Remember “DoNotPay”? They were the company, run by Joshua Browder, claiming to be the “world’s first robot lawyer.” There were all sorts of sketchy things going on, some of which dated back to “DoNotPay’s” earliest days. But things really came to a head last year when legal investigator extraordinaire, Kathryn Tewson, started digging in and finding an awful lot of questionable things going on.
In May of last year, we noted that the FTC had put out a notice which we interpreted as directly targeted at DoNotPay’s myriad false and misleading claims. It looks like we were right.
An FTC complaint claims U.K.-based DoNotPay told people its online subscription service acts as “the world’s first robot lawyer” and an “AI lawyer” by using a chatbot to prepare “ironclad” documents for the U.S. legal system. The complaint also says DoNotPay told small businesses its service could check their websites for law violations and help them avoid significant legal fees. In fact, according to the complaint, DoNotPay’s service didn’t live up to the hype. You’ll have 30 days to comment on a proposed settlement between FTC and DoNotPay, which requires DoNotPay to stop misleading people, pay $193,000, and tell certain subscribers about the case.
Respondent described the Service as “the world’s first robot lawyer” and an “AI lawyer” capable of performing legal services such as drafting “ironclad” demand letters, contracts, complaints for small claims court, challenging speeding tickets, and appealing parking tickets. Through a chatbot, subscribers would submit prompts or queries to an AI “robot lawyer” that purportedly operated like a human lawyer, including by applying the relevant laws to subscribers’ particular legal and factual situations; relying on legal expertise and knowledge to avoid potential complications, such as statutes of limitations, compensation limits, and jurisdiction, when generating legal demand letters or initiating cases in small claims court; and detecting legal violations on subscribers’ business websites and providing advice about how to fix them. In fact, the DoNotPay Service was not designed to operate like a human lawyer in these respects.
The complaint confirms basically everything that Tewson reported, and based on the timing of the investigation, it sure looks like the FTC was inspired by Tewson’s work.
They also point out that, beyond just misrepresenting the whole “AI lawyer” thing, Browder and DoNotPay inflated a user-generated comment on a site for kids that the LA Times ran as an LA Times review of the service. Really.
The donotpay.com website has prominently featured a quote that purports to come from The Los Angeles Times newspaper and states, “What this robot lawyer can do is astonishingly similar – if not more – to what human lawyers do.” Compl. Exh. F.
In fact, the foregoing quote derives from a high-schooler’s opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times’ High School Insider website, a user-generated content platform for young people.
I dunno, but it sure feels like Joshua Browder has a problem with being honest.
The complaint goes on to detail a whole bunch of claims DoNotPay made about legal services its system could offer, including suggesting it was specialized in legal expertise and could help you avoid having to hire a lawyer. But, the FTC notes:
DoNotPay did not test whether the Service’s law-related features operated like a human lawyer. DoNotPay has developed the Service based on technologies that included a natural language processing model for recognizing statistical relationships between words, chatbot software for conversing with users, and an Application Programming Interface (“API”) with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. None of the Service’s technologies has been trained on a comprehensive and current corpus of federal and state laws, regulations, and judicial decisions or on the application of those laws to fact patterns. DoNotPay employees have not tested the quality and accuracy of the legal documents and advice generated by most of the Service’s law-related features. DoNotPay has not employed attorneys and has not retained attorneys, let alone attorneys with the relevant legal expertise, to test the quality and accuracy of the Service’s law-related features.
That all seems a bit important? Maybe?
Then there’s the “diagnostic feature” that DoNotPay offered, where it said it would scan your business website and see if you violated any federal or state laws based on your email address. But, as the FTC notes:
DoNotPay’s website diagnostic tool did not, in fact, analyze a consumer’s small business website for hundreds of federal and state law violations based solely on an email address.
Also, apparently the State Bar of California had investigated DoNotPay in late 2021 and accused it of unauthorized practice of law. According to the complaint, Browder agreed to change their marketing behavior:
On or about January 21, 2022, the Chief Executive Officer for DoNotPay promised the California Bar that DoNotPay would no longer represent that the DoNotPay Service was the world’s first robot lawyer
Take a wild guess how that went?
Nevertheless, DoNotPay continued to make this representation.
On June 15, 2023, the California Bar sent a cease-and-desist notice alleging the DoNotPay Service amounted to engagement in the unauthorized practice of law. On the same day, Respondent affirmed that it had removed: a) all mentions of “robot lawyer” from the DoNotPay website and related social media; b) all products on the DoNotPay website that allowed consumers to generate legal documents; and c) any mention of “sue anyone” from the DoNotPay website. Notwithstanding these representations to the California Bar, the DoNotPay website and social media account continued to promote the Service as the “World’s First Robot Lawyer” and advertise “sue anyone” claims
Still, having to pay $193,000 seems like small potatoes for a company that has raised over $25 million from some big names like Andreessen Horowitz and DST Global (oh and convict Sam Bankman-Fried).
The company does have to alert a bunch of users to this settlement as well which might reasonably cause customers to think twice about doing business with such a problematic company.
But also, the settlement includes a consent order, which says DoNotPay cannot keep misrepresenting its products. And this is often how companies get into serious trouble with the FTC. First they do something bad and get a slap on the wrist that contains a consent decree. And then they violate the consent decree. At that point the FTC can come down on them hard.
Anyway, the company is no longer pitching itself as an AI robot lawyer, but rather your “AI consumer champion.”
Would you trust a company that just got rung up for lying to the public by the FTC about its AI capabilities to be your “AI consumer champion”? I wouldn’t.
