What makes you think that? What they are doing is illegal. It's the unlicensed practice of law.
So, DoNotPay is basically just a scam taking money from people without providing anything of value.
But a fun fact is that magistrates generally aren't required to pass the Bar, nor hold a law degree. Most states require extremely basic courses of 40 or so hours of training. I know of a magistrate that has tried numerous times to pass the Bar and has failed. I'm not sure how much competence our system mandates.
But doing so generates lots of publicity for their online wizards that send out boilerplate legal letters.
The CEO tweeted about the system subpoenaing the traffic cop. If they actually built a system which is so advanced it can handle a court case in real time and yet so ignorant of the basics of fighting a traffic ticket it subpoenas the traffic cop it's... a very odd approach to product management for the flagship product of a legal specialist, and a bit scary to think anyone would use it. Easier to make the mistake of claiming your flagship system does stuff it shouldn't be doing if it's just vaporware and you haven't put too much thought into what it should do
I'm not at all opposed to using LLMs in the research and discovery phase. But having a naive defendant with no legal experience parroting an LLM in court is deeply problematic, even if the stakes are low in this particular category of law.
Is it more problematic than this person 1) not being represented, 2) having to pay exorbitant fees to be represented, or 3) having an extremely overworked and disinterested public defender?
I’m not convinced.
The idea that we need to wait to do this stuff until the people whose profession is under threat give “permission” is dismissible on its face and is exactly why we should be doing this is as quickly as possible. For what it’s worth, I mostly agree with you: I’m doubtful the technology is there yet. But that’s a call for each defendant to make in each new case and so long as they’re of sound mind, they should be free to pick whatever legal counsel they want.
You’re leaving off being put in jail for contempt of court, perjuring oneself, making procedural errors that result in an adverse default ruling, racking up fines, et cetera. Bad legal representation is ruinous.
I get that lawyers think their profession is important (it is) and that by and large they’re positive for their clients (they are), but there are a lot of people who simply do not have access to any worthwhile representation. I saw Spanish-speaking kids sent to juvenile detention for very minor charges conducted in English with no interpreter and a completely useless public defender. So in my view that is the alternative for many people, not Pretty Decent Representation.
There are people who can stomach the downside risks to push this tech forward for people who cannot stomach the downside risks of the current reality.
They’d be better off representing themselves than trusting a non-lawyer “lawyer” that subpoenas no-show cops. Not another Andreessen-backed cluster.
Someone with an 80 IQ and an elementary school grasp of English is going to get absolutely dragged by the system with or without a "robot lawyer" if they insist on fighting without competent representation, but they'd probably still stand a better chance of getting off a fine on a technicality if they weren't paying a VC-backed startup to write a letter make sure the cops turned up to testify against them.
They'd also be more likely to not get absolutely dragged if they listened to a human that told them not to bother than a signup flow that encouraged them to purchase further legal representation to pursue the case.
Yeah, no surprise. You seem completely unreasonable if you posit only these three options for freakin' traffic court...
If your goal is to ensure poor folks are pushed towards paying an utterly unaccountable service further fees to escalate legal cases they don't have the knowledge to win so the LPs of Andreesen Horowitz have that bit more growth in their portfolio, I can see how you would think differently.
Invest in a company doing this properly and not pushing a half-bakes fraud into the world. Supervised learning, mock trials. You’re proposing turning those poor folk into Guinea pigs, gambling with their freedom from afar.
And no, I’m not. I don’t think Defendant Zero (or one, or two, or 100) should be people whose lives would be seriously affected by errors. I’m pretty sure DNP doesn’t either.
The CEO tweeting they fucked up a default judgement [1]. That not only communicates model failure, but also lack of domain expertise and controls at the organisational level.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/questauthority/status/16175419211...
And even when they lose the win. Look at the publicity they are getting.
It really doesn’t strike me as true that law requires absolute precision. There are many adjacent (both near and far) arguments that can work in law for any given case, since the interpreter is a human. You just need no silly mistakes that shatter credibility, but that’s very different from “get one thing wrong and the system doesn’t work at all or works in wildly unexpected ways.”
Low end law will be one of the first areas to go due to this tech. DoNotPay actually has already been doing this stuff successfully for a while (not in court proceedings themselves though).