(NewsNation) — The world’s first “robot lawyer” is facing a new obstacle: a lawsuit from Chicago-based law firm Edelson PC.
Joshua Browder’s brainchild “DoNotPay” is at the center of the suit. The app uses artificial intelligence and claims it can “fight corporations, beat bureaucracy and sue anyone at the press of a button.”
This time around, Browder says it will be his turn to fight in court. In a proposed class action, Edelson said “DoNotPay” is “not actually a robot, a lawyer, nor a law firm” and claimed their client Jonathan Faridian used the app but received “substandard and poorly done” results.
“We’re not going to pay … anything. We’ve done nothing wrong. We deny the allegations, and we’re going to fight in court,” Browder said during an interview with “On Balance” host Leland Vittert on Monday.
Attorney Jay Edelson is leading the suit against Browder.
“What our suit says at its core is that he’s selling junk. What you see out of Silicon Valley, every decade or so, we have a Stanford dropout who says we’re going to disrupt some really complicated area,” Edelson told Vittert on Tuesday.
The app is reportedly intended to take on small cases such as speeding or parking tickets at little cost to users.
News of the app appears to have threatened traditional lawyers, some responding with threats of prosecution or sending letters of opposition to state bar associations. No pushback against the app so far has topped the Edelson lawsuit.
“America’s richest class-action lawyer, literally someone who has made hundreds of millions suing companies, is scared of an $18 robot lawyer. They’re scared because robots are going to replace them. ChatGPT and all of these technologies are so good that you don’t have to pay a lawyer hundreds of millions of dollars,” Browder told Vittert.
Jay Edelson previously issued the following response to the battle with Browder: “We understood when we filed suit that Josh and DoNotPay would try to distract from their misconduct in any way possible. They attacked our client and now are attacking me.”
Browder fired back at Edelson’s response while appearing on NewsNation, insisting that he won’t step down.
“Jay Edelson is trying to bully us. He’s trying to shut us down. He’s intimidated by what we’re doing, but I’m not one to be bullied,” Browder said.
Edelson responded, in part: “There is going to be a time when the technology catches up and there will be a lot fewer lawyers, and that’s a great thing. I’m one of the few self-hating lawyers out there. I think there should be fewer of us. But what we don’t want in the meantime is someone who says I’ve got AI and it’s not AI, it’s total junk, and just selling that to people because it does a lot of harm.”
Human lawyers chased the robot lawyer out of the courtroom earlier this year.
Browder had plans to take “DoNotPay” into a courtroom in February to help someone fight a ticket. The app would have run on a smartphone and listened to courtroom proceedings before telling the defendant what to say through headphones.
It would have marked the first time AI would be used in a physical courtroom, but Browder says he faced threats of prosecution and potential jail time if he followed through with the case.
Through the app, Browder says he hopes to make legal information and self-help easier to access.