'Robot Lawyer' DoNotPay is Being Sued By a Law Firm Because It 'Does Not Have a Law Degree' (businessinsider.com) 84
DoNotPay, which describes itself as "the world's first robot lawyer," has been accused of practicing law without a license. From a report: It's facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed by Chicago-based law firm Edelson on March 3 and published Thursday on the website of the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of San Francisco. The complaint argues: "Unfortunately for its customers, DoNotPay is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm. DoNotPay does not have a law degree, is not barred in any jurisdiction, and is not supervised by any lawyer." The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Jonathan Faridian, who said he'd used DoNotPay to draft various legal documents including demand letters, a small claims court filing, and a job discrimination complaint.
Per the complaint, Faridian believed he'd purchased legal documents "from a lawyer that was competent to provide them," but got "substandard" results. DoNotPay claims to use artificial intelligence to help customers handle an array of legal services without needing to hire a lawyer. It was founded in 2015 as an app to help customers fight parking tickets, but has since expanded its services. DoNotPay's website claims that it can help customers fight corporations, beat bureaucracy, find hidden money, and "sue anyone." DoNotPay told Insider: "DoNotPay respectfully denies the false allegations." It added: "We will defend ourselves vigorously."
Per the complaint, Faridian believed he'd purchased legal documents "from a lawyer that was competent to provide them," but got "substandard" results. DoNotPay claims to use artificial intelligence to help customers handle an array of legal services without needing to hire a lawyer. It was founded in 2015 as an app to help customers fight parking tickets, but has since expanded its services. DoNotPay's website claims that it can help customers fight corporations, beat bureaucracy, find hidden money, and "sue anyone." DoNotPay told Insider: "DoNotPay respectfully denies the false allegations." It added: "We will defend ourselves vigorously."
will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
Law firms are PISSED they are being undercut by automation which will only increase over time. The same automation they use in-house, of course.
Re:will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:5, Funny)
Re:will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
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The suit started because a client got substandard results.
Re: will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:2)
An open AI lawyer will be a great equalizer for the middle and lower classes. The power of law is too expensive for those classes now.
Re: will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:3)
William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV, Scene 2
Re: will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:4, Insightful)
Justice John Paul Stevens said of this line: "Shakespeare insightfully realized that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government."
Not sure that's a motive I can get behind.
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OK, OK... let's only kill the baddies.
Re: will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:2)
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No, they're pissed because this does a better job and doesn't fuck over the clients.
I am amused by your +5 insightful vote, given that literally nothing you've said - other than people not understanding the bills they get from their lawyers - is true.
Chewbacca defense: Here is this unrelated thing, focus on this.
DoNotPay plaintiffs: This thing is advertised a "robot lawyer". A lawyer is a specific thing (Words have meanings! Who knew?) No lawyers are ever in
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Lawyers are pissed that they can be replaced with a small shell script of a series of If Then statements....
Funny story years ago I wrote some Filemaker scripts that a car rental company used to send letters and demands to insurance companies to pay for clients temporary cars not only did it work it worked so well, . The result Insurance companies added the benefit to their policies as an option.
Mostly if was if/then.Today I could call it an AI and get some startup money.
Second point automated scripts are used by insurance companies to work out who pays who without paying court costs
Re:will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:5, Informative)
If it claims to be an actual lawyer then there is an actionable complaint. They even tried this stunt in court https://mashable.com/article/d... [mashable.com] and got threatened with jail.
Re:will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:4, Informative)
Their website pretty much promises to be the legal solution to, well... everything. The front page calls out nearly 150 specific problems it can deal with. You have to get into the terms and conditions before finding the statement that DoNotPay is not a law firm. I don't know if that's enough to save them. With front-page language like "The DoNotPay app is the home of the world's first robot lawyer." I'd say (in my purely non-lawyerly opinion) that there's a solid case to be made that they're claiming to provide actual legal advice.
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Maybe we should ask the DoNotPay robot lawyer if the DoNotPay robot lawyer website is breaking any laws.
