AI Legal Eagle: Artificial Intelligence Chatbot To Provide Counselling In All 50 States

DoNotPay, an artificial intelligence based chatbot, which provides free legal counsel using artificial intelligence, will be available in all 50 states starting Wednesday. The chatbot has been developed by Joshua Browder, a British entrepreneur who calls it the world’s first robot lawyer.

The bot has helped defeat 375,000 parking tickets in a span of over two years in cities such as New York, Seattle, and London.

Read: Humans vs. AI: The History And Future Of Artificial Intelligence

According to Browder, DoNotPay is yet to face legal repercussions from the government. But instead of becoming an aberration, it might actually be helpful in government processes.

“Everybody can win. 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,” he told the Verge on Wednesday.

Its ability to provide information across state lines is based on local databases created with the help of lawyers and charities. Since state laws differ from each other, the bot is developed in such a way that it is locality-specific and shows only relevant local bots by detecting the user’s location.

The user facing a legal issue can just click on the bot’s URL and put in his/her query like ‘How to seek legal compensation for discrimination from an airline’ or any of the 1,000 different categories and if the user feels that the bot has directed you to the issue properly, an appeal letter can then be generated, which can then be signed and printed.

The bot can help in the case of routine legal issues such as maternity leave requests and insurance.

It currently offers a free service and has saved users $9.3 million in fines till date, according to Engadget.

DoNotPay was initially created as a bot which could automatically drag and drop documents. Browder then managed the legal aspect of the tool with the help of lawyers he recruited.

Apart from DoNotPay, Browder has also created Visabot, a service which will help immigrants with the procedure for applying for a green card or permanent residence, right from filling up the form to preparing for the citizenship interview.

Read: How Facebook AI-Based Visabot Will Help In Your Green Card Application

While legal work cannot be fully automated soon, in more complex cases, you will need a lawyer to represent you in court, AI might make routine legal issues easy to handle for the average users. The reason why AI can provide legal help is that the field relies massively on documentation. An artificial intelligence technique called natural language processing is useful in scanning and predicting what documents are relevant to a certain legal issue.

But, could it actually replace real-world lawyers in the future? We don’t know yet.

“Where the technology is going to be in three to five years is the really interesting question. And the honest answer is we don’t know,” Ben Allgrove, a partner at law firm Baker McKenzie, told the New York Times in March.