British programmer Joshua Browder is helping¹ people save a lot of money on legal fees with his latest project - the world's first robot lawyer. The 19-year-old developed a free service that allows users to ask any kind of legal question and receive relevant answers autogenerated by bots.

 

英国程序员约书亚·布劳德只有19岁，他的新项目——世界上第一个机器人律师，能帮人们省下不少法律费用。用户询问的任何法律问题，机器人程序都可以自动生成相关答案，而且此项服务是免费的。

 

Browder first started the project last summer as a free website to help people appeal unfair parking tickets. He came up with the idea after getting a series of tickets himself for "trivial reasons". Having wasted several hours on writing appeals to these tickets, he realised that many people do not have the time, legal knowledge or even the energy to appeal. So he decided² to create an automatic appeal generator³, using previously⁴ successful letters as a template. He aptly named the service DoNotPay, given that the legal fees involved in challenging tickets could mount up to sizable amounts between $400 to $900.

 

DoNotPay was a huge success, and the tech genius has now gone a step further with the website, converting it into a full fledged robo lawyer equipped to help with a range of legal issues. "I realised that the best way to help people would be to create a computer program that could talk to users, generate appeals, and answer questions like a human," he told Mashable. "The robot can currently handle parking ticket appeals, payment protection insurance (PPI) claims and delayed flights/trains. It can also answer some general legal questions like 'I can't afford my ticket. What do I do?'"

 

"I am ultimately looking to give it as much functionality as possible in the spirit of trying to replace the large group of exploitative lawyers," he added. To use the service, users need to go to the website donotpay.co.uk and sign up for free. Once signed in, the robot will ask the user a series of questions about their situation. When it has collected enough information, and if the person has legal grounds for an appeal, the robot will then generate a letter for the person to use.

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