Robot – Law Street https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com Law and Policy for Our Generation Wed, 13 Nov 2019 21:46:22 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8 100397344 Free Chatbot Lawyer Makes Legal Aid More Accessible https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/technology-blog/free-chatbot-lawyer/ https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/technology-blog/free-chatbot-lawyer/#respond Fri, 14 Jul 2017 18:24:33 +0000 https://lawstreetmedia.com/?p=62122

DoNotPay isn't quite Iron Man's J.A.R.V.I.S., but this robot can help you traverse confusing legal paperwork.

The post Free Chatbot Lawyer Makes Legal Aid More Accessible appeared first on Law Street.

]]>
"blue robot" Courtesy of Peyri Herrera License: (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Need to fill out legal forms but can’t afford a human lawyer? Well, there’s an app for that. DoNotPay, a chatbot that has been dubbed “The World’s First Robot Lawyer,” provides free legal aid to users on issues ranging from appealing parking tickets to landlord disputes. Don’t expect the robot lawyer to represent you in court any time soon, but it can arm you with some of the tools and knowledge to deal with your legal case.

The artificial intelligence asks the user a series of questions about their legal issue. Then, after learning about the user’s personal situation, the AI can help fill out necessary legal forms or provide links to other resources. Joshua Browder, the founder and CEO of DoNotPay, launched the bot in 2015 to help people appeal their parking tickets. According to The Telegraph, DoNotPay has helped beat an estimated 375,000 parking tickets worth around $10 million since its launch. But the bot hasn’t stopped there.

DoNotPay started out in London and was programmed with New York City laws soon after. Since the bot first went live two years ago, it has expanded its reach to the rest of the United Kingdom and United States and will be able to assist people with 1,000 areas of law. A Facebook Messenger portion of the app can even help refugees complete immigration applications for the U.S. and Canada, and apply for asylum support in the U.K.

Browder, who was named on multiple Forbes 30 Under 30 lists for Europe for 2017, hopes DoNotPay will provide better access to legal resources for lower income individuals. The 20-year-old Stanford student told VentureBeat that DoNotPay started as a tool to fight his own parking tickets, but ended up revealing to him “how lawyers are exploiting human misery.”

“From discrimination in Silicon Valley to the tragedy in London with an apartment building catching fire, it seems the only people benefitting from injustice are a handful of lawyers,” Browder said. “I hope that DoNotPay, by helping with these issues and many more, will ultimately give everyone the same legal power as the richest in society.”

With tools like DoNotPay, people may not have to pay a hefty price for a lawyer to help them fill out legal paperwork. But for more complex cases, a human touch might still be the better way to go.

Marcus Dieterle
Marcus is an editorial intern at Law Street. He is a rising senior at Towson University where he is double majoring in mass communication (with a concentration in journalism and new media) and political science. When he isn’t in the newsroom, you can probably find him reading on the train, practicing his Portuguese, or eating too much pasta. Contact Marcus at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Free Chatbot Lawyer Makes Legal Aid More Accessible appeared first on Law Street.

]]>
https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/technology-blog/free-chatbot-lawyer/feed/ 0 62122
Get a Parking Ticket? A New “Robot Lawyer” May Soon Be Able to Help https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/technology-blog/get-a-parking-ticket-a-new-robot-lawyer-may-soon-be-able-to-help/ https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/technology-blog/get-a-parking-ticket-a-new-robot-lawyer-may-soon-be-able-to-help/#respond Tue, 23 Feb 2016 21:40:23 +0000 http://lawstreetmedia.com/?p=50831

Ok, it's not really a lawyer, but it's close.

The post Get a Parking Ticket? A New “Robot Lawyer” May Soon Be Able to Help appeared first on Law Street.

]]>
"Robot" courtesy of [Michael Dain via Flickr]

The future is now–there’s a robot lawyer that can get you out of parking tickets in the United Kingdom…sort of. Joshua Browder, 19, who is certainly way more impressive than I was at the same age, made a “robot lawyer” that helps people appeal parking tickets. Since the site, donotpay.co.uk launched late in 2015, it has appealed more than $3 million in parking tickets, and it may soon make its way across the pond to the United States.

Browder is now a freshman at Stanford University, and he launched donotpay.co.uk (aka the robot lawyer) last year. It’s still in beta mode right now, but the full version will go live this spring.

The concept is pretty simple–if you need to appeal a parking ticket you go to the site and it takes you step-by-step through the process. According to Business Insider:

Once you sign in, a chat screen pops up. To learn about your case, the bot asks questions like ‘Were you the one driving?’ and ‘Was it hard to understand the parking signs?’ It then spits out an appeal letter, which you mail to the court. If the robot is completely confused, it tells you how to contact Browder directly.

