DoNotPay CEO Investigated by CA Prosecutors for Unauthorized Practice of Law | Hacker News Reader

DoNotPay CEO Investigated by CA Prosecutors for Unauthorized Practice of Law

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38 pointsethotool16 comments

I am not a lawyer (don't want to get sued by California!) but the law has been super super fucking annoying to deal with while figuring out basic questions like, can I lend my personal money to someone, what counts as a finance fee in lending, does a subscription fee count as a finance fee, etc when exploring this fintech idea.

~100M Americans live paycheck to paycheck and unexpected expenses leave them to turn to expensive, predatory lenders or abuse the overdraft system. This is a real problem but solving has been a real pain.

Likewise, this DoNotPay guy is helping Americans solve a problem that's encountered by so many. Only reason people are getting screwed by Comcast, etc, is because the law is difficult to deal with.

Honestly, mad props to you, DNP guy. You are an American hero.

As a legal aid attorney practicing in California I have to say that unauthorized practice of the law is a major problem that we see the result of every day.

Well-intentioned individuals from, yes, a church or other nonprofit, regularly give bad advice about numerous types of issues including benefits and immigration that are time consuming or impossible to unwind even if you are a lawyer.

Even more problematic are for-profit non-licensed individuals advertising their legal services and expertise in similar areas for a price and giving wrong advice.

Forgive my skepticism for not believing tech that is claiming to solve all the million problems with the law. My assumption with any legal startup is that it's simply putting a robinhood vibe on more corporate exploitation.

Lastly, this seems like a great service and it sounds like it was cleared up, so what is he complaining about? Advertising "sue anyone" and then waving your arms and saying you're not a lawyer when the law comes after you... takes lack of self awareness to make a public post all about it.

Who would initiate such investigation? Hard to believe it wasn’t some sort from of lobbying?

The tagline on their homepage is "The World's First Robot Lawyer". If you advertise as a lawyer, the lawyers are going to say, where's your license?

If Microsoft copilot ingests the work of this robot and begins making legal recommendations does it also become a real boy and get thrown into jail for not passing the bar and what does that mean for the copyright of software it has already written?

Do they advertise their product as a robolawyer?

Alert the FAA, copilots are fully licensed to fly the plane when needed. (Of course an autopilot or a robot pilot is not, because that would be silly.)

Since you want to get technical, all aircraft systems are tested and must be approved by the FAA. Pretty much, a license... Try again.

An approval entirely different than a pilots license process that doesn't require the designing engineer to have a pilots license.. But California Bar OTOH doesn't have any approval system for notebooks, gavels, and coffee machines.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1568248316550598658.html

Not sure why name of complainant is redacted. Was it an attorney protecting their work area from price deflation?

Friends of friends.

"one or two degrees of social network separation" among wealthy, well-connected people in an industry based on relationships is absolutely massive.

But more broadly, either bring receipts or keep hand wavy conspiracy theories off of HN.

Who knew.

Reading things like these get me tired. Person A connected to Person B connected to Person C with random event D.

I’m pretty sure if you look into most people’s lives, they’ll be “connected” with someone spooky one way or the other. But, it really doesn’t imply anything.

Quick somebody write a program to automatically rebut these types of accusations

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