Over the last few weeks, you may have noticed that the world’s most tenacious paralegal, Kathryn Tewson, has been carefully dismantling claim after claim after claim from the company DoNotPay and its CEO Joshua Browder. I won’t rehash all of her discoveries, but many of them called into question Browder’s apparent tendency to massively overstate what his company can do, even as he would then seek to quietly cover his tracks every time Tewson pointed out another bit of nonsense.
Browder made the incredibly unwise decision (he probably should have checked with a real lawyer rather than his fake AI lawyer) to appear on Bob Ambrogi’s always excellent podcast where he continued to just totally misrepresent a ton of things, some of which could get him into serious legal difficulty. As an aside, I saw some people claim that Ambrogi let Browder off easily each time he misrepresented things, but that wasn’t my impression at all. He kept bringing up more and more problems (sometimes citing us at Techdirt), and just let Browder hang himself with his own words. Words that I think he may come to regret.
I won’t go through the entire podcast, but I will note that Browder’s attack on Tewson is just blatantly false. He claims that DoNotPay delivered its first document to her, and then “the system” thought she was entering fake data, and therefore, for the next two filings she made, she got the notice she’d have to wait hours. Except… that’s not what happened. As anyone who read Kathryn’s article here knows, while Kathryn did request three documents, Browder got the order wrong. It was the first two that the company said would be delivered hours later. It was the third one that was delivered immediately (though it was terrible).
Also, Browder keeps insisting over and over again that Tewson is just mad because she was banned, except anyone following Tewson knows that’s false. She’s mad that Browder is misleading the public and selling a legal service that doesn’t do what it claims. He also keeps falsely saying that Tewson claimed that DoNotPay was really sending data off to “an army of people, typing out every letter manually.” He made that claim a few weeks ago too, but Tewson never said nor even implied that. Instead, she’s noted that the timing delays make it seem like DoNotPay is simply taking basic templates, a la LegalZoom, and having someone fill in the details from the submitted users, which would explain the delay. By exaggerating and misrepresenting Tewson’s claims, Browder gets to frame them as ridiculous, rather than addressing her real concerns.
Well, now he may have to address her real concerns. On Monday, Tewson filed a petition with the NY Supreme Court asking for an order for Browder and DoNotPay to preserve evidence, while also seeking pre-action discovery, as she plans to file a consumer rights suit, arguing that DoNotPay is fundamentally a fraud. The petition, written by J. Remy Green, is… worth reading. It’s quite impressive.
This action seeks pre-action discovery preliminary to a consumer rights suit over,
at its core, a $36 dollar fraud. Respondents appear to have lied to consumers and are pretending
to have cutting edge legal technology, all to scam them out of about $36 a person.
The petition lays out that DoNotPay is advertising a bunch of legal services that there is little indication it can actually provide, and calls out the similarities to Theranos.
This episode smacks of nothing so much as the Theranos fraud.
Theranos, like DoNotPay, was built on a noble idea. It was designed to cut
through medical testing using cutting edge technology. Theranos was built on the claim it had a
unique technology for blood testing that made it cheaper, more accessible, and less painful for
patients. It drew investments from across the ideological spectrum and was valued at over $10
Billion at its peak.
But Theranos never actually had that technology.
Instead, once cornered and forced to deliver a product, Theranos dressed up an
existing Seimens testing machine and ran it using too little blood for valid results.
So too here: By all appearances, Respondents are dressing up an old-fashioned
document wizard and calling it a “Robot Lawyer.” Certainly that’s what Respondents did with
the one document Petitioner was able to get before Mr. Browder personally began re-writing the
DoNotPay terms of service to basically say “TELL NOTHING TO KATHRYN TEWSON, SHE
IS BANNED FOR LIFE.”
The petition notes that it’s seeking pre-action discovery so that the upcoming suit is more accurate, and allowing Browder to show at least some evidence as to whether or not DoNotPay actually uses any AI at all.
Before bringing a consumer class action alleging this is all a house of cards, while
Petitioner believes she is able to plausibly allege the fraud, Petitioner would like to be able to
allege the details with specificity. And she would like to give Respondents a chance to show that
at least somewhere in their start up, something was running on Artificial Intelligence.
Much of the petition is basically a rewriting of the article Tewson wrote for us and various Twitter threads she’s posted on the subject.
There is some amusement in the filing, mainly in the footnotes. In one message that Browder sent to Tewson, published in the petition, Browder claims the evidence that Tewson is using his platform for inauthentic reasons is that she made up the name “James Joyce.”
In relation to the authentic usage, I messaged you on the 24th to tell you that and
reactivated your account but you should keep it real to stop our systems flagging
you. Who is James Joyce? You are clearly operating in bad faith by creating fake
names and “generating a TON of” (your words) of fake cases.
In the Ambrogi interview, Browder also calls Joyce a “fictional” character. James Joyce was a real person. He wrote fictional characters, but he, himself, is not fictional. In one of the footnotes, this aside is called out: “While not legally actionable, later statements demonstrate the literary offense that Mr. Browder genuinely appears not to know who James Joyce is.”
But the really fun footnote is towards the end, where Tewson notes that she consents to Browder using his robot lawyer to defend himself in this case, and practically dares him to do so:
For what it is worth, Petitioner does and will consent to any application Respondents make to use their “Robot
Lawyer” in these proceedings. And she submits that a failure to make such an application should weigh heavily in
the Court’s evaluation of whether DoNotPay actually has such a product.
So, perhaps Browder finally will get to test his robot lawyer in court after all…
