By: Eric Richard
Not that long ago there was no such thing as an app store, the word “smartphone” wasn’t commonplace, and artificial intelligence existed only in science fiction. Today, we know a very different world. Companies fight to have a best-selling app, smartphones are considered a necessity for everyday life, and artificial intelligence is finding a place in industry after industry.[1] The legal profession is no exception.[2] Year after year people are “taking the law into their own hands,” whether it be through the use of websites like LegalZoom or any number of others. People are trusting lawyers less and trusting their own abilities more. It was only a matter of time before artificial intelligence started playing a role in an attempt to do what lawyers have spent years being trained to do.
One segment of artificial intelligence, natural language processing, is already capable of scanning documents and anticipating their relevancy to a particular case.[3] While some aspects of a lawyer’s work will likely always be safe from machines and artificial intelligence, such as appearing in court, any automation is always cause for concern. [4] Basic document review has already been “outsourced,” although to machines and not to persons of other countries than the United States, with more and more likely to follow.[5] This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all, with less time needed to be spent on menial tasks, lawyers will be free to devote more time and manpower to the more complicated aspects of work that come with a common law system.[6]
But what happens when a program is capable of handling more than just the menial tasks? What happens when an app could handle actual lawyering and cut the attorney out of the equation altogether? That’s exactly what people like Justin Kan and Josh Browder are trying to do.[7] Kan is an entrepreneur who is responsible for the video game streaming service, Twitch.[8] After selling Twitch to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars, Kan has set his sights on a different venture, and now operates a legal technology start-up in Silicon Valley.[9] It’s called Atrium, and the company isn’t just looking to replace the menial tasks done by lawyers, it’s engineers are hoping to design artificial intelligence that could even issue stock options to employees of a corporation or assist with fundraising from venture capitalists.[10]
While Kan’s work is still in the early stages, Browder has released an app just this month called DoNotPay that looks to further chip away at the work lawyers are traditionally hired to do.[11] At first, DoNotPay was just a tool that people could use to challenge a parking ticket without the need of an attorney, but now a new update will reportedly allow the user to sue anyone in small claims court in all 50 states.[12] The latest version of the app is still in its infancy, and we have yet to see what successes and complications are going to come, but it’s fair to say that innovation is never going to slow down. Artificial intelligence is muscling its way into the legal profession and apps like DoNotPay might just be the first of it but will certainly not be the last.
[1] See Dan Mangan, Lawyers could be the next profession to be replaced by computers, CNBC (Feb. 17, 2017, 1:55 PM), https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/17/lawyers-could-be-replaced-by-artificial-intelligence.html.
[2] See id.
[3] See Steve Lohr, A.I. Is Doing Legal Work. But It Won’t Replace Lawyers, Yet, N.Y. Times (Mar. 19, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/technology/lawyers-artificial-intelligence.html.
[4] See id.
[5] See id.
[6] See id.
[7] See Elizabeth Dwoskin, This Silicon Valley start-up wants to replace lawyers with robots, Wash. Post (Sept. 14, 2017), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/09/14/this-silicon-valley-startup-wants-to-replace-lawyers-with-robots/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7a7097ee6959; See also Jason Tashea, DoNotPay app aims to help users sue anyone in small claims court–without a lawyer, A.B.A. J. (Oct. 10, 2018, 9:30 AM), http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/file_a_smalls_claims_suit_anywhere_in_the_country_through_an_app/?utm_source=maestro&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekly_email.
[8] See Dwoskin, supra note 7.
[9] See id.
[10] See id.
[11] See Tashea, supra note 7.
[12] See id.
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