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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?
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.
That should be "fewer lawyers". A world with better spellers would be nice too. As would a world with a little attention to proper grammar.
Alas, the latter two worlds are by far the more likely.
And even in the strict sense, you can't count lawyers, like you can't count cockroaches. There are too many of them, and nobody wants the job of counting them. So less would be correct by all rules.
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How would that make it any different from a regular lawyer?
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...