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A 19-Year-Old Made A Free Robot Lawyer That Has Appealed $3M In Parking Tickets (businessinsider.com)
schwit1 writes: Hiring a lawyer for a parking-ticket appeal is not only a headache, but it can also cost more than the ticket itself. Depending on the case and the lawyer, an appeal -- a legal process where you argue out of paying the fine -- can cost between $400 to $900. But with the help of a robot made by British programmer Joshua Browder, 19, it costs nothing. Browder's bot handles questions about parking-ticket appeals in the UK. Since launching in late 2015, it has successfully appealed $3 million worth of tickets. He is cutting into the government trough and lawyers' jobs. That's a double whammy. How long is it before the bar association and government get automated lawyers disqualified?
A world with less lawers is a nicer world.
OR usher in the new age of high-frequency lawmaking! Though, with the way our congress is moving right now, it would likely get stuck in a recursion trying to pass and repeal laws over and over again.
I'm not going to hire any robot lawyer unless it can prove it is soulless.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
In the UK, there is no monopoly on giving legal advice — only six things in the legal sphere require particular entitlement ("reserved activities"):
Anyone can give legal advice, so prohibiting just software from doing so would seem a very odd move.
The professional body for solicitors in England and Wales — the Law Society — recently released a report on "The Future Of Legal Services" and, at section 4.2, it talks through (very briefly) a number of the technology changes which will either be useful to solicitors or else challenging them.
There's no court for parking fines, they aren't criminal acts, so they keep down costs by eliminating court. You can contest a ticket for free by filing the correct form. Though, I've done it in multiple cities in multiple countries, never for London, where this is aimed (or any of the UK).
Learn to love Alaska
Around the USA, it is sometimes illegal to use do-it-yourself kits (bought in other jurisdictions) for wills, real property sales, simple uncontested divorces, etc.
I doubt that many parking tickets are contested with lawyers either way. The robot is taking jobs that the lawyers weren't getting.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm no lawyer, but I'm guessing that if this bot launched in the USA, it'd be classified similarly to LegalZoom and other document preparation services, not to mention individual income tax preparation services such as TurboTax and H&R Block At Home.
Have gnu, will travel.
http://www.americanbar.org/gro... It's also illegal in California: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-... A problem with computerizing government is that they make the rules. Idk how English government works, but in the US tickets are issued by a county government who also prosecutes unauthorized legal practice cases. I'm sure any county would miss $3m.
Since when are Chat-Bots Ro-Bots? Did I miss something about ELIZA being the first femal robot?
no thats not entrapment.
but what you wrote is ignorance.
and as long as language is a thing, regardless of its level of complexity, lawyers will be needed.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Brilliant, and about time those parasites got put in their place because most of what they do a machine could do better.
How long until the President invites him to the White House?
A world with less lawers is a nicer world.
*fewer.
Except when you do, of course.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Unsurprisingly there are a lot of comments already concerning the implications of this web site to the role of a lawyer, but maybe there is an even more important aspect here. The "success rate" statistics would seem to imply that the issuance of parking tickets in the UK is significantly more aggressive than it should be. Now this could be for a number of reasons [under-qualified ticket wardens, poor quality signs, or, perhaps, inappropriate guidance given regarding when to issue. Non-UK readers may like to know that the UK has a long and very tempestuous relationship with parking supervision; until relatively recently landowners could either clamp parked cars or have an "agent" do it for them; sadly the number of these agencies that were cowboys and scammers caused outrage and fortunately the practice was banned... When I worked in local government ~ 20 years ago, we adjusted the total price of parking tickets and fines to ensure that we recovered the cost of maintaining the car parks, providing security lighting and CCTV, collecting litter, etc, but nothing else. The car parks were basically zero-profit, cost-recovery exercises. Since then, however, government funding has changed massively, and the issue of parking tickets could well [sorry, not entirely sure either way] be a lucrative source of income for some. The success of this web site may have less to do with the need for legal skills than the likely dubious grounds under which a ticket was issued in the first place. Now what would be really interesting would be if Joshua Browder [the site developer] could pull some statistics from the site that could show which locations had the most over-turned tickets. If there were patterns in *that* data, then there might be grounds to take a closer look at the issuing agency in an attempt to put things right. Let's hope that he considers doing just that...
Charged, judged, appealed and executed within 5 minutes thanks to RoboCop, RoboJudge and RoboLawyer.
One of her coworkers (a surgeon) gave her the name of a lawyer and suggested calling him. She did just to see how they could possibly get her out of a speeding ticket. The lawyer said that the speeding ticket will be negotiated down to a non-moving violation such as improper parking. She would have to pay the full fine for the speeding ticket plus the lawyer's fee, but it wouldn't affect her insurance rates or add points to her license.
She went along to see if it would work and sure enough, the ticket was negotiated down and she paid the fine and lawyer's fee- IRIC the lawyer charged $150. No points, no increase in insurance rates.
My wife finished her anesthesiology residency just a few years ago, so life as 1%ers is pretty new to us. This event was a real eye opener. I guess this is how the 1% gets away with murder. I can't imagine what it's like to be a 0.1%er.
Parking tickets are not a "trough"
Driving is one of the most heavily subsidized personal actions in the world.
Parking fees and fines are a very very small tip of the balance back toward something remotely resembling a level playing field. Just pay for your parking and if you screw up, pay the fine and move on. You're still tens of thousands of dollars ahead of whe you would be if you actually have to pay for all that infrastructure, hit to mention the war and the pollution.
