‘Robot Lawyer’ Gets Sued For Not Holding A Law Degree 

Does artificial intelligence have an artificial license?

DoNotPay, billed by its creators as the “world’s first robot lawyer,” is being slapped with a class-action suit for supposedly not having a license to practice law. Going head to head with the machine are the humans at Chicago law firm Edelson, who brought the case to the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of San Francisco on March 3.

The legal firm asserted that, “unfortunately,” DoNotPay is “not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm,” and that it doesn’t have a law degree or license. Neither is it supervised by a lawyer, Edelson added.

Instead, the complaint insisted that the platform “is merely a website with a repository of—unfortunately, substandard—legal documents that at best fills in a legal adlib.”

Founded in 2015, DoNotPay started out as a service to help clients fight parking tickets. Since then, it has added battling corporations and bureaucracy, finding hidden money, “[suing] anyone,” and automatically canceling free trials as some of its specialties. 

The recent filing was made on behalf of Jonathan Faridian, who apparently used the program to draft demand letters, a document for small claims, and job discrimination papers. To the plaintiff’s disappointment, however, the results were “substandard” and often “so poorly or inaccurately drafted that he could not even use them.”

Faridian’s attorney further stated that DoNotPay had failed to send out his demand letters to their rightful recipients.

The complaint also mentioned a review from a customer complaining that they had ended up coughing up more money for disputed parking tickets because DoNotPay did not react in time for a summons. The same customer had allegedly attempted to cancel their account but was still charged a subscription fee.

DoNotPay’s CEO Joshua Browder has argued that there is “no merit” to the case and that the company would fight back.

In a string of tweets, Browder says he started DoNotPay because of lawyers like the founder of the opposing law firm, who has pushed class-action suits onto several Big Tech companies. Browder also pulled up a 2015 New York Times report describing this lawyer as “tech’s least-friended man.”

“We are fighting back!” Browder concludes. “We have the receipts, have nothing to hide and will defend ourselves.”

“We may even use our robot lawyer in the case.”

[via Insider and Gizmodo, cover illustration 93412932 © Rainer Zapka | Dreamstime.com]