Kathryn Tewson Invites DoNotPay To Use Its AI Lawyer In Court… To Address Her Petition For Pre-Action Discovery For A Consumer Rights Claim (original) (raw)

from the note-to-self:-never-conduct-fraud-that-kathryn-tewson-finds-out-about dept

Over the last few weeks, you may have noticed that the world’s most tenacious paralegal, Kathryn Tewson, has been carefully dismantling claim after claim after claim from the company DoNotPay and its CEO Joshua Browder. I won’t rehash all of her discoveries, but many of them called into question Browder’s apparent tendency to massively overstate what his company can do, even as he would then seek to quietly cover his tracks every time Tewson pointed out another bit of nonsense.

Browder made the incredibly unwise decision (he probably should have checked with a real lawyer rather than his fake AI lawyer) to appear on Bob Ambrogi’s always excellent podcast where he continued to just totally misrepresent a ton of things, some of which could get him into serious legal difficulty. As an aside, I saw some people claim that Ambrogi let Browder off easily each time he misrepresented things, but that wasn’t my impression at all. He kept bringing up more and more problems (sometimes citing us at Techdirt), and just let Browder hang himself with his own words. Words that I think he may come to regret.

I won’t go through the entire podcast, but I will note that Browder’s attack on Tewson is just blatantly false. He claims that DoNotPay delivered its first document to her, and then “the system” thought she was entering fake data, and therefore, for the next two filings she made, she got the notice she’d have to wait hours. Except… that’s not what happened. As anyone who read Kathryn’s article here knows, while Kathryn did request three documents, Browder got the order wrong. It was the first two that the company said would be delivered hours later. It was the third one that was delivered immediately (though it was terrible).

Also, Browder keeps insisting over and over again that Tewson is just mad because she was banned, except anyone following Tewson knows that’s false. She’s mad that Browder is misleading the public and selling a legal service that doesn’t do what it claims. He also keeps falsely saying that Tewson claimed that DoNotPay was really sending data off to “an army of people, typing out every letter manually.” He made that claim a few weeks ago too, but Tewson never said nor even implied that. Instead, she’s noted that the timing delays make it seem like DoNotPay is simply taking basic templates, a la LegalZoom, and having someone fill in the details from the submitted users, which would explain the delay. By exaggerating and misrepresenting Tewson’s claims, Browder gets to frame them as ridiculous, rather than addressing her real concerns.

Well, now he may have to address her real concerns. On Monday, Tewson filed a petition with the NY Supreme Court asking for an order for Browder and DoNotPay to preserve evidence, while also seeking pre-action discovery, as she plans to file a consumer rights suit, arguing that DoNotPay is fundamentally a fraud. The petition, written by J. Remy Green, is… worth reading. It’s quite impressive.

This action seeks pre-action discovery preliminary to a consumer rights suit over, at its core, a 36dollarfraud.Respondentsappeartohaveliedtoconsumersandarepretendingtohavecuttingedgelegaltechnology,alltoscamthemoutofabout36 dollar fraud. Respondents appear to have lied to consumers and are pretending to have cutting edge legal technology, all to scam them out of about 36dollarfraud.Respondentsappeartohaveliedtoconsumersandarepretendingtohavecuttingedgelegaltechnology,alltoscamthemoutofabout36 a person.

The petition lays out that DoNotPay is advertising a bunch of legal services that there is little indication it can actually provide, and calls out the similarities to Theranos.

This episode smacks of nothing so much as the Theranos fraud.

Theranos, like DoNotPay, was built on a noble idea. It was designed to cut through medical testing using cutting edge technology. Theranos was built on the claim it had a unique technology for blood testing that made it cheaper, more accessible, and less painful for patients. It drew investments from across the ideological spectrum and was valued at over $10 Billion at its peak.

But Theranos never actually had that technology.

Instead, once cornered and forced to deliver a product, Theranos dressed up an existing Seimens testing machine and ran it using too little blood for valid results.

So too here: By all appearances, Respondents are dressing up an old-fashioned document wizard and calling it a “Robot Lawyer.” Certainly that’s what Respondents did with the one document Petitioner was able to get before Mr. Browder personally began re-writing the DoNotPay terms of service to basically say “TELL NOTHING TO KATHRYN TEWSON, SHE IS BANNED FOR LIFE.”

The petition notes that it’s seeking pre-action discovery so that the upcoming suit is more accurate, and allowing Browder to show at least some evidence as to whether or not DoNotPay actually uses any AI at all.

Before bringing a consumer class action alleging this is all a house of cards, while Petitioner believes she is able to plausibly allege the fraud, Petitioner would like to be able to allege the details with specificity. And she would like to give Respondents a chance to show that at least somewhere in their start up, something was running on Artificial Intelligence.

Much of the petition is basically a rewriting of the article Tewson wrote for us and various Twitter threads she’s posted on the subject.

There is some amusement in the filing, mainly in the footnotes. In one message that Browder sent to Tewson, published in the petition, Browder claims the evidence that Tewson is using his platform for inauthentic reasons is that she made up the name “James Joyce.”

In relation to the authentic usage, I messaged you on the 24th to tell you that and reactivated your account but you should keep it real to stop our systems flagging you. Who is James Joyce? You are clearly operating in bad faith by creating fake names and “generating a TON of” (your words) of fake cases.

In the Ambrogi interview, Browder also calls Joyce a “fictional” character. James Joyce was a real person. He wrote fictional characters, but he, himself, is not fictional. In one of the footnotes, this aside is called out: “While not legally actionable, later statements demonstrate the literary offense that Mr. Browder genuinely appears not to know who James Joyce is.”

But the really fun footnote is towards the end, where Tewson notes that she consents to Browder using his robot lawyer to defend himself in this case, and practically dares him to do so:

For what it is worth, Petitioner does and will consent to any application Respondents make to use their “Robot Lawyer” in these proceedings. And she submits that a failure to make such an application should weigh heavily in the Court’s evaluation of whether DoNotPay actually has such a product.

So, perhaps Browder finally will get to test his robot lawyer in court after all…

Filed Under: ai lawyer, consumer rights, discovery, fraud, joshua browder, kathryn tewson, robot lawyer
Companies: donotpay