Here is the top five of our most read blog articles for July 2017:
One year ago, we wrote about the world’s first robot lawyer. Donotpay.co.uk was created by Joshua Browder. It is a website with a chatbot that started off with a single and free legal service: helping to appeal unfair parking tickets. When the article was published, the services was available in the UK, and in New York and Seattle. At the time, it had helped overturn traffic tickets to the value of 4 million dollars. Apart from appealing parking tickets, the website could already assist you, too, in claiming compensation if your flight was delayed. Since then, a lot has happened. By now, DoNotPay has successfully appealed traffic tickets to the amount of 10 million dollars. But, more importantly, its activities have expanded considerably. And in the last year, several other legal chatbots have seen the light of day, as well.
Let us start with DoNotPay. A first important expansion came in March 2017, when it started helping refugees claim asylum. Using its chatbot interface, DoNotPay can offer free legal aid to refugees seeking asylum in the US and Canada, and assists with asylum support in the UK.
A second, and far more massive expansion followed only days ago, on 12 July 2017, when DoNotPay started covering a much broader range of legal issues. Its new version can offer free assistance in 1,000 legal areas, and does so across all 50 US states, as well as in the UK. It can now, e.g., assist you in reporting harassment in the workplace, or to make a complaint about a landlord; or it can help you ask for more parental leave, dispute nuisance calls, fight a fraudulent purchase on your credit card… The new DoNotPay covers consumer and workplace rights, and a host of other issues.
Browder didn’t stop there. Because he wants to address the issues of ‘information asymmetry’ and ‘inequality of arms’, as of 14 July 2017, DoNotPay is opening up so that anyone can create legal bots for free, with no technical knowledge. If you want to create your own free legal chatbot, all you have to do is fill in this downloadable form, and send it to automation@donotpay.co.uk.
Another interesting legal chatbot, is Law Bot, which was created by a team of Cambridge University law students, consisting of Ludwig Bull, Rebecca Agliolo, Nadia Abdul and Jozef Maruscak. When Law bot was launched, it only dealt with aspects of criminal law in the UK. More specifically, the bot wanted to inform people who had been the victim of a crime about their legal rights. What had motivated the creators, was the observation that most advice from lawyers on legal rights of the victims of a crime felt like it was written mainly for the use of other lawyers, rather than to help inform the general public, who were in fact the people most in need of the information. The first version of Lawbot guided its users through a series of questions and answers that helped them to assess what, from a legal perspective, may have happened to them and what they should do next, such as to formally report a crime to the police.
A second Law Bot initiative was Divorce Bot. It asks its users questions via an internet-based interface to guide them through the early days of a divorce. The chatbot explores different scenarios with them, and helps clarify their exact legal position. It also explains legal terms that are commonly used in divorce, such as ‘irretrievable breakdown‘ and ‘decree nisi‘, and provides a comprehensive breakdown of the divorce process. It gives a breakdown of the costs and forms needed, too. This way, people (in the UK) know exactly what to expect, even before they talk to a lawyer.
One of Law Bot’s co-founders also launched an AI-driven case law search engine, called DenninX. The free application’s aim is to help lawyers and law students conduct legal research on English case law by making use of AI technology, such as natural language pre-processing and machine learning.
24 July 2017 is the launch date of a new and more expanded version of Law Bot, called Lawbot-X. Lawbot-X will now cover seven countries: Great Britain, the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. It will also be available in Chinese, for markets such as Hong Kong. The new bot further adds a case outcome prediction capability to assess the chance of winning a legal claim that the bot has analysed. The free legal bot will also operate from a new platform and will be hosted on Facebook Messenger.
[Update 25 November 2017: in October 2017, Lawbot changed its name to Casecrunch].
