by WorldTribune Staff, June 28, 2016
A robot lawyer, working pro bono, has gotten 160,000 parking tickets overturned, saving thousands of people in New York and London an estimated $3.9 million.
The free online chatbot laywer, called DoNotPay, is touted as the “world’s first robot lawyer.” It was launched 21 months ago by self-taught British coder Joshua Browder, a 19-year-old student at Stanford University.
DoNotPay’s chat-based interface guides users through a range of basic questions, such as whether there were any visible parking signs at the location where the ticket was given, to establish if an appeal on a parking ticket is possible.
Browder said he created DoNotPay by scanning thousands of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, under the guidance of a traffic lawyer. The robot lawyer has won a 160,000 of the 250,000 cases that it has taken on so far.
“I think the people getting parking tickets are the most vulnerable in society. These people aren’t looking to break the law. I think they’re being exploited as a revenue source by the local government,” Browder told VentureBeat.