Technology
‘Robot lawyer’ website DoNotPay settles FTC claims it couldn’t deliver on promises
DoNotPay, a website that billed itself as the “world’s first robot lawyer,” has agreed to pay $193,000 to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission that it did not live up to its claims. (Screenshot from the DoNotPay website)
A website that billed itself as the “world’s first robot lawyer” has agreed to pay $193,000 to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that it did not live up to its claims.
The DoNotPay website agreed to settle the FTC allegations without admitting or denying them, according to a proposed consent order.
Besides paying $193,000, DoNotPay agreed to refrain from making claims about its ability to substitute for legal services without evidence to support them, the FTC said in a Sept. 25 press release. The company also agreed to provide a notice to consumers who subscribed to the service from 2021 to 2023 about the limitations of its law-related features.
The DoNotPay legal chatbot was founded in 2015 to help people fight traffic tickets, but it later expanded to help people with other legal matters. The company claimed that it could sue for assault without a lawyer, could “generate perfectly valid legal documents,” and could replace the legal industry with artificial intelligence, according to the FTC.
“DoNotPay, however, could not deliver on these promises,” the FTC said in its press release.
According to the FTC complaint, the company didn’t conduct testing to see whether its AI chatbot was producing content that equaled that of a human lawyer. Nor did the company hire or retain lawyers, the complaint said.
The FTC complaint included a quote on the DoNotPay website said to be from the Los Angeles Times: “What this robot lawyer can do is astonishingly similar—if not more—to what human lawyers do.”
The quote actually came from a high school student’s opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times’ High School Insider website, which was a user-generated content platform, according to the FTC.
DoNotPay technologies recognized statistical relationships between words, used chatbot software to converse with users, and used an interface to connect with ChatGPT, according to the FTC.
None of its technologies was trained on a comprehensive database of federal and state laws, regulations and judicial decisions, or on application of the information to fact patterns, the FTC said.
The cost of a consumer subscription varied, but it was $36 every two months at times relevant to the complaint. The company also offered a “Small Business Protection Plan” for $49.99 per month at times relevant to the complaint.
In a concurring Sept. 25 statement, Lina M. Khan, the FTC chair, and Melissa Holyoak, the FTC commissioner, said the settlement “does not suggest that consumers should use expensive professional services, or that companies should avoid offering innovative products that reduce the need for high-priced lawyers. The misdeeds of a few bad apples shouldn’t dampen pro-consumer innovation.”
DoNotPay’s founder, Joshua Browder, is a 2017 ABA Journal Legal Rebel.
Publications that covered the settlement include Above the Law, Law360 and Ars Technica.
A DoNotPay spokesperson told Ars Technica that the company “is pleased to have worked constructively with the FTC to settle this case and fully resolve these issues, without admitting liability.”
“The complaint relates to the usage of a few hundred customers some years ago (out of millions of people), with services that have long been discontinued,” the spokesperson said.
DoNotPay agreed in June to settle a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California claiming that the company “is not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm.” The plaintiff had said he used DoNotPay to write several legal documents, but he couldn’t use some of them because they were “poorly or inaccurately drafted.”
See also:
Inside the claims against DoNotPay’s Joshua Browder and the ‘World’s First Robot Lawyer’
Judge tosses UPL suit against ‘robot lawyer’ DoNotPay, saying law firm plaintiff was not harmed
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