Re:will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:4, Informative)
It literally describes itself as a robot lawyer
The "literally describing itself as a robot lawyer" is the reason for the complaint, and exactly why this will not be thrown out. If your faux AI software "literally describes itself as a robot engineer" and drafts plans for you to build a bridge with, you would absolutely be sued into the ground by whatever jurisdiction some dumbass tried to build that bridge in.
This guy may be a moron, but it's more in the sense of "someone who represents themselves has a fool for a client."
The same automation they use in-house, of course.
This is absolutely true, and I'm inclined to agree with you that a paralegal generating boilerplate using an expert system that an actual attorney gazes at for thirty seconds is certainly not "worth" being billed 4 hours of an attorney's time for. With that said, the attorney in question absolutely claims that as his work product and he is personally and professional liable for the consequences if he, say, files boilerplate adoption papers instead of the motion to dismiss some civil complaint that you hired him to prepare.
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When lawyers give bad advice, you can file a legal malpractice claim.
Can you file a similar claim against this robot lawyer, if it gives bad advice?
I personally don't think a business can both set itself up as a giver of legal advice, and also state that they aren't actually competent and you have to agree not to sue if they are wrong. There may be ways of resolving this that don't involve shutting the business down, and that DO involve making affordable legal advice widely available...but they are going t
Re:will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:4, Funny)
> When lawyers give bad advice, you can file a legal malpractice claim.
Sounds easy, cheap and within the reach of someone who just got corn-holed by their existing lawyer.
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How is this any different than you representing yourself and asking someone/someAI for advice?
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There's a reason for that...
Re:will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup, and reading the actual lawsuit, the claims have a are pretty straightforward failure path.
The first one, "holding itself out to be an attorney to the residents of the State of California" the company is clear in many places, including before you purchase, that that isn't the case. Lots of notices all over the place that they aren't attorneys or lawyers, and that they do not represent the user. In order to purchase you need to certify that you agree that "DoNotPay is not a law firm. DoNotPay provides a platform for legal information and self-help. ... does not constitute legal advice. We do not review any information you provide us for legal accuracy or sufficiency, draw legal conclusions, provide opinions about your selection of forms, or apply the law to the facts of your situation." If you want to put in your credit card number, you've got to agree to that, in big bold print.
The second one, "engaging in the unlawful practice of law by selling legal services to residents of the State of California when it was not licensed to practice law in that jurisdiction" is also covered in the lawsuit. They make it extremely clear before you can buy anything that you are not buying any legal services, you are buying access to forms and documents and self-help information to help you fight your own case.
Faridian can certainly file the lawsuit, that's his own choice. But given the way the company's ToS are written and the broad indemnity clause it includes, the company could quite readily sue him back to cover the costs. The contract terms specifically cover "any claim that your use of the Service violates any applicable law" so they could go after Faridian as a contract claim to recover their costs to defend from his lawsuit. While recovery of legal fees isn't normally isn't allowed as a direct counter-claim as it is in countries like the UK, that kind of indemnity clause is usually enforceable in the US as a matter of contract law. The guy is likely to go bankrupt.
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>They make it extremely clear before you can buy anything that you are not buying any legal services
If two of us agree that a dog's tail is also a leg, how many legs will a judge say a dog has?
>"any claim that your use of the Service violates any applicable law"
In the lawsuit he alleges that the forms produced were so dogshit that he never used them.
if two people write that in a contract, sure. (Score:2)
If a person agrees to sell another person 5-legged dog, using a contract that defines that the dog's tail is also a leg, then as long as both parties were aware of the terms of the contract, a court will uphold it. For the purposes of this contract and sale, the dog has 5 legs.
Now, if the person buying the dog can prove that they weren't aware of the term, and they can show that they could have been expected not to have been aware of it, a judge might rule the contract invalid.
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I hate to break it to you - wait, no I don't - but you can't loudly proclaim you are providing legal services, put in small print that you were kidding about that, and expect it to be a guaranteed get-out-of-lawsuit free card. A very, very quick perusal of the California law they purport to be relying on would tell you that. I'm not sure if you perhaps don't understand how the concept of a 'cause of action' works here, bu
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> Law firms are PISSED they are being undercut by automation which will only increase over time. The same automation they use in-house, of course.
