The world’s first bot lawyer
How Joshua Browder employs AI to fight civic cases
Most 19 year-olds who receive parking tickets will grumble, scrounge together pocket money but finally pay up. But Joshua Browder is not most 19 year-olds.
After receiving a string of tickets in North London last year, Joshua became a parking guru researching the best ways for people to get out of their fines.
It didn’t take long before friends and family started asking for help, which prompted Joshua to build the chatbot lawyer DoNotPay to do the job automatically.
The bot begins by asking you questions about your situation and your ticket. You then complete a short form with your personal details. In less than thirty seconds you receive a 500-word appeal letter you can send to the government, complete with relevant legal precedent and a Google Map of where the incident occurred.
In a year, the app has successfully appealed over 190,000 tickets.
Rather than having a lengthy form to complete, Joshua turned to a natural language interface to gather the information. Originally he used keyword analysis but later turned to IBM Watson’s Conversation service which helped him improve accuracy by 30%. Joshua points out that being 19 he doesn’t have a PhD (he is currently studying at Stanford), but Watson helped him bring stronger artificial intelligence to his app in a matter of months.
Joshua has since turned his attention to other areas of law, including resolving landlord and travel disputes.
According to the American Bar Association, over 80% of people who need lawyers can’t afford it.
Joshua’s work illustrates how cognitive systems open up computing to address these societal problems. One area that he thinks a chat-based lawyer can make a significant difference is in the use of transcription and translation to help Syrian refugees claim asylum in the UK, his next endeavor.
Read more about Joshua in VentureBeat and The Telegraph.
