A chatbot that provides free legal counsel using AI is now available in all 50 states starting today. This is following its success in New York, Seattle, and the UK. DoNotPay was originally created two years ago by 18-year-old British entrepreneur Joshua Browder using IBM’s “Watson” AI technology. He managed to develop a chatbot capable of offering advice to motorists who wanted to dispute parking tickets. He has since expanded it to tackle other small legal disputes, such as flight delays and landlord disputes. The technology even provides legal advice to refugees completing immigration applications and applying for asylum.
The bot has since helped over 16,000 people successfully dispute their parking tickets across London and New York over a period of less than two years. That’s over $4 million worth of fines.
You can type in questions like “I got an unfair parking ticket,” or requests for legal compensation from an airline or reporting discrimination, for a total of 1,000 different categories, although results only pop up for certain keywords. If the chatbot successfully directs you to the appropriate issue, it can then generate an appeal letter for you that you can sign and print.
The letters include language like “I believe that the court should exercise fairness in cancelling a ticket that…is perfectly justified to be cancelled,” and “I feel that the issue of a ticket is an unlawful action inconsistent with precedent.” But if you stump the bot, it triggers a prompt: “Need extra help?” It then provides a rather unhelpful link back to Google.