The Robot Lawyer Resistance with Joshua Browder of DoNotPay

I imagine a world where you didn't even know that something happened robot lawyers were fighting for you in the background and almost immediately they get you the refund or something back today we're talking about the fascinating intersection of Law and Technology so the law is a set of rules that a group of people agree upon to regulate a specific region often through the application of penalties if people break such laws so for example in many regions it's against the rules to steal something from another person and if you're caught breaking such law well a penalty is applied but what happens when you don't have the resources to fight for your rights whether it's a major medical bill or a minor parking ticket even if you were in the right is it easier to just pay well Joshua browder's answer is do not pay he's built a thriving company off the same name that helps consumers fight corporations beat bureaucracy and Sue anyone at the Press of a button through the power of Technology do not pay has resolved over 2 million cases successfully and in this interview we get to hear from Browder himself about where he hopes to take the company including his first hand account of his recent plan to bring the robot lawyer into the physical courtroom you're not going to want to miss this as a reminder the content here is for informational purposes only should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any accz fund for more details please see acc.com disclosures [Music] I am so excited for this conversation today I've been seeing you post on Twitter I've been seeing news articles everywhere about what do not pay has been experimenting with and so we'll get into some of those timely topics but first let's start out with where do not pay originated so how to do not paid start and what really inspired this company so it's no secret that I'm a terrible driver and when I start the driving at age 18 I got about 30 parking tickets between the ages 18 and 20. in London and also when I moved here to study in college and I couldn't afford to pay these really expensive tickets and I learned something remarkable which is if you know the right things to say you can save a lot of money and I got this reputation among my family and friends as the person who can help with parking tickets and it wasn't long before people were just messaging me just pictures of their tickets they wouldn't even say anything I didn't want to copy and paste all of these documents and so I thought why not build an automated solution with templates where a user can select an option and then a defense is generated and sent to the right place and I really just did it for a few family and friends and I never could have imagined that it would go globally viral because people hate parking tickets and that's what made me realize that the idea of helping people with technology and consumer rights is bigger than just tickets and so I spent the past almost seven years now expanding do not pay from parking tickets to many other areas of the law well yes many other areas of the law your website has I think over a hundred different use cases or applications that you help your customers with and I just want to call out a few and get you to quickly explain in what this is how it works because I think many people are maybe familiar with do not pays parking ticket support things like crafting a cease and desist letter but let me just give you a few examples that I was surprised by so one of them that I saw on your website is free raffle tickets what does that mean so there's this obscure law in America that says that um you can enter any competition for free so you hear on the radio you can pay to enter but they always bury in the terms of service that if you mail an obscure latter to an obscure address you can enter for free so we've built a product that automates free entry into any competition so you just paste in the terms of service or you can even just choose from competitions that are bought scrapes on websites and it enters it for you for free and this is the thing with do not pay there are so many laws that help consumers that no one has the time to actually follow through with and that's a great job for technology and it empowers those people through technology right I feel like they're are people who know about these loopholes within Raffles for example but they're just manually entering into these things without the knowledge or without the support of Technology let's go through one or two more just to kind of give people an understanding of the vast range of areas that law can be applied one of them was egg donor rights what do you mean by that there are all these riots around egg donors and making sure you get uh compensation for expenses and things like that which is important and also on the other end um there's compensation opportunities for donating that sort of stuff um and we've automated kind of signing up for that uh if people need extra money it's a very controversial product but we're happy to give people more money I'm sure there are many controversial products that you facilitate what about this one this one's not so controversial but I thought it was interesting find my lost pet every city or most cities have these forms where if your pet is lost you can fill it out and if if the pet is found on the street and it walks towards a flight fire station or a police officer they'll deal with it and then they will put it into the system to see if someone's reported it as lost and this is another area where people don't have time to fill in these obscure government forms the same is true for Airport Lost Property forms we've automated all of these Lost Property forms at major airports so do not pay is really about saving people time with obscure consumer rights laws and also government services yeah yeah I like that positioning and another positioning that I've heard you say is basically the general counsel for consumers and I love this idea where the average everyday person doesn't necessarily have the funds or the time to represent themselves effectively and you've been able to use technology to empower these folks so let's fast forward you started seven years ago where is do not pay