If their jobs are threatened., can't they just "Learn to code".
Re: will be thrown out, this guy is a moron (Score:2)
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OK.. hires a robot called "DoNotPay" for cut rate services .. and *3 times* as well so he must have been happy the first 2 times.. but then complains that he got what he paid for .. I'm not sure that an app created to fight parking tickets would ever be described as a lawyer..
But they're not selling it as one either.. Anybody else would have sussed that out!
Health Insurance Companies (Score:3, Interesting)
Cool - sue health insurance companies that tell a doctor what they can order and prescribe for practicing medicine without a license.
Re:Health Insurance Companies (Score:5, Insightful)
But they don't do that, they just tell the doctor what they will cover. The doctor can always legally ignore that and send the charges directly to the patient.
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Was it procedures or medication which your insurance wouldn't cover? Because if it was prescriptions, you could get your pharmacist involved. They aren't just people who dispense drugs at Walgreens, they will also understand the medication you have been prescribed and be able to suggest a different one while reviewing your insurance coverage. I have had that happen before with a pharmacist at my local drug store.
Re:Health Insurance Companies (Score:4, Informative)
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> The doctor might have a vested interest in a particular pharmaceutical
I was assured by Pfizer, Moderna, the FDA, the CDC, corporate news outlets and the government that these conflicts of interest don't exist.
Re: Health Insurance Companies (Score:2)
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Unfortunately there is a carve-out in ERISA that protects and precludes insurance companies from being sued for making medical/treatment decisions.
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Really, if the insurance commissioner had balls, they wouldn't even be allowed to call themselves insurance companies. In car insurance, if the insurance company tries to make you use a particular body shop it's called "steering" and AFAIK it's illegal in California and maybe other states too. In health insurance they call it a "provider network" and it's legal. Why?
This is one of my many problems with the whole system. It's not insurance. It's a badly run buyer's club. Cards? Co-pays? Nonsense. If
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Cannot have people getting cheap legal help! (Score:2)
As one of the most repulsive money-grabber professions, often for rather questionable services, lawyers have to protect their monopoly.
Reminds me of one of RHAs alternate worlds where one had a "year were all lawyers got lynched".
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Re: Cannot have people getting cheap legal help! (Score:2)
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This one probably: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Yes, "RHA" seems to be a mistyping of "RAH", the initials of Robert A. Heinlein. I haven't read The Number of the Beast, but it appears to feature the crew of an interdimensional craft that visits a time/place where they had such a year: https://mycroft.heinleinsociet... [heinleinsociety.org] (see "Year They Hanged the Lawyers")
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Technically, the licensed role is attorney-at-law. Anyone who graduated law school can call themselves a lawyer, but they can't represent clients in court unless they've passed the bar exam (and remain a member in good standing of the bar).
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Typical slashdot: trying to rebut a joke with a single point of personal data, the whole time not realizing that you're arguing against a decades-old one-liner joke based on nothing but having an operational sense of humor.
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Parents are typically bias regarding their own children, so you will have to excuse us for not taking what you say at face value. Especially regarding lawyers.
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There is no shortage of nerd programmers, thus the stereotype.
There is no shortage of ambulance-chasing grasping motherfucker lawyers that will bleed your bank account dry because your choice is either that or getting fucked over even more by whatever circumstance that caused you to seek legal help; thus the stereotype.
This company with their bullshit "robot lawyer" exists for a reason - people are tired of paying hundreds of dollars to have some asshat put five sentences onto their letterhead and drop it i
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There is no shortage of ambulance-chasing grasping motherfucker lawyers
"There is not shortage of" doesn't equate to "there's more than half and thus enough to form a stereotype." Yes, it's easy to find an ambulance-chasing lawyer, but I'd wager they at most amount to
I agree that services like this are needed and am on your side in regard to using something like this for minor stuff, but I just hate it when people draw a bad image of lawyers because of a few bad apples. I've seen my share of good and great lawyers. It just "seems" that they're all bad, because they'll fi
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I'm going through a very easy, simple divorce. It's so easy, that had my soon to be ex wife and I been on the same page, I wouldn't of bothered getting a lawyer in the first place. Obviously, if we were on the same page, we wouldn't be getting a divorce.
