Josh Browder opened the door to his low-slung house on a leafy street in Palo Alto, California, in the same outfit he was wearing when we met the week before: black jeans and a grey T-shirt. This time, though, he was shoeless. He’d been up all night coding. “Hi. Sorry you came all this way,” he said.
Browder is an oddly apologetic rabble-rouser. He gained notoriety two years ago when, at 18 and still living in Hendon, northwest London, he launched a “robot lawyer” called donotpay.co.uk, to fight parking tickets. Much has happened since. He relocated to America to attend Stanford University. And his robo-lawyer has successfully challenged more than 375,000 parking tickets in Britain and the US. Two months ago, he moved, with five other students, into the fabled house that Mark Zuckerberg rented when he moved out of Harvard, also aged 20, to build his budding social network.
Like Zuckerberg, Browder has quickly plugged into the Silicon Valley machine that is so adept at spotting talent and nurturing it. Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, has become a mentor. IBM has given Browder free access to its Watson artificial intelligence (AI) system — which is now powering his growing roster of “bots”.
Browder wants to automate lawyers out of existence. He is proceeding methodically, one sector of the law at a time. He will open the latest front with the launch tomorrow of a free bot to challenge council tax bills.
“Elon Musk is sending rockets to space. There’s no reason why a few documents can’t be automated
Hundreds of thousands of homeowners could be overpaying council tax, which is determined using decades-old property values and guesswork. Why is he doing it? “To be honest, I just dislike authority,” said Browder in a disarming, almost innocent tone. Nothing gives him greater pleasure than stopping governments “ripping people off”.
Advertisement
It’s a theme he returns to often when he lays out his plans to create a fleet of free, AI-powered bots handling everything from marriage and divorce to train ticket refunds and criminal defence. Taking aim at millions of lawyers is arguably more ambitious than anything Zuckerberg ever contemplated.
Thus far, Browder is waging his war while simultaneously pursuing a computer science degree at Stanford. He admits university has become a “side project”. He spends many a night chugging Diet Coke and Soylent, the vile “food replacement” liquid that is de rigueur for sun-starved coders, crafting the complex decision-tree algorithms that sit behind the unadorned home page of DoNotPay’s website, a page that features just one simple question: “What can I help you with?”
Smart software overtaking ambulance chasers and solicitors, he said, was an inevitability. “Elon Musk is sending rocket ships to space,” he said. “There’s no reason why a few documents can’t be automated. The legal industry’s really exploitative and I think it’s going to go away.”
Council tax is low-hanging fruit. Property value banding is determined by a bafflingly backward process in which present rates are based on what a property was worth in 1991, when the system was established. That 26-year-old value is used to place a house in one of eight bands to determine what you pay today.
Individuals can appeal online but must navigate government websites and questionnaires to do so. Browder’s bot does that heavy lifting, he said, in seconds. Simply enter your address into DoNotPay’s website and it will determine the 1991 price. If it appears like a decent potential case, the app crafts a five-page appeal for you and then finds the email or physical address of the local Valuation Office Agency to send the documents.
Advertisement
“In light of the rate hikes this month, I hope this will level the playing field and lead to millions of successful claims.” An additional benefit, he said, would be to “take down” the “exploitative” law firms that charge fees to handle appeals. He plans to launch a similar service in several American states next week.
Browder has short, curly black hair, thick spectacles and a nasal tone. He is solicitous and achingly polite, which makes his bursts of bravado all the more surprising. Is he not worried, for example, that the lawyers will shut him down? “No one can stop me in the world,” he said. “There hasn’t been a single case in the history of unauthorised practice of law where there’s been a transaction where one person wasn’t making money. So to get me would be unprecedented. I’m protected by a legal loophole because the service is free.”
Browder’s rebellious streak runs in the family. His father, Bill, has become famous for his crusade against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Browder Sr founded a hedge fund specialising in Russian markets whose lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in police custody in 2009 after uncovering a vast state-sponsored fraud. Browder Sr championed the Magnitsky Act, an American law passed in 2012 that imposed sanctions on Russian officials, and that was allegedly at the heart of meetings between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russians lobbying for the act’s repeal.
According to Browder Sr, “there’s something in our genes”. Josh’s great- grandfather, Earl, headed the Communist Party in America from 1932 to 1944, and twice ran for president. “Josh was never doing what other kids were doing. He always did his own thing, and did it with great intensity,” said Browder Sr.
Some of Silicon Valley’s most well- connected and deep-pocketed executives have taken notice. When school broke up for the summer he joined Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firm Greylock as an “entrepreneur-in-residence “ intern. He was brought in after meeting Hoffman, a Greylock partner, at an industry event. Josh Elman, another Greylock partner who has worked closely with Browder, called him “a brilliant entrepreneur” who was “at the forefront of the bot ecosystem”. Phil Libin, founder of note-taking giant Evernote, is also a mentor.
Advertisement
Browder plans to raise a round of venture capital in coming months to expand DoNotPay into other areas that may eventually include criminal defence.
“I want to have this service where you type in what you’re being accused of and it will ask you questions about your case and tell you what exactly the prosecution will probably have a hard time proving. So it ought to make your entire criminal defence. It’s possible,” he said. “I want to be the go-to platform for all legal help.”
DoNotPay is a product born of disability. Browder has dyspraxia, which affects speech, communication, time management and spatial awareness — the latter, of course, critical for parking. Whenever he left his car he would invariably return to find that he had read the sign wrongly, or not parked within the boundaries. “I got so many tickets,” Browder said. “My parents were very supportive, but they said we’re not paying your tickets.” So he started coding. He had done it before. At 16, he created an app that allowed anyone to find the nearest Pret A Manger. “I love Pret,” he said.
Four years on, he is chewing on something much bigger. But with his father as a reference, it all seems rather manageable. “Fighting Russian torturers and murderers is much braver than fighting government bureaucrats,” he said. He did admit, however, he was toying with the idea of following in the footsteps of other famous Stanford drop-outs, such as Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and not finishing his studies.
But Browder Sr has different ideas: “He’s not allowed to drop out of Stanford. That’s not gonna happen.”