now like how many customers are you servicing how many people are actually using these tools as you said as a general counsel so we've submitted over two million cases and we have hundreds of thousands of active subscribers at the moment what's really exciting is that a lot of this stuff is is not necessarily the Obscure products you mentioned but getting serious refunds from companies so refunds are our most popular product canceling subscriptions some gym memberships require you to send a signed letter and mail it to an address just to cancel suing robocallers getting discounts these kind of high ticket items that people don't have time to wait on hold for hours just to get a couple hundred dollar refund and so that's a good job for software as well so tell me more about that particular particulars where you are helping someone get a refund or get access to something where it typically would take hours of someone sitting on the phone how are you actually facilitating that with technology so our motto is the squeaky wheel gets the grace so if you are on a flight and the in-flight Wi-Fi doesn't work and you've paid it's now fifty dollars if a Trans Continental in-flight Wi-Fi and it doesn't work our software will generate a letter and send it off to United Airlines and it will cite FTC statutes and be really aggressive United will receive that letter and think it's not worth it and so 80 plus of the time they just grant the refund and that's what's amazing is just with a template letter we've managed to achieve all of this success over the past few years but what's really exciting is in the past kind of six months we're actually using more and more true AI versus decision tree templates tell me more about that this differential between maybe what people did in the past which was a human lawyer drafting up a letter to I'd say a second step which is using technology not necessarily AI but really to take different pieces that are necessary in crafting them almost like a template and then a third generation which is using AI which is not just a a template but really bringing in all of the prior examples for a particular letter and crafting something net new how do you think about which use cases require step one step two or step three or how are you assessing where to apply some of these new technologies so we started a step two and so what we did was we said well all of these letters that you had to pay a lawyer three hundred dollars for we're going to automate with document automation which is a very simple technology but it's something that hadn't be done for these types of letters we were doing what's really exciting about step three is that sometimes the companies respond and the governments respond and step three with AI allows us to respond back instantly so instead of helping someone with a hundred dollar dispute with Comcast we can now work on ten thousand dollar medical bills because Comcast or United might let that hundred dollars go but no hospital is just going to let ten thousand dollars go just because of one letter and so you really have to have that conversation back and forth and so what we're working on now is actually communicating live um on medical bills specifically and I can go into the laws we're using around that that will be kind of our first major AI product um in do not pay please tell me more about that because something that I would love for you to address is is the fact that some people may push back on this idea of having a robot lawyer because some people might say that actually having a mediocre lawyer or a bad lawyer is worse than having no lawyer or representation because you might get yourself into more trouble I don't know if that's the case with the medical bill example but tell me more about how you're using these AIS to really have this back and forth and ensure that it is the high quality back and forth that you would want if you were actually enlisting counsel do not pay as automated consumer rights and unfortunately lawyers don't typically get out of that for consumer rights I I said that on Twitter that they don't get out bad at all and everyone's crazy because they're saying I once sued a client for 500 I get out of bed for concealer rights and so most lawyers most lawyers focus on serious issues and because of that these corporations governments know that people can't fight back and these issues aren't rocket science if the in-flight Wi-Fi didn't work you're entitled to a refund and there's very little that technology can do to change your case and so it's really about just jumping through the Hoops saying the form letter and sending off to the right place with medical bills we haven't yet launched it and we're testing it and we're trying to be very thorough to make sure it's it's accurate before we launch it but the way it works is um there's something called the no surprises act which is a brand new law passed in 2022 and it requires hospitals to do two things the first is to publish that process and a lot of these hospitals when they were complying with the law they published their prices in like obscure PDFs and Excel documents on their website and so what we've done is we've had GPT scrape all of these websites create a master XL of 1.4 million rows because they don't name these treatments properly they just put obscure codes and standardize it among all hospitals in the US so that's the first step then the second step is this law requires hospitals to provide a good faith to go Association to provide discounts on medical bills and so the way it works is say you upload a bill it takes what's in the bill itemized Compares it to this master list of nearby hospitals offering the same treatment and if any item is more expensive than a similar hospital it crafts it in this latter to say that I'm asking for a good faith discount because a similar hospital is offering a treatment at a cheaper rate and it's not even a different hospital sometimes the same hospital is offering a treatment but for insurance it's like 50 of the cost if you're paying the cash price and so all of this stuff is not rocket science you can have a lot of impact with just a latter and a lot of lawyers say well if you're being accused of a serious crime maybe AI is not a good idea and I think