Imagine this: You’re in a courtroom accused of breaking the law. Your future rests on your legal defense. But you didn’t hire an attorney who spent years in school studying the law and many more practicing it. You’re trusting a robot to win your case.
That could be the future, according to Joshua Browder, the CEO of DoNotPay, a startup that calls itself the world’s first robot lawyer.
“It’s pay to play in the current legal system. If you know the right lawyer, pay enough money, you can pay them to grease the wheels,” Browder said. “That’s not how society should work. It should be based on the facts and the law. And I think that if AI is introduced more into the legal system, especially to defend people, it can become more objective.”
Browder raised eyebrows this week when he tweeted a shocking proposal: His company DoNotPay wants to pay an attorney $1 million to argue a Supreme Court case wearing AirPods, only repeating exactly what the robot lawyer says.
DoNotPay will pay any lawyer or person $1,000,000 with an upcoming case in front of the United States Supreme Court to wear AirPods and let our robot lawyer argue the case by repeating exactly what it says. (1/2)
— Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) January 9, 2023
Fact checkers are quick to point out that the Supreme Court bars electronic devices in the courtroom, making this scenario likely impossible. But despite that and no offers on the SCOTUS side, Browder said DoNotPay has heard from attorneys at the appeals court and district court levels.
“The lawyers were just going crazy at the idea of DoNotPay representing people in physical court rooms,” Browder said.
DoNotPay is preparing to test its lawyering skills in traffic court in February. After putting out the all call, Browder said DoNotPay got 300 offers from around the country to let the robot lawyer fight a speeding ticket. But so far, he said there are limited places where it’s legal to use a robot, so they’re testing it in the two places the company found where it’s not strictly against the rules.
Browder said the defendants will go before a judge wearing special glasses that also act as earphones. The company will pay for any imposed fines.
Anyone with a speeding ticket hearing coming up, please DM me.
We want to build a @donotpay bot that listens to the court hearing via your AirPods and whispers what to say with GPT-3 and LLMs.
We just want to experiment and will pay the ticket, even if you lose!
— Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) December 13, 2022
While applying the AI in a physical courtroom is new, DoNotPay is already applied in written form, helping customers lower bill amounts, cancel subscriptions, get refunds and get out of parking tickets. The company was last valued at $210 million in 2021.
Browder said DoNotPay is using the same technology as the up-and-coming chatGPT, called GPT3. DoNotPay has fed the robot data and documents from the past seven years and tells it to craft a defense using the provided data. But Browder acknowledges the AI is far from perfect.
“There are two things that worry us,” he said. “The first is, the robot tends to make things up. When we had disputes against Comcast going back and forth, the robot was just exaggerating. It was saying things like, ‘I had five internet outages in the past week,’ and all of this crazy stuff, which might be an effective strategy, but from a liability perspective, you can’t have a robot lie in court.”
To battle it, DoNotPay had to tell the robot not to exaggerate and stick to the information provided.
“Another issue is that the robot talks too much,” he added. “There are some things in human language where you don’t actually need a response. But with the Comcast dispute, again, the robot was saying, ‘Thank you,’ every two minutes. And so we have to stop that as well.”
He said to deal with these issues, DoNotPay built two AIs: one to decide whether to say something at all and the other to decide what to say.
Browder, who’s British, said he started the company in 2015. Coming from a country where they drive on the opposite side of the road, he said he had a hard time adjusting to traffic laws in the U.S. and would rack up really expensive tickets.
“Although I’m not the most sympathetic character, I learned that these corporations and governments, they give people tickets, not necessarily because people do things wrong, but to make money,” he said.
The way he sees it, many big companies have a business model of levying small fees on lots of people. A late fee of $10 isn’t worth fighting for most, but spread over a million people, the company can gobble $10 million.
“And that’s a great job for software to push back against that,” he said.