My lawyer is doing his best to take as long as possible to get things done. He's done his best to not explain ANYTHING upfront, so I'm instead learning the correct questions to ask to move things along in a timely fashion. It's about the dumbest thing I've h
Will they eat their own dog food? (Score:5, Interesting)
DoNotPay's website claims that it can help customers fight corporations, beat bureaucracy, find hidden money, and "sue anyone." DoNotPay told Insider: "DoNotPay respectfully denies the false allegations." It added: "We will defend ourselves vigorously."
Will they use their own robot lawyer or they will go to a flesh and blood lawyer?
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Good lawyers never represent themselves. Bad lawyers might.
"Substandard results" (Score:3)
Okay, now this raises an interesting point. How much did he pay for his draft documents, and if he had paid a barred, "human" lawyer that same amount of money, would the quality have been better?
If I agree to let somebody shingle my house at a quoted price of $250 total, and I discover it was shingled using toilet paper and a Swinger stapler, did I get substandard results, or did I get exactly as much as I paid for?
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Morally, you got what you deserved.
I someone agreed to do a job and used materials not appropriate/suited for the work you'd still have a case. Generally, disclaimers/terms of service/contracts/etc. can't discount gross negligence. Shingling a house with TP would, IMO, fall under that...or willful malice which is also generally exempt.
This case will come down to what's in their terms of service/usage disclaimer and probably settle out with a fine and rebranding to remove, or at least move, the use of the
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Probably the kind with "Forever Chemicals".
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According to the complaint? (Score:2)
Unfortunately for its customers, DoNotPay is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm.
The DoNotPay should run with that. "Your Honour, the plaintiff alleges we are not a robot, a lawyer nor a law firm, and as such we don't need a law degree. Defence rests."
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Hyper-Chicken Matcluck, is that you? (Score:2)
Where is the Futurama defense?
My empathy is limited. (Score:3)
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Jonathan Faridian, who said he'd used DoNotPay to draft various legal documents including demand letters, a small claims court filing, and a job discrimination complaint.
Might be that these things each need legal addressing... or he might be somebody who reaches for the courts excessively. A side effect of making legal matters cheaper is that sue-happy twits get to indulge their propensities with even less abandon that before.
Like it or not, cost is one of the brakes on the use of the courts in society. It's wildly unequal, of course, but if the cost was made very low, the system would collapse under an absolute deluge of frivolous litigation. I don't know how you fix that.
Re:My empathy is limited. (Score:4, Insightful)
With robot judges and juries, of course!
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A side effect of having legal proceedings being expensive is that is unaffordable for poor people to get justice.
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Yep. As I said, wildly unequal. But everybody know that, and there's no attempt to hide it, at least in the United States. You get as much justice as you can afford. The poor get the public defender. The rich get the dream team.
In the U.S., justice is for sale. and for profit. Period.
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I have no doubt that's true. I didn't mean to malign public defenders. But their clients get some limited slice of their time instead of a dedicated team that money permits.
But maybe its a good thing? (Score:2)
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No, they tried that. They got threats of jail for practicing law without a license. While you have all the right in the world to represent yourself in court, you cannot offer legal advice or represent others in court if you are not a lawyer.
I've used it multiple times (Score:4, Informative)
We have a NotALawyer and are not afraid to use it! (Score:2)
All those books full of DIY legal forms (Score:3)
Pot and Kettle (Score:2)
The bot is simply assisting citizens with the necessary knowledge to represent themselves. I don't see anything wrong with it. But if you disagree, please help me understand why this law firm has the right to take the bot creator to court.
An old, but true adage (Score:2)
Do they not allow people to represent themselves? (Score:2)
I'm just trying to figure out how this works... if a person can represent themselves, and DoNotPay is not actually saying that its defense constitutes legal advice in the same sense as it would from a lawyer, I don't understand what they are doing wrong here.
Unless, as I said, they just don't allow people in Chicago to represent themselves in court, and official legal representation is always compulsory.