Recently, foreign media reported that the first “AI lawyer” will appear in court next month to assist the defendant in a lawsuit to revoke the traffic ticket. When the news came out, many people felt incredible. AI can write papers, play chess, and now it can help with lawsuits?
Not only that, compared to the traditional lawyer services whose charges are more personalized and not transparent enough, the annual service fee of the AI lawyers of the company we want to mention is only 36 US dollars, which greatly reduces the litigation costs of ordinary people. You know, the founder of the company once revealed his dream to the outside world: to make “the $200 billion legal industry free for consumers.”
genius idea
In 2015, Joshua Browder, who was only 18 years old at the time, was still studying at Stanford University. Soon after getting his license, he kept getting parking tickets for inexplicable reasons. At the same time, he also found that as long as he wrote a letter to complain and explained the reasons, he could not pay the wronged money.
Later, it found that the market demand was too great, so it simply spent a night writing and developing an automated program to help people deal with parking tickets. Users only need to fill in the information to automatically generate an application letter to submit, and this is the prototype of “DoNotPay”.
After the number of users came up, some users began to give suggestions to Joshua Browder, hoping to add more practical features such as automatic submission of refund applications. So after several years of development, DoNotPay has expanded from the initial parking fines to more than 150 legal areas. Currently, DoNotPay, as a mobile app that uses AI to provide legal services, is available for download in the UK and the US for a subscription fee of $36 per three-month period.
DoNotPay, like the popular ChatGPT some time ago, was developed based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 API. In order to make artificial intelligence understand the law better, DoNotPay spent a long time training it to understand a large number of case law. Users only need to download the app and have a conversation with the robot lawyer, and the “lawyer” will fill out the form based on the information and send it to the city government to apply for revocation of the ticket.
It is understood that in the five years since its establishment, the company has handled more than 3 million cases, helped to revoke $80 million worth of fines, and its coverage has also extended from traffic law to immigration law.
The world’s first AI lawyer will “debut”
In order to further prove the value of the company, with the support of Joshua Browder, the world’s first AI lawyer will appear in court in February to defend a defendant accused of speeding.
Joshua Browder obviously didn’t want to fight unprepared, so he launched a call on Twitter not long ago: “Whether you are a lawyer or not, we want to give you $1 million, all you need to do is bring AirPods and repeat in the Supreme Court of the United States The words of the AI lawyer to defend the case.”
The specific operation is roughly like this: DoNotPay launches an AI legal assistant app that can be executed by a smartphone and listen to court debates. After the AI program receives the debate information, it will immediately transmit the argument to the defendant through a wireless headset. The entire process was only known to the defendant wearing the wireless headset.
Many countries and jurisdictions around the world prohibit the use of mobile phones and internet-connected devices in court proceedings. To circumvent the restrictions, DoNotPay has found courts that allow Airpods to appear in court.
Although it is difficult for AI lawyers to appear in court under legal restrictions, Boston lawyer Matt Henshon believes that AI litigation lawyers are promising innovations. DoNotPay’s AI chatbots can provide legal assistance in low-risk situations, especially for self-defense The defendants helped a lot.
Legal technology also “hits a wall”
DoNotPay launched the AI lawyer service, so that people with poor pockets also have the opportunity to reiterate “justice” at a low cost. However, considering the current legal obstacles and the opposition of many lawyers and bar associations, the app has no further commercialization plans for the time being, and it is all in the experimental stage. And some problems that have already appeared in its peers cannot be ignored.
Among them, ROSS and Atrium were once the best in the industry.
ROSS is a legal technology company that has received wide attention in the European and American legal industries. It was established in 2015 and received an investment of US$8.7 million from Dentons-Dacheng Law Firm two years later. In June 2019, their first-generation AI lawyer product was officially launched, and was called a revolutionist in the legal industry by the American Bar Association.
Less than a year after its launch, in May 2020, legal technology giant Thomson Reuters filed a lawsuit against ROSS as the plaintiff. They believe in the indictment that ROSS stole data from its own product Westlaw through the third-party platform LegalEase without authorization.
Although ROSS has been able to get rid of the basic charges through its efforts, such a lawsuit initiated by a giant will undoubtedly deal a huge blow to a start-up company. According to ROSS, the lawsuit has cost $100,000.
Therefore, under the pressure of higher legal fees in the future, this technology company that wants to revolutionize the legal profession can only declare bankruptcy.
In March of the same year, Atrium, another legendary legal technology company, announced its bankruptcy. Atrium was founded in 2017. The founder Justin Kan is a successful serial entrepreneur. His start-up company, the live game platform Twitch, was acquired by Amazon for $970 million.
As a layman without a legal background, Justin Kan is surprised by the traditional legal service inefficiency and high fees. He believes that “lawyer service is a job that combines art and repetitive behavior”, so he hopes that Atrium can Transform repetitive work parts and automate low-value work with technology.
Atrium’s business sector consists of two parts: its own law firm and an AI technology company. Justin Kan hopes to use his own technology to improve the service quality of his own law firm, thereby creating a catfish effect in the market.
Atrium abandoned the set of charging high commissions on an hourly basis, and instead priced software and legal service packages to attract customers at a fixed rate (monthly subscription system for members), during which professional legal consultants provided consulting services. Although the efficiency has been improved, Atrium’s monthly subscription fee model is significantly lower than the hourly fee, and it has failed to make better profits than traditional law firms.
Summarize
As a highly vertical market with high knowledge barriers and few employees, the legal industry has not been a popular track for technology venture capital. However, this does not mean that technology is not needed in the industry. In fact, the legal industry also relies heavily on algorithms and models, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States. It is not new to use big data statistics to improve the winning rate.
On the other hand, a large number of lawyers in the industry are unwilling to engage in highly repetitive work, so more and more SaaS enters this field and is replacing some lawyers’ jobs. In addition, some technology companies provide integrated services such as document management, organizational management, customer management, and bill management for legal workers. The structure of these companies is usually simple, mainly based on technical personnel, supplemented by an appropriate proportion of legal professionals to better train the system and design products.
However, even if the market already has this demand, under the influence of some giants and judicial units, how to pass the relevant regulations on AI lawyers and continue to make profits in the market is not small for DoNotPay and the entire industry challenge.
