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Teen’s bot lawyer kills $4 million in parking tickets

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When this teenage freshman at Stanford first got his driver’s license, he said he got a whole lot of parking tickets. What Joshua Browder, 18, then began doing was going to court and appealing them. He began to win and began to learn his way around traffic court.

So, he decided to build a lawyer bot in the hopes it might help others with their parking tickets, too. Turns out, he has saved million of dollars, around $4 million by some estimates, for thousands of people in both New York and London. His web based lawyer bot is known as Do Not Pay and it has appealed around 250,000 tickets. Of that quarter of a million appeals, 160,000 of them have been successful.

He originally designed the bot to be simple. To be a basic software program that could just talk people through the procedures of appealing a parking ticket. The bot would, then, send along the appeal request to the proper authoritative agency. It took him the three months of last summer, during his break between high school and starting at Stanford, to put the program together.

Do Not Pay creator and Stanford freshman, Joshua Browder

Do Not Pay creator and Stanford freshman, Joshua Browder

Once he launched the lawyer bot, thousands of people began flocking to the site including many people who were much older than he and his teenage generation.

“I couldn’t believe so many people would use it,” he declared.

Browder, who is studying computer science at Stanford, taught himself to code at the age of 12 from watching tutorial videos at YouTube. He sold his first app right around that time and he has created many more for human rights organizations. He hopes to expand out into that field some day, also. He swaps apps for legal advice from a stable of lawyers he has befriended.

While the app won’t win any design awards, and Browder says their is a bug or two still in it that he needs to fix, the results can’t be argued with. While bots are being touted as the new replacement for apps, the current ones being offered out there have, so far, not impressed anyone.

Browder’s lawyer bot is free to use so, perhaps, the next time you get a parking ticket…

PHOTO CREDITS: Forbes