that's true but certainly for fighting back against corporations we haven't seen much go wrong and I think it can be a net positive for people yeah I want to get into this further conversation around what AI can and can't do and also your Venture into the physical courtroom but I think what you called out there is so important which is just in many cases we would hope that the law is applied uniformly and that it's applied in a seamless way where you don't have disparities in information but the example you gave is is perfect in illustrating that sometimes it is just having access to counsel or sometimes it is just having access to certain pieces of information to know what laws exist or what laws don't exist or in the case of in-flight Wi-Fi like you're right if something doesn't work you should very easily be able to get your money back and so with that said I want to understand from you more about how you're thinking about evolving the different services that you offer I mean you already offer as I mentioned 100 things on your website so how how did you decide for example next up is medical bills we're addressing that or how do you decide whether oh actually we want to go into the physical courtroom like what are you doing to understand where your priorities should be we're just trying to create value for people so we look very carefully about the average amount that do not pay customer saves on a yearly basis and we're trying to 10x that so instead of it being a few hundred dollars we a single medical bill could be ten thousand dollars and is where I think AI comes in really raising the value of the cases that the robot lawyer can pursue we've tried things that haven't worked well because it's too emotional AI is not too good at dealing with emotions so many years ago actually before I turned do not pay into a business I tried to use do not pay for Asylum like to automate the Asylum process but with these cases sometimes people are crying in the courtroom and that's something that software can never really touch because you need the human touch in those sorts of cases that's fascinating when you're talking about the Asylum case for example you're saying people need to go into the courtroom and vouch for themselves is that what you're referring to yeah and it's all about emotion it's about the judges and of course there's a body of law that they rely on but it's beyond the paperwork with a bill or with United Airlines it's really about the paperwork but once you start getting into emotions like real divorce cases is another example they have to have like Marshals in the courtroom because people might even fight in the courtroom if they weren't there and those sorts of cases says can't really be touched by software the corporations that you're fighting against how have you seen them respond to the work that you're doing has there been a pushback from these companies saying no no no like you're you're kind of messing with the system that we've built you're giving people information or access to things that we kind of banked on them not having access to it's an alms race so we saw this from the very beginning at do not pay where we had Bots do clicking on big company websites and they would have anti-bots to try and identify our Bots and shut them down and the way we got around that is we have the do not pay app and it actually uses the IP of the user so it's like a it's almost like lots of distributed nodes fighting these companies and they haven't been able to stop that on the AI front the big companies are using AI now to stop consumers even outside of do not pay and that's one of the things I think is sad about new technology it typically gets in the hands of massive corporations and governments fast so our role is give power to the people first so one example is we have a bot that we're using internally to negotiate Comcast bills there's Comcast have an online chat and it generates these instant responses to chat with Comcast and it's obvious that Comcast is already using Ai and so our AI is chatting with Comcast Ai and on the negative side it's it's kind of sad that consumers had to chat with AI to get refunds on the positive side at least now the AI is doing the work on both sides and saving the humans from the bureaucracy and are you finding that you are able to keep your AI up with the AIS that are written by Comcast for example where they are actually winning those battles yes and I think it's two reasons the first is that um I feel like I have the best job in the world and our team is way more motivated than the average big company engineer and then the second reason is the kind of drop in the bucket do not pay has helped a lot of people but if you kind of divide our use cases by our customers and the number of companies out there it's just a small tax that they're having to pay maybe if we one day get to 50 of their revenue they'll actually care properly but at that point it will be so kind of huge that we'll have other issues to worry about I mean that'll be a good problem to have but I think it's actually a great question this idea of if you are able to expand and really give consumers the legal counsel that they need or in this case like to be able to fight back against fines or charges that they shouldn't be paying if that can expand or scale to a substantial part of the market won't these companies have to rethink the way their businesses work won't new laws have to be written I mean one simple example of this that I think of is parking tickets where up until the pandemic you could kind of count on the fact that if you went and fought your parking ticket most people wouldn't bother with this but if you did the police officer might not even show up but then when covet hit all of these parking ticket court cases were online and that was a totally new Dynamic more police officers are showing up more people are showing up to fight their cases and so the change in the system required people to to rethink like are we doing this properly and so have you seen that at all are you expecting that where companies are going to have to rethink the way that they're engaging with customers yeah I think this is one of the biggest risks to do not pay what if all the problems in America get solved fortunately um