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I wouldn’t advise anyone to use a service like this because it’s not privileged. In other words if you suffered some kind of injury/damages and go speak to a l

I wouldn’t advise anyone to use a service like this because it’s not privileged. In other words if you suffered some kind of injury/damages and go speak to a lawyer your communications are privileged. Here you have some “chat bot asking you questions” and guess what, if you tell that chat bot something that is not true or hurts your case, the other side will be entitled to subpoena all communications and use it against you. They are right there is a huge problem with education in this country (people don’t even know their basic rights or how to seek remedies when said rights are violated), lawyers are expensive, there is a natural barrier to entry into the courts...but for a company that wants to educate people, they don’t seem to mention the pros/cons of discussing your case with a non-lawyer like this chat bot.

gammateam 8y ago
Yes, but a bot like this can help you dry rehearse and check out different outcomes Then you can use a lawyer MUCH more effectively and use less hours, or WASTE less hours. Right now lawyers are a black box of costs, efficacy and process. They get so many frantic people that they'll just say "it depends" for everything and collectively they have never bothered with having flow charts for any issue no matter how common. There isn't even as much as a SCATTERPLOT of law firm:issues:to cost, just "it depends" so, an app like this can help people with one of those prongs, and doesn't need to be relied on for the whole process. But can be.
- will_brown 8y ago
  not sure the app does what your think it does...in fact I have no clue what you even mean by “dry rehearse and check out different outcomes.” I don’t think the app is running any sort of simulation here, and if it did any result other than “it depends” would be a disservice to a client. One reason a lawyer is going to tell you “it depends” is because that is always the right answer in law. Look at SCOTUS and how many cases are narrowly decided by a split court 5-4. How could any lawyer, or app, tell anyone with any reliability what would happen in a case? In fact that point is codified in all the Bars which have rules prohibiting lawyers from making any guarantees to clients on the outcome of cases. For example, maybe a defendant doesn’t answer and a default judgement is entered, well that will cost substantially less than a case where the defendant answers with affirmative defense and files a counter suit...an app isnt going to be able to determine that anymore than a lawyer. If you want a SCATTERPLOT ok here it is, whether your case is civil/criminal there is a >90% chance it won’t go to trial/verdict, and in civil cases the majority of the 90% of cases resulting in settlement will be confidential...so data from >90% of cases isn’t available for a lawyer or app to use.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Look at SCOTUS and how many cases are narrowly decided by a split court 5-4. Because it's a second-level appeals court with largely discretionary jurisdiction biased toward taking cases with unsettled questions of law (a factor which tends to weigh heavily in favor of them taking an appeal is a conflict between the circuit courts of appeal on a question of law), SCOTUS rulings are vastly deceptive on the degree to which legal outcomes are uncertain.
    - will_brown 8y ago
      That’s just it SCOTUS is 9 Justices ruling on issues of law...Law...not fact, and yet they regularly find themselves split. But it’s beyond the point because rulings aren’t the point, the point is it’s impossible for any lawyer to tell a client how a case will go, because no one knows how a finding of fact will go. Pick 12 random people, have them watch a verifiable video of events and you will still have a split on the finding of fact. But let’s assume there is a case with no issue of fact...you still can’t tell a client how the case will go/what it will cost...again maybe it’s a default judgment, maybe it’s a case with significant discovery, maybe it will get referred to mediation and settle...the same case, the same facts, the same law, can have different outcomes and when trying to factor in costs the outcomes are infinite.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > That’s just it SCOTUS is 9 Justices ruling on issues of law...Law...not fact The Constitution disagrees. > yet they regularly find themselves split. The Supreme Court both passively and actively selects for cases that are on the edge. If it's not unusually uncertain, it's less likely to get even get to trial, less likely after that to be appealed from the trial court, less likely to have a petition for cert. filed after it's heard in the appeals court, and, in any case, near certain to have that petition denied even if it is filed. The Supreme Court selects for the most uncertain tiny fraction of a percent of all legal cases in the US. And, still, by a wide margin, the most common vote on cases decided on the merits is 9-0. Sure, 5-4 is the next most common and the 5-4 decisions get way more media coverage just by being 5-4 decisions, but 9-0 is still the most common.
Bartweiss 8y ago
> subpoena all communications I was wondering about the same issue, but now I'm curious if this could be the solution. With no privilege, is there any requirement to store data? If not, can the app handle anything subpoena-worthy locally and without logs, then just phone home for something like "give me a Tenessee housing court non-return of security deposit filing with the following data filled in"? For that matter, what is the subpoena-worthy content? It looks like the major use case here is to provide information which would be immediately public in court anyway. If you're submitting photos of your parking job and saying "was I parked legally?", then yeah, that could show up on a subpoena. But if you're just saying "I have a ticket I think was illegal, which court do I fight it in using what form?", I don't see any risk.

