If you have a parking ticket you want to fight, but can’t afford a lawyer, help is on the way to Vancouver.
DoNotPay, a chatbot service that provides free legal services without having to involve a physical lawyer, is set to debut in four Canadian cities in December to help people either lower their ticket costs, or avoid paying them altogether.
The service, dubbed “the world’s first robot lawyer,” gathers information directly from the user and automatically generates the proper legal documents the user needs to send to the city to dispute their ticket, as well as anything the user might need for an in-person court appearance.
DoNotPay is also set to debut in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal next month.
DoNotPay was born out of its founder’s experience racking up parking tickets early in his driving career.
“I was a terrible driver,” said Joshua Browder, the 19-year-old Stanford University student who came up with the “robot lawyer.”
“It wasn’t long before my family and friends were asking for my help. I thought, rather than helping them individually, I should create some sort of software to do it automatically.”
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WATCH: A YouTube tutorial shows how DoNotPay handles many small claims queries and processes information simply by talking to you.
As a chatbot, DoNotPay gathers information by talking to the user like a person, asking questions about the nature of the ticket and what led to the infraction.
It then uses that information to figure out a legal defence and populate a legally sound 500-word appeal letter that can be sent directly to the authorities.
But Taryn Scollard, director of streets and engineering at the City of Vancouver, said DoNotPay may not have much of an impact in Vancouver, which has switched from a write-in or email service for ticket disputes to a phone-in system.
Browder said the service can be tweaked to adhere to Vancouver’s system, much as it has in other jurisdictions where the laws are slightly different.
DoNotPay has already proven successful throughout the U.S. and U.K., having already helped to overturn around 400,000 tickets.
Its services have since been expanded in those countries to handle many other legal needs, including landlord disputes and applications to extend maternity leaves. It’s even handling small claims against Equifax, the U.S. credit monitoring firm that was hacked in September.
Browder is working on expanding DoNotPay to handle even more legal issues, including divorce, noting that it can cost thousands of dollars just to fill out the necessary forms.
“Basically I want to level the playing field and become the justice advocate for everyone,” Browder said, adding that his goal is to remove all costs associated with legal issues by keeping the service free for consumers.
As for potentially making money from his invention, Browder admitted he hasn’t thought much about monetizing the service, but that could change one day.
“Maybe one day when I replace all lawyers, there will be some business model,” he said with a smile.
- With files from Ted Chernecki
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