Text| Motion Point Technology
Author| Huang Chen
Editor| Songla
This article is expected to be read for 7 minutes
Recently, foreign media reported that the first "AI lawyer" will appear in court next month to assist the defendant in the protest lawsuit to revoke the traffic ticket. When the news came out, many people felt incredulous, AI can write papers, play chess, and now help with lawsuits?
Not only that, compared with traditional lawyer services with more personalized and less transparent fees, the annual service fee of this company's AI lawyer is only $36, which greatly reduces the litigation cost of ordinary people. You know, the company's founder once revealed his dream to the outside world: to make the $200 billion legal industry free for consumers.
Genius ideas
In 2015, Joshua Browder, then 18 years old, was still studying at Stanford University. Soon after getting his driver's license, he always received parking tickets for inexplicable reasons. At the same time, he also found that as long as he wrote a letter to complain and explain the reason, he could not pay the unjust money.
Later, it found that the market demand was too large, and simply spent the night writing and developing an automated program to help people process parking tickets, and users only need to fill in the information to automatically generate application letter submission, and this is the prototype of "DoNotPay".
As the number of users increased, some users began to suggest to Joshua Browder to add more useful features such as automatic refund submission. So after a few years of development, DoNotPay has expanded from the initial parking fine to more than 150 areas of law. Currently, DoNotPay is a mobile app that leverages AI to provide legal services, available for download in the UK and US for a subscription fee of $36 every three months.
DoNotPay, like ChatGPT, which caught fire some time ago, was developed based on OpenAI's GPT-3 API, and in order to make the AI more law-savvy, DoNotPay spent a long time training it to understand a lot of case law. Users only need to download the app, talk to the robot lawyer, and the "lawyer" will fill out the form according to the information and send it to the city government to apply for the cancellation of the ticket.
It is understood that in the five years since its establishment, the company has handled more than 3 million cases, helped revoke $80 million worth of fines, and extended the scope of coverage from traffic law to immigration law.
The world's first AI lawyer will "debut"
To further confirm the company's value, the world's first AI lawyer, backed by Joshua Browder, will appear in court in February to defend a defendant charged with speeding.
Joshua Browder apparently didn't want to fight an unprepared battle, so he recently launched a call on Twitter: "Whether you are a lawyer or not, we want to give you $1 million, all you need to do is bring AirPods and repeat the words of the AI lawyer in the US Supreme Court to defend the case." ”
Here's how it works: DoNotPay launches an AI legal assistant app that can be executed by a smartphone and listen to court arguments, and the AI program receives the debate information and immediately transmits the argument to the defendant through a wireless headset. The whole process was known only to the defendant wearing wireless headphones.
As many countries and jurisdictions around the world prohibit the use of mobile phones and connected devices in court proceedings. To circumvent restrictions, DoNotPay approached the court that allowed Airpods to appear in court.
Despite the difficulties of appearing in court under legal restrictions, Boston lawyer Matt Henshon sees AI litigators as a promising innovation, and DoNotPay's AI chatbot can provide legal assistance in low-risk situations, especially for defendants seeking to defend themselves.
Legal technology also "hit a wall"
DoNotPay launched AI lawyer services, giving cash-strapped people a low-cost opportunity to reaffirm "justice." However, considering the current relevant legal obstacles, coupled with the opposition of many lawyers and bar associations, the App has no further commercialization plans for the time being, and it is in the experimental stage. And some of the problems that have already arisen among its peers cannot be ignored.
Among them, ROSS and Atrium were once the best in the industry.
ROSS, a well-followed legal technology company in the U.S. and European legal industry, was founded in 2015 and received an $8.7 million investment from Dentons-Dentons two years later. In June 2019, their original AI lawyer product was officially launched, and was called a revolutionary in the legal industry by the American Bar Association.
Less than a year after its launch, in May 2020, legal tech giant Thomson Reuters filed a lawsuit against ROSS as a plaintiff. In the indictment, they argued that ROSS stole data from its own product, Westlaw, through a third-party platform, LegalEase, without authorization.
Although ROSS has since worked hard to get rid of the basic allegations, such a lawsuit initiated by a giant is undoubtedly a huge blow for a startup. According to ROSS, the lawsuit has cost $100,000.
Therefore, under the pressure of higher litigation fees in the future, this technology company, which wants to make a revolution in the legal industry, can only declare its business.
In March of the same year, another legendary legal tech company, Atrium, announced its closure. Atrium was founded in 2017 by founder Justin Kan, a successful serial entrepreneur whose startup, Twitch, was acquired by Amazon for $970 million.
As a layman with no legal background, Justin Kan is surprised by the inefficient yet high-fee operating tradition of traditional legal services, arguing that "lawyering is a combination of art and repetitive behavior," so he hopes that Atrium can transform repetitive parts of work and automate low-value work with technology.
Atrium's business segment consists of two segments: its own law firm and an AI technology company, and Justin Kan hopes to use its own technology to improve the quality of its own law firm's services, thereby creating a catfish effect in the market.
Instead of charging high hourly commissions, Atrium instead pricing software and legal packages at a flat rate (monthly membership) with expert counsel providing advice. Although it has improved, Atrium's monthly subscription fee model is significantly lower than hourly fees, and has not been better profitable than traditional law firms.
summary
As a highly vertical market with high knowledge barriers and few practitioners, the legal industry has not been a hot 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 on algorithms and models, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, and the use of big data statistics to improve the success rate is not new.
On the other hand, there are a large number of lawyers in the industry who are also reluctant to engage in highly repetitive work, so more and more SaaS is entering the field and is replacing the work of some lawyers. In addition, there are some technology companies that provide integrated services such as document management, organization management, customer management, and billing management for legal workers. These companies are usually structured simply and are predominantly technologist, supplemented by an appropriate proportion of legal professionals to better train systems and design products.
However, even if the market already has this demand, under the influence of some giants and judicial units, how to open up the relevant regulations of AI lawyers and continue to make profits in the market is a big challenge for DoNotPay and even the entire industry.