World’s First Robot Lawyer Counseling Clients

A company called DoNotPay uses an AI-powered robot to interview clients about their legal problems, then uses the answers to complete and submit legal paperwork on their behalf. According to the company’s owner, Joshua Browder, the legal industry is poised for disruption because most services are overpriced, and involve nothing more than standardized processes and boilerplate language. He says he will consider his enterprise a success when the word “lawyer” is no longer in the lexicon for ordinary people. His company’s initial focus was on fighting parking tickets, which he characterizes as an unfair tax on the poor. DoNotPay successfully overturned citations about half the time, and claims to have saved users $16 million in fines in its first three years. Now it is expanding to cover a broad range of legal problems. Browder’s ambition is to make the complexities of the legal system a bigger pain for government than for average people, thus forcing lawmakers to slash red tape.