America I mean it sounds hypocritical with my accent but America has a lot of work to be done and I think it will take a long time before everything is perfect and if it is we'll all be living such a good life on the courtroom front it's really interesting because I think covid has accelerated the legal industry by 20 years a lot of the things stopping a company like do not pay were these bottlenecks that were introduced sometimes over a hundred years ago like you have to show up to fill in this form you have to have a wet signature for this document so one product we have is we automate the filing of 83b Elections which is an obscure tax form for startup employees and up until covert the IRS required a wet signature on that document but during covert they relaxed and said you can have a digital signature allowing us to build the product and the same is true with the zoom Court hearings and sometimes filing of documents online and that's actually moved us forward and what's exciting is we continue to be forward in 2023 with all these relaxed regulations but traffic tickets now are going back into call so we're having all the benefits with few of the disadvantages and is there pushback at all from the people who are facility dating these courtroom traffic ticket cases for example where they're like I don't really want to bring this back to the physical world like why can't we stipulate this digitally these judges are very old very anti-technology and even in the cases that do allow Zoom I'm a legal nerd so I watch a lot of like legal cases and view transcripts and they say things like nice of you to show up today when the attorney is on zoom and they say something like oh yeah I'm sorry I was out of state for another case and so they're already being prejudiced against Zoom um which which is not a positive outlook but I think it just shows how the Judiciary and the legal industry is being controlled by very old incumbents that might not have the most forward view on technology to a degree I'm not surprised but in a way I am surprised because the amazing thing about technology is it often automates or gets rid of the boring mundane aspects of a job and then you can imagine how if these judges didn't have to spend all day in court talking about parking ticket cases they could apply their wealth of knowledge to other maybe more intriguing interesting diverse cases but with that said I think this is actually the perfect segue I was going to wait a little bit but let's let's move on to what you were hoping to experiment with which is actually bringing your robot lawyer into a physical courtroom so let's start there what was this project yeah so in December of last year I made an offer on Twitter and I said that even if you lose do not pay we'll pay the ticket but we want to use AI to represent you where for a speeding ticket a user would go into the courtroom have these bone induction glasses which are basically like airpod version of glasses and the AI would whisper in their air telling them exactly what to say to get them out of that ticket and we had about 300 people step forward and offer their cases and we accepted two of them but that's when things went crazy with the pushback from the legal industry so what did that pushback look like lawyers were writing letters to State Bar associations one lawyer called up every major State virus Association in all the major cities and California and another State Bar Association actually threatened us and they said that if you do it it's against the rules and we'll prosecute you for unauthorized practice of Law and what's specifically about that experiment was against the rules in their eyes the legal industry is very protectionist so to even become a lawyer you have to pass the bar exam take a test have a government stamp of approval even for something as minor as a traffic ticket and their view was that even though the laws weren't written they could never have imagined that when the laws were written in the 1800s and 1900s the AI would be practicing law this applied to that situation but our viewer do not pay was that it didn't apply to that situation because in these laws it says a person can't practice law without passing the bar and AI is not a person it's a technology and the person is just representing themselves with the help of AI but obviously don't seem to buy into the understand perspective around you said this one person seemed very out of adamant very very emotional about this idea of bringing AI into the courtroom what do you think that is a reflection of like why was there such effort to stop this experiment lawyers love rules and they love accusing people of breaking the rules and I think they're scared of this technology um it's like the dinosaurs turned to stop the ice age lawyers really don't want this technology to move forward that much because they realize that a lot of their job is copying pasting documents not all lawyers are like that but some of them are and if AI can just do that and replace them it puts a lot of them out of work and so it's a combination of loving rules being worried about their profession and also just disliking these young kind of Cs students trying to take them down I'm not part of the legal establishment and I'm trying to fight against them so I also think there's like a cultural mismatch so use the term Ice Age there which makes me think that you think this is some somewhat inevitable like even though there is pushback even though you were threatened with six months of jail time that this may be a blip in the journey which eventually will result in technology being applied to the legal practice maybe in a substantial way is that an accurate depiction or how do you see this progressing past this one instance yeah I mean so a Colombian judge recently wrote one of their opinions using chat GPT lawyers themselves are using this technology but instead of passing the savings onto the client they're keeping the rates the same and just pocketing the savings for themselves and so our viewers do not pay is that customers deserve the savings they deserve to access their rights very cheaply and you can just cut out the middleman with these lawyers taking huge sums just to write a letter I think a fair pushback on that would be