Another useful chatbot for legal consumers is Billy Bot. Unlike the DoNotPay and Law bot chatbots, Billy Bot does not offer legal assistance, but helps you find a lawyer, barrister or solicitor, in the UK. Billy Bot was created by Stephen Ward, a career barristers’ clerk, and founder of clerk-oriented technology company Clerksroom. Billy Bot can interface with members of the public about some of the same preliminary legal questions that barristers’ clerks often handle. It can currently refer users to appropriate legal resources and pull information from the 350 barristers’ offices. Ward intends to give it access to other systems, including scheduling and case management capabilities. It currently answers questions on LinkedIn.
Next, we have Lawdroid, which was created by Tom Martin. Lawdroid is an intelligent legal chatbot that can help entrepreneurs in the US get started by incorporating their business on a smartphone for free. No lawyer is required. Lawdroid is available on Facebook Messenger. Lawdroid, too, has expanded its services, and the company that created the bot, now also makes legal chatbots for lawyers. Referring to the important rise of chatbots, they point out that there are over 100.000 of them already on Facebook.
[Update 25 November 2017: corrected an item with regard to Lawdroid].
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Sometimes Law and Technology combine in ways that one does not immediately anticipate. Here are some recent items that have been in the news.
A hardware keyboard for lawyers
Lawyer Brian Potts got frustrated when he was writing a brief and had to insert a section symbol (§) into the text. As the symbol is not on the keyboard, it takes just enough steps that have to be undertaken to interrupt one’s train of thought. So, it dawned on him that having the section symbol as a key on the keyboard would be easier. He realised that there were other things, too, that lawyers use every day, which would make his life a lot easier if he could access that functionality straight from his keyboard.
Potts created the LegalBoard, which has specially designed function keys and keys on numeric pad that can be used to insert commonly used legal words or symbols, or to perform specific functions, like
A software keyboard for lawyers
Emily Montgomery is an attorney in Las Vegas and a graduate of UCLA Law, who had a similar idea. She came up with the Citepad, which is a software (on-screen) keypad, rather than a physical keyboard. It also comes with buttons for commonly used tasks involving citing legal references, inserting some often-used symbols, and some formatting, etc. Citepad can work with e.g. Lexis Nexis and Word, OpenOffice, Google Docs, and is available for Mac OS and Windows 10.
Napping Pods
Some big law firms in the US have been installing napping pods, and they are well-received. The “energy pods” are lounge chairs with a domed privacy visor and they can play “relaxation rhythms” while the user snoozes. After 20 minutes, the pods use vibrations and soft lights to wake the user.
Wearables
Lawyers are using wearables, like smart watches, to help their practice, in three different ways. Smart watches are used to keep connected (retrieve email, etc.). Some law firms are experimenting with Virtual Reality Headsets, e.g., for interviewing witnesses, or for multisite meetings. Inspired by dash cams, some are experimenting with smart glasses to record evidence in situ.
An AI ‘Workspace assistant’ for lawyers
A legal software provider recently announced the launch of Workspace Assistant, which allows lawyers to perform time management functions using the Amazon Echo or other Alexa enabled devices. So, it is now possible for lawyers to just say, ‘Alexa, Track My Time,’ and it does. At present, it can perform time management functions like tracking billable hours and controlling time entry. As this functionality is hosted by an existing legal service provider, confidentiality aspects are covered by the agreement you have with the provider.
Emoji Law
Did you know there already is such a thing as ‘Emoji Law’? At present, there are three relevant legal aspects to emoticons. A first is how the courts will deal with questions of interpretation raised by emojis used in communication. Courts have already ruled that emoji can convey content. (Noteworthy in this context is that Emojis change depending on the version of the OS of the device: one study showed that people interpreted an earlier implementation of a grinning emoji to mean “ready to fight” while the later version is more clearly smiling and happy. Therefore, someone on a newer iPhone sending that emoji to someone using an older version of iOS could unintentionally appear threatening).
A second aspect has to do with intellectual property that underlies the small, digital pictographs themselves. Emoticons are graphic works, and as such are protected by copyright.
Finally, the topic of emoji is also relevant in eDiscovery. Recent court decisions stated that messages sent by SMS, MMS or instant messaging all had to be included in the discovery process. At present, however, nearly all text-based legal research tools fail to capture visual communications.
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