoNotPay’s technology can do so even without technical know-how by signing up
here and sending the form to
[email protected]. Creators would retain the rights to the document, but they do have to give permission to DoNotPay to create the bot and send the link.
The expansion is starting with what Browder says is the lowest-hanging fruit, which is automating documents where all that’s needed to changed are text variables.
Related stories:
Parking ticket robot lawyer now aids refugees
19-year-old’s free robot lawyer beats tons of parking tickets
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