In August, 2015, Joshua Browder, a British entrepreneur, then a junior at Stanford University, created DoNotPay the first chatbot to offer assistance in fighting traffic tickets. Since then, the bot has beaten over 300,000 tickets. The DoNotPay bot uses AI to create a pdf ready for the user to send to the court. Like a legal Mad-Lib, the bot asks the user questions and then uses the responses to fill in a form letter that fits the situation – no sign posted, wrong day or time, whatever. From this initial bot, Mr. Browder has expanded to a website that helps with other situations where a person might need help crafting a strongly-worded letter with all the right legal phrases – returning a defective product, getting compensation for subpar service, or getting your landlord to fix that leaky sink.
This article was first published in the December 2016 issue of WIRED magazine