The robot lawyer is also being taught how to help people navigate certain insurance claims and deal with delayed or cancelled flights.

So, the robot lawyer isn’t a lawyer exactly, but rather a tool that can automize tasks that were traditionally done by a lawyer–and often done expensively. Of course, the robot lawyer cannot dispense subjective legal advice, because that is something that only humans can legally do.

Robot lawyer is, however, learning:

Browder programmed his robot based on a conversation algorithm. It uses keywords, pronouns, and word order to understand the user’s issue. He says that the more people use the robot, the more intelligent it becomes. Its algorithm can quickly analyze large amounts of data while improving itself in the process.

Browder has big plans for this kind of tech–he’s starting to program in New York City laws, and he’s working on a version that will help Syrian refugees apply for asylum. Browder’s tech, whether or not you want to call it a “robot lawyer,” is pretty cool, and it’s certainly a cost and time-saving measure. I don’t think we’ll see robots arguing in a courtroom anytime soon, but we may all have an easier time when we get into a scuffle with a broken parking meter.

Anneliese Mahoney
Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Get a Parking Ticket? A New “Robot Lawyer” May Soon Be Able to Help appeared first on Law Street.

]]>
https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com/blogs/technology-blog/get-a-parking-ticket-a-new-robot-lawyer-may-soon-be-able-to-help/feed/ 0 50831
Where Inventions, Privacy, and Economics Intersect: R2D2’s Evil Twin https://legacy.lawstreetmedia.com/news/where-inventions-privacy-and-economics-intersect-r2d2s-evil-twin/ Tue, 10 Dec 2013 16:49:14 +0000 http://lawstreetmedia.wpengine.com/?p=9626

Robots are the future- and they are already here. Although, the average “joe” may not interact with these human replacements, military personnel, across seas, encounter robots on a daily basis.  Today, there is a powerful shift in robotic technology for domestic use. In fact, just last Monday, Amazon strategically released their drone delivery concept. Robotic […]

The post Where Inventions, Privacy, and Economics Intersect: R2D2’s Evil Twin appeared first on Law Street.

]]>

Robots are the future- and they are already here. Although, the average “joe” may not interact with these human replacements, military personnel, across seas, encounter robots on a daily basis.

 Today, there is a powerful shift in robotic technology for domestic use. In fact, just last Monday, Amazon strategically released their drone delivery concept. Robotic machinery is blending into the average citizens’ everyday life. So should we be worried?

Well that depends…

A company, Knightscope, in California has recently developed a robot called K5 Autonomous Data Machine (this machine is quite remarkable).

Within months of its debut, this security robot has already created quite a ruckus — “R2D2’s evil twin,” to be exact according to Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, in Washington, DC.

What makes this robot truly evil? Well…

 The first point is obvious. This device is the NSA’s fantasy; a harmless looking device that collects images and records sound 24/7.

Now, some may say this is awfully Orwellian. Yes, that may be so, but the intentions are good. William Santana Li,  co-founder of the technology company that created K5 Autonomous Data Machine claims that they created this robot “after what happened at Sandy Hook”, based on their assertion that “[we] are never going to have an armed officer in every school”.

School shootings have become more prevalent in the United States over the past few years. There have been 34 shooting events in 1990’s contrasting with 86 shooting events between 2000-2013, according to the American Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Consequently, K5 Autonomous Data Machine was developed to ensure the safety and security of schools, and possibly an alternative to human guards.

But did you catch that second detriment? No? Human Security will be rendered pointless. Is our world becoming so efficient that it is destroying the working middle class?

Yeah, robots are efficient. Yeah, it’s cheap. Yeah, it’s cool and futuristic, and it feels like you are living on Tatooine.

 But this could drastically hurt our economy, on such a large economic scale proving esteemed economist, David Author, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s theory that technology decimates the working class.

In the United States, the Federal minimum wage in $7.25 an hour, while the implementation of K5 would short the American middle class by an entire dollar at a mere $6.25 an hour reported by the Department of Labor.

This also brings up the recurring argument of privacy vs. security. How much is the common citizen going to compromise in order to procure their safety?

However, I am less worried about security than I am more concerned about the dying off of the middle class. At what point do you draw the line? Case and point, robots don’t need to worry about feeding a family.

 At the end of the day, people are going to complain about both sides. Either, there is not enough protection, or it is too invasive. Myself personally? I’m conflicted. As of now, I want to see more of Evil R2D2.

[NY Times]

Featured image courtesy of [littlelostrobot via Flickr]

Zachary Schneider
Zach Schneider is a student at American University and formerly an intern at Law Street Media. Contact Zach at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Where Inventions, Privacy, and Economics Intersect: R2D2’s Evil Twin appeared first on Law Street.

]]>
9626