Скачать или смотреть British student creates world's first robot lawyer

(13 Nov 2016) FOR CLEAN VERSION SEE STORY NUMBER: 4065173

LEAD IN:
Could the next piece of legal advice you receive be from a robot?
A British student has developed what's claimed to be the world's first robot lawyer, helping unhappy motorists appeal against parking tickets.

STORY-LINE:
Meet Joshua Browder, a second year student at Stanford University and founder of 'DoNotPay', what's claimed to be the world's first robot lawyer.
Frustrated at having received several parking tickets, London-born Browder was driven to develop an automated system which helped appeal them.
After first sharing his creation with family and friends, the economics and computer science student then saw his robot lawyer called upon by thousands of unhappy motorists.
"I created this almost as a side project, but then 9 months later, millions of dollar's worth of tickets were appealed and over 180,000 tickets were successfully overturned," he says.
"And this made me realise that this issue of helping people with the law is bigger than just parking fines.
"So, I expanded to flight delays, PPI compensation in the UK and now property.
"So you can fight your landlord if they're not repairing the property or they're keeping your security deposit."
The 19-year-old's creation doesn't look like a legally trained C3PO or even SoftBank's talkative Pepper robot.
Instead it takes the form of this website chatbot, which asks a variety of questions on the user's specific issue before generating a legally sound appeal.
"First, it asks you a few questions about your ticket to find out exactly what's wrong," explains Browder.
"For example, it will ask you 'Was the parking bay too small?' or 'Was it hard to understand the signs?'
"Once it knows the legal issue, it then takes down details and then places these details into a legally-sound appeal which can be sent directly to the local authorities."
For parking tickets, the robot can even use Google Street View to include a picture of where the ticket was issued.
The technology may seem limited, but even some of the world's largest law firms are experimenting with automation.
Here at Linklaters law firm in London, they've experimented with using automation to search and review certain documents.
Partner Edward Chan says they're taking small steps to automating some processes currently conducted by lawyers, but a robot lawyer is merely science fiction.
"We're not yet at the point, I don't think, where that technology translates into an industrial-scale use across, certainly across our firm, our across our industry," he says.
"So just on the basis of simple automation, we think there's still quite a long way to go before just the simplest of processes can become automated."
As with other industries, Chan believes the legal profession can benefit from using automation to complete "low-end' or "tedious" tasks.
This then frees up legal experts to concentrate on more difficult challenges.
"Our general conception of automation of lawyers is that it takes away the burdensome, what we term the low-end, more tedious activity and empowers lawyers to focus on what they've been trained to do," he says.
"So it takes some of that drudgery away from them."
Browder says 95 percent of lawyers he's encountered have been broadly supportive as it's clear his smart bot won't be taking their place in court just yet.
The other 5 percent believe this kind of technology isn't suited to the legal profession.
He's just happy his robot lawyer is empowering vulnerable people to avoid paying charges they can't afford.


Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork
Twitter:   / ap_archive  
Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​
Instagram:   / apnews  


You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...