World’s First Robot Lawyer Now Offers Free Help for 1,000+ Legal Issues

Joshua Browder, the maker of DoNotPay – a chatbot dubbed as the “world’s first robot lawyer”, announced that his chatbot now offers free legal assistance for more than 1,000 legal issues.

Browder, a student at Stanford University, first got the attention of the public by developing two years ago DoNotPay – a site that features a chatbot that initially helped residents in the UK to appeal parking fines. The chatbot later extended its free legal assistance to New York City and Seattle residents. Recently, it has offered its legal assistance to all 50 states in the U.S.

Browder told India Today that it appealed 10 million dollar worth of parking fines in the UK, New York City and Seattle. In June 2016, Browder told Venture Beat that 160,000 out of 250,000 or 64% of parking tickets have been successfully challenged with DoNotPay.

The maker of DoNotPay said that legal assistance of the chatbot now extends beyond appealing parking tickets, from landlord issue to getting a refund from an airline or refund for a toaster.

In January this year, Browder was named as one of Forbes 30 under 30 in the Law and Policy category. In March this year, DoNotPay was made available in Facebook’s messenger interface to provide free legal assistance to those seeking asylum in the U.S., Canada and the UK.

Browder works with volunteer and part-time lawyers to help him with the legal aspect of the chatbot. He also works with lawyers and charities to make the legal aid locality-specific. The chatbot detects the user’s location and only shows relevant local results.