well that's true it'd be great if the savings were passed on to the consumer but does the consumer who has not passed the bar as an example have the discretion to understand if what the AI is returning is actually something that's going to represent them well so is that maybe even a fair question or how would you respond to that everyone points to when an AI makes a mistake but we forget that humans also make mistakes that the bar associations actually exist to police lawyers there are lots of lawyers who steal money from their clients most lawyers are expensive but they also steal money on top of that somewhat lawyers unfortunately have drug and alcohol problems and AI isn't perfect but at least it's objective and it can't get drunk the night before the case that's that's a good perspective I think another amazing thing that I've seen the technology can be cross-border as well so typically a lawyer is specialized in one very particular area maybe in one jurisdiction can you tell me a little bit more about how you're thinking about the potential for this technology to support people not just in your region but really anywhere yeah the benefit of AI is it can read 10 000 documents and produce an answer in seconds and not even the best human lawyer can do that so I think the example you're talking about is a consumer rights issue relating to a timeshare we had a elderly consumer in Boston they got suckered into a timeshare actually in Mexico and do not pay got them out of it because there's a five-day law in Mexico to cancel time share contracts and so things like that where you can help consumers in Boston for issues in Mexico most lawyers in Boston don't know about Mexican law but AI does because you can just feed it all the time share cases and it comes out with a way out and the same is true actually for Comcast these generic AI models like um Da Vinci from openai they're not actually that good at the law what we've had to do at do not pay is you feed it documents so we say we fed at all of these outcomes from the templates in many years of operating and and you say based on these thousand documents write X and then it becomes much better than just a generic usage of any of the models something that openai has also done though is had humans as part of the training process to really hone it in are you also doing that are you bringing in lawyers who are specialized in these areas to take a look at the output from your models to hone them in or improve them yeah we have some of the best lawyers in the country helping us like at Wilson sensini and other firms that the AI has been very problematic for us so there's really two problems with it the first is that it's dishonest so with Comcast for example it says things like I've had three Internet outages in the past 24 hours and that might be a good way of getting a refund from Comcast but it's not true and it can Court liability issues and in court if you lie that's a crime and to send people to Jail the second issue is that it talks too much with Comcast or even in a courtroom there are some some questions and human speech that don't require a response it's like a rhetorical question so imagine the judge says something like um hold on let me take a look at the case the AI models would often say okay thank you and by the way I'm innocent for like these six reasons the judge will just get annoyed you have to build other AIS to decide whether to say something let alone what to say and so you have to really retrain it and also build these guard rails otherwise things get out of control that's so fascinating and I love hearing about the different AI models that are being built in various Industries because there are these like very specific nuances in a courtroom for example that you have to to consider but let's let's think about how things move on from here because you mentioned for example that you think that this is somewhat of an Ice Age like it's going to happen inevitably but what does that mean really does that mean that for example an AI needs to pass its own version of the bar and then it can represent people do you think that it'll just take another generation of people who are maybe more inclined to welcome technology into the space like what what will it take for this technology to really be maybe more so welcomed despite the legal industry being very protectionist they have a serious problem which is that over 80 percent of people who need legal help can't afford it and so these courts will have to eventually modernize and allow people to have their AI assistance helping them in all sorts of cases my role of do not pay is starting with consumer rights and we have literally hundreds more products to build with AI and that's what we're focusing on at first but I think people will have assistance in courtrooms I think that consumer rights they'll have ai General councils sitting on their shoulder making sure that these companies aren't ripping them off and it will just create a more efficient world where companies with business models of kind of ripping off consumers I won't be able to continue because the AI will just Spam them with lawsuits and legal demands yeah do also think there's going to be a deflationary aspect of this you mentioned that different lawyers are already using Technologies like chat GPT to kind of get their work to the 80 level and then mastering it further do you think that naturally there will be different legal firms that take advantage of these Technologies and then can bring down their prices and then that will deflate the cost of Legal Services at large well it gets even better than that there are varying estimates but some estimates say that customer service costs make up 12 of total corporate spending if that goes to from 12 to 1 because United Airlines have an AI that handles all of their customer service there will be huge deflationary pressures and that's really exciting and that's how you can see AI lower prices of something that has nothing to do with AI how does airline tickets have to do with chat GPT that's the connection and so it's not just legal services but also all services could be reduced just from the customer service angle I think that paints a very nice picture for consumers I wanna push you on some of the