“MSNBC Touts DoNotPay App That Eliminates the Need for Attorneys”
All right you’ve got me. The above headline is fake news. But thanks to a Stanford undergraduate from London, there is a good chance that the need for an attorney can be eliminated for many legal proceedings.
When Joshua Browder was in high school in London, he got a parking ticket for being too far out in the street. Since the cost of the parking ticket represented 60 percent of his monthly allowance, he started to research how to get out of paying. He found out that the parking strips were mis-painted and he didn’t have to pay. This gave him the idea to create a bot so people could bypass the need for a lawyer for simple legal proceedings.
Browder has now written an app called DoNotPay that allows people to fill out forms for legal proceedings. If you want to file suit in small claims court, the app will create the document. If you want to win a dispute with the landlord, bring up the app and soon Browder’s app will help you file for a uncontested divorce.
I was in the throes of putting together a nonprofit that would help get small businesses relief from the ridiculous cost of the healthcare they provided for their employees, when lighting struck. I asked one member of my “Saturday Breakfast Club,” an attorney, to become a member of the board of directors and he agreed. At our first board meeting, I asked this now-former friend if he could do the required legal work pro bono — and it was my understanding that he would.
One month later, I got a bill from him for $7,000. All he had done for the $7,000 was to incorporate the nonprofit — maybe make 10 phone calls, attend three board meetings and go to a negotiation meeting with University of Utah Health Sciences.
After some agonizing negotiations with him, the nonprofit ended up paying $5,000.
A good friend of mine ran afoul of the EPA and it ended up costing his company over $2 million. Of the $2 million, only $600,000 was spent on cleanup and the rest went to his attorneys. The firm employs about 50, which means rather than pay attorneys, he could have given each employee a one-time bonus of $28,000.
I started to wonder just how much the legal profession influenced laws and regulations. Not only are attorneys lobbyists, they are also elected officials. If I were a conspiracy theorist — which I am not — there is a case that can be made that attorneys pass laws and issue regulations to feather their own nests.
In 2013, the U.S. had over 81,000 regulations in place. If you stack the 81,000 regulations one on top of another, the pile would reach the same height as a three-story building. Donald Trump campaigned on reducing the number of regulations and has instigated a policy that says, “for every regulation in, take five regulations out.” This is a move in the right direction.
The U.S. leads the world in the number of lawyers per capita, with one lawyer for every 300 citizens. Germany has one lawyer for every 583 citizens and France has one lawyer for every 1,403 citizens. Again, I must reiterate that we must do everything we can to make America competitive globally — and keeping businesses’ cost of legal fees as low as possible is one way to do it.
My wife and I hired an attorney to update our wills. Not only did he update our wills, he set up a trust for us. It looks like he did a good job, but, my gosh, it was expensive and he contacts us annually to see if we need anything — for which he charges us. If the DoNotPay app had a feature for estate planning, my wife and I would have used it instead.
Even though lawyers make up only 0.06 percent of the population, they make up 40 percent of Congress. Author George R.R. Martin once wrote, “Politicians were mostly people who had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers.”
Enough said.
Robert Pembroke is the former chairman and CEO of Pembroke’s Inc. in Salt Lake City.