That's was my first thought, it's likely a robot issued the fine, so it's obvious a robot should have the right to dispute it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Stephen Fry
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
So it's not really a threat to the legal system but a threat to the city finances that have come to depend on the fines as a regular source of income instead of using them as a deterrent.
High frequency lawmaking would only benefit the robotic lawyers to the further detriment of traditional lawyers. This is one profession which AI could seriously bring huge benefits at the cost of many jobs. The entry level lawyer basically spends their life doing searches of laws to find something relevant to their bosses clients' cases, something that computers have been better at for almost 2 decades now.
Many people believe that only low- skilled workers will be replaced by machines. Doctors and lawyers being put out of work should be an eye opener for what is quickly heading our way. Yet absolutely no one is speaking about steps to alter society to accommodate the replacement of human workers. The old notions about retraining are obviously a joke. What is a doctor or lawyer supposed to retrain to do? Management positions are also in great danger.
Sorry - Here is a corrected version :
85% of lawyers have no good background in science and engineering. I took a para legal course and under the family law, I was able to replace 48 pages of legal statements(descriptive), by one fully loaded flowchart. We tested it with over 100 cases and it showed the right solution. My friend is a lawyer and he validate it. I had generated over 100 templates in MS Word (sorry, that is what they use), and a data base to answer questions and based on it to select the right legal brief form where just replace the variable names by actual party names. Every thing is done completely correctly. I have submitted most of them trough my lawyer to appropriate court and none had been rejected. The point it, most lawyers do not draft any thing, their para legal do the bull work. So, this robotic lawyer is in the right step. All intellectual laws should be routed through AI based legal learning systems and the mystery is removed. Tons of money and time can be saved. This boy is in the right direction and get a senior , trustworthy law student to help you
A world with less lawers is a nicer world.
A world with fewer lawyers is one where lawyers are more expensive.
Expertise is expensive. The bigger problem isn't lawyers as a whole, it's a combination of (1) major needed reforms in the legal system, and (2) the lawyers who are especially big assholes.
The second problem is especially hard to solve.
You don't need a criminal act for a court to be used, courts are also used for civil actions like disagreements about money. In the UK fines can be contested in civil courts.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Sheesh, It's just machine-assisted pro se.
Do you want to get this banned?
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
In the US, most places pass special laws to make infractions and code violations uncontestable, except to the authority that issued them. That means you can contest your ticket to the parking authority, but they don't need to hold a hearing or anything to find you re-guilty, and you hae no means of appeal, short of suing the government (something that rarely succeeds). An automated contesting bot would be useful, and wouldn't generate any secondary costs in many places.
Learn to love Alaska
Although it's reasonable to appeal parking tickets, and a 40% success rate suggests far too many bullshit ones are being issued, there's something else in the article that hasn't been discussed:
He's 19 and he's received 30 parking tickets since he passed his test.
In the UK that means he's getting at least 10 parking tickets per year. I'm averaging less than one per decade. The issue isn't the parking rules or enforcement, the issue is that this guy is quite clearly some form of total cunt.
Learn to fucking park.
Oh, you can appeal. You have to appeal to the circuit court (called superior court in some states). That means filing fees ($100-$300) and (usually) required use of a lawyer--at your expense. Thus an "appeal" can cost more than paying the fine.
227-3517
That's pretty dreadful, I'm glad we have the option of a third party to oversee justice here. Without the option of court, the govt has no incentive to be just during appeals.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
You'll think differently when it takes over the world and enslaves us all...
Exactly how is putting lawyers out of business a bad thing? Other than the unemployment, these guys in specific have been some of the most usurious jackasses, problematic to a fault, and if machines can do this to them first, then there's hope for preventing large-scale unemployment by mechanized labor.
Nobody seems to be mentioning that the success rate is not good at all...
A success rate of just over 1/3rd is nothing to be proud of, particularly if you assume a bigger percentage of people using the site were contesting the ticket precisely because they were actually innocent. Only if you assume the majority of users of the site are actually guilty, does that look acceptable.
So lawyers can still easily sell their services... merely trumpeting that they have a far better success rate, and their services will cost less than your increased insurance rates due to the citation lingering on your record.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Judges are just thief lawyer whores with robes.
Things I have consulted lawyers over: getting a divorce, consultation as to what was going to happen in a multi-car accident that our car was involved in due to a woman whose marijuana had apparently not made her drive more cautiously, trying to remedy an injustice someone else caused for me, dealing with a criminal charge against me based on mistaken identity and another factor that's downright stupid-sounding.
The common factor in a lot of this is getting things done right. I wanted to get the divorce over and done with and on terms reasonably fair to me. I wanted to see if I'd likely have to do anything to protect us in any litigation on the car crash. I wanted to get that injustice remedied. I'd really like the criminal charge currently against me to be dismissed; failing that, I want to be acquitted.
I can read and understand the laws just fine. They're all available online, and the language is, while dry, pretty clear. They're a lot easier reading than the C++ standard. I can come up with good legal arguments, according to some paralegals I've talked to.
However, I typically have one shot to get things done right in legal cases. I can't screw up, find it out in testing, and correct it before it reaches production. If I get it wrong initially, I may have serious problems. That's why it's worth hiring an expert. What I stand to lose in my current criminal case, should my side screw up, is considerably greater than what my attorney is charging me.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Robots can take the place of paralegals in many cases, and the place of lawyers in others.
What I won't get out of the robot is professional judgment. I'll get a procedure that is probably correct for most cases, which is often enough. For more serious things (like my current criminal charge), I'm going to want someone who knows what's correct for my particular case.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes