As lawyers we have long been accustomed to the rigours of competition in the marketplace- there is a surfeit of lawyers on the street, and we are all jostling for the same clientele – ( that elusive sub-set of the general adult population that has legal trouble and enough coin in their pocket to pay to get out of said trouble), so we resort to the Yellow Pages, cheesy billboards, and cheesier TV ads, and sometimes even flail away on social media ( Could someone please explain to me what snapchat is all about, bye the way ?)
In addition to our ‘learned friends’ at the bar, we fend off competition from a host of near-lawyers -notaries, para-legals, accountants, business consultants and the like,with varying degrees of success, but now, courtesy of Joshua Browder, a clever young man from the UK we have to gird our loins against competition coming from a totally new, and unexpected place.
The next competitor trying to eat our lawyer’s lunch is the legal robot !
That’s right, Browder has created a legal bot, now launched in all 50 states, so doubtless coming soon to Canada, called DoNotPay -designed to help the user successfully fight parking tickets (and he claims that it has been successfully deployed over 350,000 times ) To add insult to injury, the damned bot is FREE ! Worse yet, he’s built a bot to automate the process of building other legal bots -to expand into areas such as claiming compensation from airlines, for missed flights or lost baggage, and more
Now I don’t mind going into the trenches to try to wrestle a case or two away from my lawyer buddies down the street – I can probably devise a cheesier advert than theirs in fifteen minutes with some free clip art- (and a crate of beer) but how am I gonna compete against a something that that wins case for FREE, and never even sleeps ?
There ought to be a law !
THE DILETTANTE 