pushback that do not pay as received recently so I think there's maybe one thread in particular that's gone viral but I think some pushback is saying these Services aren't high quality but others are just saying you know this isn't really using the AI that I thought it was and do you just have any responses to maybe generally the pushback that the company has received especially as it's gotten more and more attention in recent weeks and months do not pay us in a transition from a template company to an AI company and you don't need AI to write a angry letter to your former landlord to request a security deposit refund it's just a question of the amount and uh sticking that into an angry letter so that the small claims court can see that you at least tried to ask something there's not much that can go wrong what these lawyers have been doing is they've been signing up creating fake cases and creating these dramatic scenarios so what they'll do is they'll say I had a hundred thousand security deposit why hasn't the AI supposed AI told me that uh the small claims limit is ten thousand dollars and the answer is because that's not a real case and if you create a fake case of course you're going to have a fake outcome and so there's nothing that can go what wrong with these consumer rights cases that they've been trying um the true AI is coming and that's what we've been working on chat GPT is a brand new technology released in November of last year so I would just say to them relax it's not all that serious it's not the end of the world today an in-flight Wi-Fi refund I think that's fair but I think they would also say something along the lines of what I mentioned before which is just in some cases it can be worse to get mediocre legal counsel versus any at all and so is your goal here with do not pay currently while the technology is in the place that it is to just focus on these consumer rights issues where getting it wrong is actually doesn't really have much downside or how do you think about maybe the progression you mentioned ideally you 10x the value that do not pay offers to Consumers how do you think about taking it to that next level yes so we're trying to focus on consumer rights but consumer rights to your point could be a twenty thousand dollar medical bill refund and that creates real value for people my goal is to make it so the average person doesn't need to see a lawyer if you're being accused of burning down someone's house you should probably still see a lawyer but normal people don't deal with that they just deal with Comcast United their Hospital Etc and that's what we're trying to automate with do not pay the second thing is that we really want to test these AI products much more so when they deal with serious issues and also when it's not deterministic technology so going back to this feeding ticket one member of the do not pay team actually has a speeding ticket case coming up and we're thinking that we can get around all of these unauthorized practices of law rules if they're representing themselves using technology they've created and so we're looking to push forward be via responsible by testing everything before releasing it and I would say that consumer rights is not rocket science and so far they haven't actually found someone who's actually where something's gone wrong it's all have been it's been these lawyers coming out with theoretical problems but people really need help and Technology can help them I want to ask maybe a far-fetched Quest we look so how do you this new technology AI in particular reshaping the legal landscape and as an example of this like when might a robot lawyer actually write law that governs the implementation of AI within law like that seems like it hasn't happened yet but something that maybe is inevitable I think in the next year it's already secretly writing laws a lot of laws originate from an overworked staffer in Congress and I'm sure it's 2 am they need to finish it and they're probably typing in chat GPT asking asking it to uh help them a bit and so I'm sure in the next year that's going to happen in the future I think a lot more court systems will be automated and tools like do not payable will help people so I think it's a very exciting time speak an exciting time I feel like do not pay has done an excellent job of kind of keeping up with the times and so something I saw you build recently is the chat GPT extension which you can basically understand the terms and conditions of a website more effectively so how are you thinking about the gaps that still exist for consumers and maybe what other opportunities there are to give consumers their rights back when new technology comes out we think how can it help people and times and conditions is a great example because people can't understand the changes being made what they're giving up so this is actually our first public product relating to True AI where you can paste in any terms and conditions upload a document including leases and it will go through and tell you all the things that are non-standard and also things you should watch out for and that's really important because people don't have time to read 100 page document which is what are some of the some of these leases are especially in New York and so that can be really helpful really we're trying to be like David and David versus go life so the AI can turn David into Goliath versus Goliath and help Ordinary People something that's coming up in my mind as you're speaking is just a question around why the law is so complex and maybe this is such a silly question because there's Nuance to life and therefore there's Nuance to law but why are so many laws a hundred pages long that no regular consumer can actually read through and understand like should it not just be a rule system that you could even effectuate through code for example I think there's a lot of lobbying that goes on but the big companies spend huge amounts of money shutting consumers out of their rights and every year it seems to get worse there are lots of positive laws that have come out like the CCPA and other laws around that but I think big companies have a lot of influence in creating the laws and one area that I'm worried about is anti-ai laws so one could imagine a law that