‘Robot’ enters the legal domain to defend humans in the USA

It is the time when the world is getting introduced to the integration of AI and Law. In the coming month, a ‘Robot Lawyer’ or an Artificial Intelligence Computer app will argue in the Court of Law, in the USA.  

The next month during a case, the ‘DoNotPay App’ will run on a defendant’s smartphone and record the arguments in real-time, and will direct the defendant on what statements to say, via an earpiece.  

‘Joshua Browder’, the Founder and CEO of DoNotPay, stated that he invented this company by accident. He said in a video on the company’s website that he was originally from England and when he moved there, he realized that he was a terrible driver, and he began to accumulate all the parking tickets. He said that being a young person, he could not afford to pay for these tickets, so he became a legal expert about all the reasons people can get out of parking tickets. At the same time he was a software engineer he said. He developed this software that deemed ‘World’s First Robot Lawyer.’ 

The DoNotPay App uses artificial intelligence (AI) and claims it can “fight corporations, beat bureaucracy and sue anyone at the press of a button.” 

“With parking tickets, there are hundreds of pages of rules the government doesn’t follow when they issue these tickets. People get parking tickets not necessarily because they did something wrong, but sometimes because the government is trying to make money and make up tax revenue,” Browder said. 

What Browder has to say about the Robot?

According to Joshua Browder, his app works by asking what the legal problem is and finding a legal loophole, he inserts that loophole into a legal letter. He is taking his produce into a courtroom the following month. 

Browder gives the explanation to various issues, including the monetary interests, charges levied upon, and many more issues that a layman usually faces, and he believes in introducing Artificial Intelligence integrated with the procedural Law, to provide legal aid in such matters. 

Browder also pointed out that “Lawyers are charging hundreds of dollars an hour for copying and pasting a few documents. Our vision at DoNotPay is to make the law free. The average person shouldn’t have to worry about paying all of this money just to get basic access to their rights.” He later added: “I want to make big companies scared to mess with people and rip them off. I want to be like the general counsel for the consumer and fight back against these issues.” 

A Report from the New Scientist says that DoNotPay will run on a smartphone and listen to the court proceedings in the month of February. Then, it will communicate with the defendant via headphones, directing him on what to say while fighting a speeding ticket. 

Therefore, Browder told the NewsNation host Leland Vittert, that this marks the first time AI will be used in a physical courtroom. 

However, this entire concept has got an unfavorable reaction from the Lawyers. 

“Lawyers are saying I should be in jail. They’re very angry because their profession is threatened. But we found two areas where the court rules don’t explicitly forbid AI and technology and electronic devices. It was a struggle finding courtrooms where this would be allowed, but we found two,” Browder said. He stated that Billboard lawyers should be worried about this invention because DoNotPay would be used for specific cases only. 

Browder also contended in the NewsNation video that “We’re staying in our lane and definitely not defending people for murder. I think there have to be rules, but there’s no lawyer who’s going to get out of bed for a $500 Comcast refund. So that’s the perfect job for AI because it’s not replacing the lawyer, it’s serving an underserved kind of part of the legal industry,” 

However, the company’s website says DoNotPay is not a law firm and is not licensed to practice law. Instead, the site says it aims to make legal information and self-help easier to access. 

This is the first time AI is merging with the Legal domain, and this new domain altogether is going to have controversial debates on the existence and dominance of one domain over the other. The world is moving forward, and we can see Technology combining with all the fields. However, rest is up to mankind, to determine its utilization. 

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