DoNotPay, Inc.

What was claimed

DoNotPay marketed an online subscription service as “the world’s first robot lawyer”. According to the FTC’s complaint, it advertised that the service would let people “sue for assault without a lawyer”, “generate perfectly valid legal documents in no time”, and that the company would “replace the $200-billion-dollar legal industry with artificial intelligence”.

The complaint also describes a second product aimed at businesses: a service claiming to check a small business website for hundreds of federal and state law violations based on nothing but the owner’s email address, detecting problems said to risk $125,000 in legal fees if left unaddressed.

What the FTC found

The FTC alleged the product did not live up to any of it, and that DoNotPay did not test whether its service performed to the standard of a human lawyer before making the claims. The small-business compliance check was, per the complaint, also ineffective.

That second point is the transferable lesson and the reason this entry is worth reading even though the sums are small. The failure was not that an AI product underperformed. It was that a capability claim was made and marketed without anyone checking whether it was true.

Why this belongs in the legal-services space

Anyone selling AI into legal work should read the specific shape of what was charged. The FTC did not object to automating legal tasks. It objected to marketing an automation as a substitute for a professional without evidence, and the resulting order bars exactly that: claiming the product can substitute for any professional service without substantiation.

The business-facing compliance product matters even more here. Quoting a concrete exposure figure like $125,000 while assessing a business from an email address alone is the pattern to recognise, and it is not confined to legal services.

Outcome

Under the settlement DoNotPay agreed to:

• pay $193,000
• notify subscribers who used the service between 2021 and 2023 about the limitations of its law-related features
• refrain from claiming its product can substitute for any professional service without evidence to support the claim

The Commission vote authorising the complaint and proposed order was 5-0.

Why this is marked Resolved

This entry is filed as Resolved rather than Documented because the matter was settled, the required payment and notifications were part of that settlement, and the conduct at issue was addressed by the order. It stays on the record rather than being deleted, because a record that removes matters once they conclude is not a record.

What is not established

A settlement resolves allegations without any admission or finding of wrongdoing. Nothing here should be read as a determination that DoNotPay committed the conduct alleged.

We have not yet contacted DoNotPay for comment. When we do, the attempt and any response will appear on this entry.