To date, DoNotPay has resolved over 2 million cases and offers over 200 use cases on its website. Though DoNotPay has not disclosed its revenue, it charges $36 every two months. Given this, it can be estimated that DoNotPay is generating $54 million in annual revenue, assuming that all 250K users subscribe for 1 year."[1]
$193K seems like a pittance compared to the money they're making off of this.
> "what this robot lawyer can do is astonishingly similar—if not more—to what human lawyers do."
Wow!! That seems so simple, and literally a few weeks to do in today's ecosystem, now thoroughly testing make take a little more time, but wow, I wonder if it was evening attempting to do RAG.
There is no world in which allowing that to happen is a good idea.
Can't they ask ChatGPT to write some objection and, at the end of the prompt, put "but make it look like it was written by a lawyer" and send that to the court to waive the fine?
Please read my comment as a joke. The title really sounds funny!
Lawyers at huge firms or companies automate the hell out of their legal actions against normal citizens and get things wrong all the time. But it’s okay if they do it because they’re part of the same cabal keeping the legal system afloat. Say what you want negatively about some dark patterns and marketing BS, they’re making legal things affordable to the every day person.
The fine seems fair for overhyped marketing claims, but I hope they keep going and improving.
Of course this didn't stop them raising $10m from credulous investors in 2021.
It felt like a shaky premise at best as far back as I can remember. Even "standard" things often have many intricacies that a person might not know to say, and it may not let them know/ask them about it.
As an example, think of all the questions TurboTax et. al ask about taxes.
As an example I parked my car to drop my daughter off at a party and paid online - but mistyped the little number for the car park and ended up paying for 3 hours parking somewhere across the country.
Naturally the private car park tries to charge me 20x the parking fee as a “fine” - which they can whistle for frankly. But they sent varying letters that sound but don’t actually say “court” or “legal action” (things like “solicitors action prior to court”
I kept sending them the same answer they kept rejecting it
Then they actually sued me in county court. Oh wow I thought I better pay. And as a court judgement is really bad on credit record (one above bankruptcy) it’s serious. But I checked the court website anyway to be extra careful. And Incoukd challenge it - actually appear before the beak and say “hey it’s not my fault”.
So I filled in the form that says “yes I will challenge it, see you in court”
That might my wife said don’t be fucking stupid they have won pay them
So I went back the next day - and guess what - they had after 9 months withdrawn their action against me, no further need to progress, cancelled
I called the court to find out WTF
They had, and do every week, mass spammed the court with hundreds of parking cases, knowing that pretty much everyone would act like my wife pay a couple of hundred quid not to risk their credit record. I mean a county court judgement and you can kiss a mortgage goodbye.
That is simple abuse - an overworked courts system, hundreds probably thousands of rubbish claims that are put simply to strong arm people to pay up with legal threats, and no genuine attempt to filter out cases with merit, or even only look at “repeat offenders”
But is it worth the time of any parliamentarian to take this on (well frankly yes it would be great backbencher cause celeb, but what do I know.
Anyhow there was a point here - there are many many legitimate companies whose ficking business model is based on legal strong arming anyone who makes a minor infraction and that’s ok, but having a scam my business model to fight the scammy business model is bad?
Yes DoNotPay could have stayed on the right side of the line - but then would frankly run out of money. I guess we can only put our Hope in the hands of our elected representatives:-)
Especially when you are really just shoving data into an LLM and expecting a response to do some job, you are not training it to do a specific task.
Like the home buying AI that was on HN yesterday.
And yet people keep thinking so, both selling it as magic, and buying it as magic, and not once taking the time to consider what the words on the paper might mean.
Back in the day, anyone who touted AI generated works by default exclaimed that the work was not as good as a human. That changed now but was a valid statement back then.
Wow, that's brave. Create a wrapper around ChatGPT, call it a lawyer, and never check the output. $193k fine seems like peanuts.
Sometimes I think about where I would be in life if I had no moral or ethical qualms. I'd probably be running a company like this.