The Silicon Review ^Asia

A chatbot that provides free legal counsel using AI is now available in all 50 states. This is following its success in New York, Seattle, and the UK, where it was invented by British entrepreneur Joshua Browder. Browder, who calls his invention “the world’s first robot lawyer,” estimates the bot has helped defeat 375,000 parking tickets in a span of two years.

Browder, a junior at Stanford University said “The legal industry is more than a 200 billion dollar industry, but I am excited to make the law free, some of the biggest law firms can’t be happy!” He believes that his chatbot could also save government officials time and money. “Everybody can win,” he says, “I think governments waste a huge amount of money employing people to read parking ticket appeals. DoNotPay sends it to them in a clear and easy to read format.”

There are countless categories for which the chatbot can provide assistance, ranging from an unfair parking ticket to reporting discrimination. It’s even capable of generating an appeal letter that the user can print out and sign.

Browder sped up the making of DoNotPay by creating a bot builder for himself to quickly drag and drop documents and automate bot creation. Then, he recruited volunteer and part-time lawyers to help him with the legal aspect of the tool. To deal with the differences between state laws, he had to work with lawyers and charities to make locality-specific bots and detect the user’s location to show only relevant local bots. Browder eventually wants the chatbot, called DoNotPay, to cover more complex legal issues like divorces, marriages, and bankruptcies. IBM has offered its Watson technology for free so that users are able to express their legal questions in natural language.