19-year-old builds robot lawyer, overturns 160,000 parking tickets
In his second year at Stanford University, London born Joshua Browder created DoNotPay, the "world's first robot lawyer."
The program, coded solely by Browder, has overturned 160,000 parking tickets in 21 months across New York and London. Working at no charge, for free, saving people a total of $4 million in fines, DoNotPay swiftly revolutionized the industry with people still staring in shock.
"There are ethical and legal limits to what [robots] can do. Programs such as this one do not, at least in my humble opinion, threaten the legal profession writ large," Bradley Moss, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who works on national security issues told TechInsider. "They will, however, continue to streamline processes for handling simple tasks that arguably people should be able to handle without the need for – and expense of – formal legal assistance."
But are robots the future of the legal field?
"Until we get machines that are smart enough to look for and understand the legal implications of a particular email or document or voicemail message, I think lawyers being lawyers and clients being clients, somebody’s going to have to actually go through and make sure it's OK to produce it," Karl Bayer, a lawyer in Austin, Texas who is often hired to oversee the electronic discovery process, told the Monitor.
Browser believes regulation can hinder instead of help in many situations. "As a 19-year-old, I have coded the entirety of the robot on my own, and I think it does a reasonable job of replacing parking lawyers," he says, after receiving 30 parking tickets himself.