Three weeks ago, tech CEO Josh Browder offered a million dollars to anyone who’d let his a chatbot argue a case at the Supreme Court. Yesterday, he announced that his company DoNotPay is exiting the legal services business entirely to concentrate on consumer protection products instead.

“Bad news: after receiving threats from State Bar prosecutors, it seems likely they will put me in jail for 6 months if I follow through with bringing a robot lawyer into a physical courtroom,” he tweeted of a planned February traffic court appearance where a lawyer agreed to allow the chatbot to feed him lines through an earpiece. “DoNotPay is postponing our court case and sticking to consumer rights.”

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It’s an abrupt about-face for the company which bills itself as “The World’s First Robot Lawyer” and whose founder vowed to “make the $200 billion legal profession free for consumers.” And it comes after a month of intense pushback since Browder announced his decision to add “live” court appearances to his site’s longtime legal offerings which include divorce documents, wills, and powers of attorney, as well as various consumer-oriented services, such as canceling cable or reporting potholes to municipal authorities.

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This week, the company’s document practice received some pretty negative coverage as well, with Seattle-based investigator and paralegal Kathryn Tewson taking the site out for a spin in a viral Twitter thread that became a post on TechDirt. Tewson, a prolific participant in (what remains of) law Twitter, says her interest was piqued when Browder tweeted that his AI had issued a subpoena.

“I asked ‘who signed that subpoena?’ And he didn’t answer,” she told ATL. “So I kind of hounded him about it a little, and he still didn’t answer, and then I noticed he had deleted the tweet. So I asked ‘why did you delete your tweet about the subpoena?’ and he blocked me.”

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So Tewson plunked down her $36 for a two-month subscription, and summoned up Browder’s bots to draft a defamation demand letter, a divorce settlement agreement, and a a plain vanilla demand letter for breach of contract.

“I didn’t get either of the first two documents I generated, and got the last one instantly, and I realized that the other two documents promised personalization with relevant legal information based on facts I had given them in the prompts, and the one I got didn’t,” Tewson went on. “And then I got REALLY suspicious, because the timers they had given me were for 1 hour and 8 hours. Those are human time frames not computer time frames.”

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No updates since then. No contact from the company, no way to generate a support ticket, no hint as to what the trouble is. Just a cheerful, brightly colored promise that it's doing its best. pic.twitter.com/pFmPkBdHhL

— Kathryn Tewson (@KathrynTewson) January 24, 2023

Browder then unblocked Tewson and messaged to say that her account had been flagged for suspected inauthentic activity and that he was refunding her subscription fee. She never did get the other documents.

The second, though — and I find this much more likely based on the one-hour and eight-hour timelines given — is that this isn't AI at all; that @DoNotPay collects the information from the prompt and then hands it to a human to go find the relevant law and customize the doc.

— Kathryn Tewson (@KathrynTewson) January 24, 2023

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Browder’s customers can hardly complain if his bots are getting backstopped by actual lawyers. But if he promised investors that he’s got code that can do the job, and he’s really Mechanical Turk-ing it, that could be … problematic.

Yesterday Browder told NPR that the retreat was a response to threats from representatives of various state bars to turn him in for the unlicensed practice of law.

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“Multiple state bar associations have threatened us,” he said. “One even said a referral to the district attorney’s office and prosecution and prison time would be possible.”

Obviously Browder understands that he touched the third rail when he talked about sending his bots into court, even by proxy. But in an interview with Fast Company, the CEO made it clear that the barrier is protectionism by the industry, not a defect in the technology as it now exists.

“There’s not a lawyer who will get out of bed for a $500 refund. And that’s really where we should focus; so that they don’t come after us for the other stuff, which is a distraction,” he told FC.

And indeed, there is a strong case for empowering the average consumer to vindicate low-value claims. But perhaps the person best suited to fill this need should be someone who understands that the practice of law outside the Hague consists of more than filling in the blanks and pressing “print.”

And Browder is definitely not that guy:

There are lots of good lawyers doing great work, such as human rights lawyers and Supreme Court lawyers, but there are others who are on billboards charging hundreds of dollars for copying and pasting documents. And those are the ones that we want to replace.

The long-term goal is that we want to automate all of consumer rights. The average person should not have to see a lawyer for any reason, unless there’s a serious issue like they’re being accused of breaking into someone’s house. A normal person shouldn’t even have to know what a lawyer does.

Well, we assume that everything on the up and up over at DoNotPay. But if it isn’t, we’re guessing Browder will magic up a robot lawyer to protect his interests. Wouldn’t want to waste hundreds of dollars an hour on copypasta, right?

The World’s First Robot Lawyer Isn’t A Lawyer, And I’m Not Sure It’s Even A Robot [TechDirt]
Why legal services chatbot DoNotPay is abandoning its idea of putting a robot in court [Fast Company]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Topics

DoNotPay, Joshua Browder, Technology