says that no Bots are allowed unless they say they're a bot and you're already seeing companies Implement these policies and that could easily be a law I could yeah imagine members of Congress signing up for that idea and that would hurt a lot of consumer rights and automated systems helping people what makes you think that people will actually Implement a law like that or are there other rules that you see on the horizon based on your experiences with companies with lawyers who are pushing back against some of this new technology the fairer when any technology comes out is huge and it doesn't help that people like me are stirring things up and fear creates action on behalf of governments and big companies and so that's very worrying the good news is that there are a lot of things in the law we have over 100 Years of law to deal with that if you jump through the right hoop and follow the correct processes you can get results like one thing we automate is credit report disputes and they say that if you submit a correct letter and assigned in the correct way and all of this stuff you can dispute something on a credit report and this allows us to kind of get old or inaccurate items off people's reports and even if it's coming from Ai and we have to tell the big company that this was written by AI it's not going to be influenced they still have to respond to that letter and so there's all these rights that people have and I don't think that they can strip them all away with one law but it is worrying about where where kind of Congress is heading yeah I love that you said or you mentioned that you like stirring the pot I want to ask you specifically about within the experiment that you were trying to enter the physical courtroom with your robot lawyer you also were pushing to enter specifically the Supreme Court and you tweeted about offering someone a million dollars who happened to have an upcoming court case that was willing to wear air pods to kind of circumvent that idea of bringing the AI into the courtroom through that audio technology what made you want to push for that I think it would show everyone that AI is nothing to be scared of and it's actually pretty good at understanding lots of documents AI even passed the bar exam or a portion of the bar exam and so it is better than some lawyers um and if it was brought in the Supreme Court and all of the little cases we were dealing with like traffic tickets and um consumer rights disputes people would think that it could help them on the smaller stuff I didn't expect any lawyers to accept our offer we got lower court lawyers except our offer but no one at the Supreme Court but it was a serious offer and if you know anyone please let me know well I'm curious to hear what you're hearing from the lawyers who are supportive because we've kind of talked about the pushback from the legal world that is not in support of some of these ideas and some of this technology but it does sound like there are people on board and also people who are using some of this technology today so what are you hearing from that side of the spectrum most lawyers are supportive because they're arguing serious cases around human rights and other issues that don't really impact consumer rights and so there's a judge I talked to in San Diego called Von Campos we talk a lot about cases where people can't represent themselves and they don't have an attorney and how technology can help them and so just talking to a lot of the good lawyers gives me hope that things can change yeah I'm very excited to see how this progresses especially because the thing that's so wonderful about technology is that it improves across the board so as we get more court cases as these models improve they're not improving on a single case basis like a lawyer they go they represent someone they learn something it's ingesting all of this information and improving with every case that is fed into into the model so I guess as we look towards you know not just one year from now but maybe five 10 15 years from now anything else you'd like to add about where the future of law might go and how technology may be involved in that future yeah I think there will be instant class actions so right now the way class actions work is imagine a big cryptocurrency exchange steals all the money imagine well it's happened many times years of bankruptcy and class actions drag it out and then almost 10 years later someone gets a check for like twenty dollars and that's what happens with any wrongdoing the only people that win are the lawyers in the future I imagine a world where you didn't even know that something happened robot lawyers were fighting for you in the background and almost immediately they get you the refund or something back and I think it will create a more just world because the bad people know that if they do something wrong it might take them 10 years if if ever that they'll have to pay up but with enough kind of pressure and Technology it can create a wild where consumers fight back almost instantly so I'm excited about that you know one example that I loved from your social media was people who can get money from spam calls I feel like that's just such a great Exemplar of all of us get these goddamn spam calls all the time they're really frustrating and you can't really do much about them or at least up until now but you've set up a product where you can actually not just stop them but potentially make money off of them yeah so there's an obscure 1991 law called the telephone on consumer protection act that allows you to sue these spam callers for one thousand five hundred dollars a call if you're on the federal do not call list so what the product will do is it will sign you up to the Do Not Call list with a bot if you're not already on it and then the next time you get a call you can pick up and um to the point of using cool technology to benefit consumers these um spam callers they hide behind fake names and fake businesses and they don't tell you who they are but when they try and sell you something we've built a trap and what the Trap does is uh it's a credit card and you can give them the card number and when they try and charge you for something it gets their name phone number business address business name and