gammateam 8y ago

Yes, but a bot like this can help you dry rehearse and check out different outcomes Then you can use a lawyer MUCH more effectively and use less hours, or WASTE less hours. Right now lawyers are a black box of costs, efficacy and process. They get so many frantic people that they'll just say "it depends" for everything and collectively they have never bothered with having flow charts for any issue no matter how common. There isn't even as much as a SCATTERPLOT of law firm:issues:to cost, just "it depends" so, an app like this can help people with one of those prongs, and doesn't need to be relied on for the whole process. But can be.

will_brown 8y ago
not sure the app does what your think it does...in fact I have no clue what you even mean by “dry rehearse and check out different outcomes.” I don’t think the app is running any sort of simulation here, and if it did any result other than “it depends” would be a disservice to a client. One reason a lawyer is going to tell you “it depends” is because that is always the right answer in law. Look at SCOTUS and how many cases are narrowly decided by a split court 5-4. How could any lawyer, or app, tell anyone with any reliability what would happen in a case? In fact that point is codified in all the Bars which have rules prohibiting lawyers from making any guarantees to clients on the outcome of cases. For example, maybe a defendant doesn’t answer and a default judgement is entered, well that will cost substantially less than a case where the defendant answers with affirmative defense and files a counter suit...an app isnt going to be able to determine that anymore than a lawyer. If you want a SCATTERPLOT ok here it is, whether your case is civil/criminal there is a >90% chance it won’t go to trial/verdict, and in civil cases the majority of the 90% of cases resulting in settlement will be confidential...so data from >90% of cases isn’t available for a lawyer or app to use.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Look at SCOTUS and how many cases are narrowly decided by a split court 5-4. Because it's a second-level appeals court with largely discretionary jurisdiction biased toward taking cases with unsettled questions of law (a factor which tends to weigh heavily in favor of them taking an appeal is a conflict between the circuit courts of appeal on a question of law), SCOTUS rulings are vastly deceptive on the degree to which legal outcomes are uncertain.
  - will_brown 8y ago
    That’s just it SCOTUS is 9 Justices ruling on issues of law...Law...not fact, and yet they regularly find themselves split. But it’s beyond the point because rulings aren’t the point, the point is it’s impossible for any lawyer to tell a client how a case will go, because no one knows how a finding of fact will go. Pick 12 random people, have them watch a verifiable video of events and you will still have a split on the finding of fact. But let’s assume there is a case with no issue of fact...you still can’t tell a client how the case will go/what it will cost...again maybe it’s a default judgment, maybe it’s a case with significant discovery, maybe it will get referred to mediation and settle...the same case, the same facts, the same law, can have different outcomes and when trying to factor in costs the outcomes are infinite.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > That’s just it SCOTUS is 9 Justices ruling on issues of law...Law...not fact The Constitution disagrees. > yet they regularly find themselves split. The Supreme Court both passively and actively selects for cases that are on the edge. If it's not unusually uncertain, it's less likely to get even get to trial, less likely after that to be appealed from the trial court, less likely to have a petition for cert. filed after it's heard in the appeals court, and, in any case, near certain to have that petition denied even if it is filed. The Supreme Court selects for the most uncertain tiny fraction of a percent of all legal cases in the US. And, still, by a wide margin, the most common vote on cases decided on the merits is 9-0. Sure, 5-4 is the next most common and the 5-4 decisions get way more media coverage just by being 5-4 decisions, but 9-0 is still the most common.

Bartweiss 8y ago

> subpoena all communications I was wondering about the same issue, but now I'm curious if this could be the solution. With no privilege, is there any requirement to store data? If not, can the app handle anything subpoena-worthy locally and without logs, then just phone home for something like "give me a Tenessee housing court non-return of security deposit filing with the following data filled in"? For that matter, what is the subpoena-worthy content? It looks like the major use case here is to provide information which would be immediately public in court anyway. If you're submitting photos of your parking job and saying "was I parked legally?", then yeah, that could show up on a subpoena. But if you're just saying "I have a ticket I think was illegal, which court do I fight it in using what form?", I don't see any risk.