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Chatbot Lets You Sue Equifax For Up To $25,000 Without a Lawyer (theverge.com)
Shannon Liao reports via The Verge: If you're one of the millions affected by the Equifax breach, a chatbot can now help you sue Equifax in small claims court, potentially letting you avoid hiring a lawyer for advice. Even if you want to be part of the class action lawsuit against Equifax, you can still sue Equifax for negligence in small claims court using the DoNotPay bot and demand maximum damages. Maximum damages range between $2,500 in states like Rhode Island and Kentucky to $25,000 in Tennessee. The bot, which launched in all 50 states in July, is mainly known for helping with parking tickets. But with this new update, its creator, Joshua Browder, who was one of the 143 million affected by the breach, is tackling a much bigger target, with larger aspirations to match. He says, "I hope that my product will replace lawyers, and, with enough success, bankrupt Equifax."
Not that the bot helps you do anything you can't already do yourself, which is filling out a bunch of forms -- you still have to serve them yourself. Unfortunately, the chatbot can't show up in court a few weeks later to argue your case for you either. To add to the headache, small claims court rules differ from state to state. For instance, in California, a person needs to demand payment from Equifax or explain why they haven't demanded payment before filing the form.
Not that the bot helps you do anything you can't already do yourself, which is filling out a bunch of forms -- you still have to serve them yourself. Unfortunately, the chatbot can't show up in court a few weeks later to argue your case for you either. To add to the headache, small claims court rules differ from state to state. For instance, in California, a person needs to demand payment from Equifax or explain why they haven't demanded payment before filing the form.
This shows how easy some legal steps are, but also how hard they are too. How do you get legal advice whether you should use this chatbot or sue for far more money some other way, perhaps after your data is actually used illicitly?
Over here, we call most lawyers 'solicitors'. I'm sure some have a wild, edge-of-your-seat lives, but many do 'conveyancing', which is a paper pushing exercise to do with house buying and selling. It's a job that could, and should be completely automated into non-existence, and one that a 'chat bot' could easily achieve - were it not for the insistence of various parties to post documents to each other.
My point is... a lot of legal processes are really quite simple, and only look complicated because those that execute those procedures continue to make them look more complex than they are. 'Chat bots' or other electronic solutions show just how simple those processes are, but as I say, can't really do so well at the 'advice' part of the legal profession.
"AI" is replacing lawyers. If this doesn't make our planet a better place I don't know what does.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
This is small claims court. If you want to claim more than the small claims maximum, get a lawyer and sue them in 'regular' court.
There's two issues with your postulation.
First, as JBMcB implied, automation fails at the margin. Worse still, neither it nor you will know it's failing until way too late.
Second, it is (mostly) not true that things are made needlessly complex to keep lawyers making money. All those little twists and turns represent an effort to prevent repeating something that went wrong in the past.
Now, the law is very slow to catch up with changes that might have eliminated the risk of those things going wrong again, and lawyers and lawmakers ought to review and streamline procedures to account for that. Sometimes they do, but it's usually way later than they could have, and sometimes not at all.
So what you're saying is we need chatbots in Congress?
I doubt merely being part of the disclosure would do the trick. You need to have damages in a civil suit. You haven't been harmed merely because they leaked your data, you aren't harmed unless someone uses it.
I assume that you cannot sue in small claims court if Equifax says your data/credit report/personal information wasn't affected in the hack?
To sue someone on a small claim court, you need to 1) have damages that can be quantify to an amount of money (not imaginary amount) and 2) can prove that the damages are done by their action (not circumstantial evidence or very likely to lose). If you are sure you have both, then go for it; otherwise, don't waste your time.
A friend got a summary judgment in small claims court against Dell years ago, but actually getting them to pay turned out to be incredibly difficult. They simply ignored legal documents that were mailed to them, and while the would likely piss off a real judge, the small claims court judge just kind of shrugged about it. He tried to file a seizing of assets to cover the debt - got a sheriff to look into seizing the computers and whatnot at a kiosk in a mall. Legally apparently Dell doesn't own that stuff, some franchisee does. He would need some mechanism to seize assets at Dell headquarters, and that wasn't happening. AFAIK, he never collected, and the judgment stands (and continues to accrue interest).