uses all of those details to sue them for the one thousand five hundred dollars this morning that I'm doing the case for and we've had users who it's basically their full-time job suing spam callers or one user even paid her for a new roof for their house with the money they made from suing these callers so just things like that can be easily automated with technology and it's not just AI with fintech if you have these credit cards that can get all their information whatever it takes will use it to help people that's great and yes I think I think what we mentioned several times here is important AI doesn't necessarily need to be the technological solution but on this idea of Technology why haven't there really been many companies who have developed these systems to fight back for the consumer I know there are some for example I know there are technology companies that will like help you write a will or like help manage your estate planning things like that but it doesn't really feel like there's been a company that has tackled this with the scope also that do not pay is addressing and so has there been a fundamental technology shift or what is enabling do not pay to really tackle this in the way that it is when I started do not pay Andreessen Horowitz was was my first precede investor and I made a deal with them which is I don't have to drop out of school I can stay at Stanford and they would invest and I had other offers but I decided to go with them because they gave me that deal and that allowed me to really take time to develop the right strategy and with any idea it seems obvious that something like do not pay should exist why haven't people done it before and why aren't people doing it now and the reason that I develop by taking it slightly slower at the beginning was that do not pay is only successful because it's a horizontal company that our average person unless you're a bad driver like me only gets a parking ticket once a year and so you can't be able to build a real company around that and so because we've gone horizontal and done all of these use cases over time it's allowed us to build a retentive customer base which makes it a successful company but that's taken seven years and I see do not do not pay as my life's work so I think it was this unique insight about being horizontal plus the effort of seven years to actually kind of build it out that has allowed us to be unique and there are companies like even offered by lawyers that allow you to get out of your tickets but there's no one trying to tackle all of consumer rights with the tools necessary where we're not even building individual products we're building tools to build products so that when something bad happens in two weeks we can come out with something to help people yeah the product cycle has been incredible and I as an SEO nerd I also dug into the different content that you've produced and it's it's so wide ranging and I love the idea idea that actually when you are that horizontal company you can do keyword research for example just to find out all the consumer search volume for issues they're facing and you can somewhat use that data to figure out okay this is the next feature the next product that we're going to build versus if you are constrained in a very specific area or use case you can't really expand in those ways or use that data to expand so I think that's great Josh anything else you want to leave listeners with about your your company or the recent experiments that you've been running and how those have gone we have some really exciting announcements coming including around in courtroom usage of AI awesome well I want to end off on just a fun little game because I know we've been talking a lot about the law and I did some research and found some very strange laws from around the country and I wanted to just probe you with these and see if you could guess accurately if they were in fact true or false if they are actual laws that exist oh no when I don't do well with the game the lawyers are going to go crazy they're going to use this as a proof point that you are not fit to reshape the legal system but there are truly obscure laws so the first one is true or false in Arizona donkeys cannot sleep in bathtubs um I'm gonna say that's true you're right and the law was enacted in 1924 so that one is indeed true okay the next one is in Rhode Island coins cannot be placed in ears um I'm gonna say that's false you got that right again but in fact that is a law in Hawaii which was enacted in 1847 so an old law I didn't guess that I just knew definitely okay next one is an Alabama you cannot have ice cream ice cream or back pocket um I'm gonna say that's true so that one's false because it's not Alabama but it is I believe a law in Kentucky from the 1800s you know something as I did this research that was fascinating is just to see how many laws still exist from hundreds of years ago and I wonder actually if you know much about this Josh is there a process to like expire laws that no longer apply no there's not and the laws you mentioned probably aren't enforced but some of really obscure laws are still enforced like in Utah hotels can't give alcohol for free because of some religious laws that have existed for a while and so all of these obscure laws that's what makes America great every state has all of these different laws exactly we'll do one more which is in New Jersey customers are not allowed to pump their own gas oh that's true by a by a mile yeah that's true that's true and that was enacted in 1949 so I believe it's one of if not the only state where that's still true but you know you're not covering some of those laws but I think I would really encourage people to go to do not pay and look at the super wide range of things that you are supporting consumers with because it's really eye-opening yeah thank you all right Josh thank you so much for joining us today thanks for listening to the a16z podcast if you like this episode don't forget to subscribe here on YouTube to get our exclusive video content we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: a16z

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Id: AmVdYPTdw2c

Length: 49min 10sec (2950 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 01 2023