DoNotPay, the chatbot that became known for helping users challenge thousands of unfair parking fines and refugees apply for asylum, has announced a massive expansion to bring its AI-based free legal counseling to 1,000 different areas of law in all 50 US states and across the UK.
The new broad range of capabilities include bots to apply for more parental leave, fight a fraudulent purchase on your credit card, claiming lost luggage for an airline, make insurance claims, resolve landlord disputes and lots more. The bot won't help you take on court battles, but it can help with anything involving documents --- users simply state the problem they are trying to solve, answer a few questions, and DoNotPay will fill out the right forms or generate letters for you.
Joshua Browder, the British entrepreneur behind the so-called "robot lawyer" has been working with volunteer and part-time lawyers to deal with the differences between state laws and make locality-specific bots. IBM also offered its Watson technology for free to DoNotPay, making the tool smarter about figuring out what users need when expressing their legal questions in natural language.
If it can't help with someone's specific legal queries, DoNotPay may still be able to refer the person to a resource, law firm, or charity that's willing to help.
The service started as a side project for Browder but he is now working on it full time as an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) at Greylock and receiving advice from the firm. It's already saved people an estimated $9.3 million disputing 375,000 parking tickets.
Browder hasn't accepted any outside funding as of yet, but he's considering some monetization options down the road while keeping the service free for users. One option is sponsorships, like a car dealership sponsoring a parking ticket bot specific to its city, for example
The new capabilities that come with today's update are available through the web only, not the Facebook Messenger chatbot were the service originated.