Chatbot lawyer fights unfair parking tickets

DoNotPay is an AI robot lawyer in the form of a chatbot, who will contest parking fines for free.

Hundreds of thousands of people are issued parking tickets unfairly every year, but contesting them can seem like more trouble than it’s worth, especially when the regulations aren’t entirely clear and there is mundane paperwork involved. Now, DoNotPay is a chatbot that will take over the bureaucracy for the driver, creating an appeal for them if they were wrongly fined.

DoNotPay is an AI robot lawyer in the form of a chatbot that has already won 60 percent of its 250,000 parking ticket cases in London and New York City since launching two years ago. To begin, people simply log in and answer a few multiple choice questions about their ticket. They are given a list of potential exceptions — such as “The offense was after the car was sold” or “The parking bay was too small”. Then, after choosing the appropriate one, they are presented with the right document to fill in to contest their ticket. DoNotPay is completely free to use and doesn’t charge any commission.

The bot was created by 19 year old Joshua Browder and has since been expanded to offer other free legal advice and assistance to consumers, such as applying for compensation after a delayed flight. How else could chatbots be used to help consumers undertake overwhelming tasks?