 And another very interesting video podcast with Joshua Browder of the Do Not Pay set of applications, Dazza Greenwood, that's me, and Brian Wilson of the MIT Computational Law Report, interview him about what his applications do and how they constitute an innovation in computational law. Let's give a listen. And we're live from MIT Media Lab, or at least I'm in the Media Lab. And this is the MIT Computational Law Report. And I'm joined by MIT Computational Law Report editor-in-chief, Brian Wilson. Hey, Brian. Hey, from the luxurious Airbnb that I'm in and underneath the bunk bed in Cambridge. Looks very spacious, like a coffin. A cozy, I think, is how the realtors would. Yeah, that's the way that they would frame it, I bet. And I am Dazza Greenwood, a scientist here at MIT and started a little thing called law.mit.edu, where we've been trying to do field building in the area of computational law with research and graduate courses and now our flagship publication. And part of what we like to do is talk, and we like to introduce people in our budding community to folks that we think are thought leaders and real doers in the space. And that is, of course, why we have asked Joshua Browder to join us on the show. So hi, Joshua, welcome. Hi, thank you for having me. And you are becoming renowned for this little app you made a few years ago called Do Not Pay, which is really blossomed into a whole class of what we would consider interesting computational law applications and services. And I was wondering if you could just take a moment to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about this journey. What is Do Not Pay and how did that get started and bring us up to speed? Sure. So Do Not Pay is the world's first robot lawyer. And by that, I mean it's an app that helps consumers fight for their rights against big corporations and governments. We're all being ripped off on a daily basis from these companies that try and keep us subscribed to things, charges all these fees. And so Do Not Pay is really just a tool to help people fight back against that. It started three years ago with me getting out of my parking tickets. And I built a bot that gets my family and friends out of their tickets too. And really it was just a side project, but unfortunately these parking tickets are a global problem in both the US and the UK. And at that point, I realized that helping people with the law using technology is bigger than just a few parking tickets. Why not expand this to all of consumer rights? So right now we have over 100 different features with the most recent being getting cash compensation for robot calls. Interesting. And so I'm just going to go ahead and ask, as a quick follow-up question, I'd love to hear some of Brian's questions and perspectives too, but how? MIT, especially being an engineering school, we are fascinated by the how as well as the why. So how can you go from an app to making any impact at all on the scourge of robot calls? Like connect the dots for us. So our sweet spot is doing anything in consumer rights where you don't have to sharpen court. Computational law is particularly good because computers can't yet argue in the courtroom. And so with robot calls, what the app does is it enrolls you in the federal do not call list. It gives you a virtual credit card that you can give to any robot caller. And when they try and run the card, it actually gets all of their details. And then using all of those details, it generates all of the documents to first send them a demand letter and then to file in small claims court to get you compensation for violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. And so technology is really good here because it's not only generating the documents, it's also helping in discovery because you've got you can give them this card and get their details. So I think a big misconception with legal tech is you just is all about the documents, but really we try and take a holistic approach and include it everywhere from customer acquisition all the way up to filing. That's so great. And you know so much of how we look at computational law here. I know there's some more academic views that are like make it into like a very narrow legal reasoning kind of thing or AI on a replicating like a decision a judge might make. The way we look at it is a little bit more holistic as ways to express rules and legal processes so that they could be automated that they can be integrated as part of the regular activities and our lives and serve our goals in a measurable way. And this registry services is really a master stroke. You know, we've had these do not call registries for a while. A registry service is a perfect component as part of a workflow that could be leveraged and extended to achieve legal outcomes the way that you have. So it just seems like a particularly good fit and maybe even a design pattern to start thinking of other other novel places this approach could be could be applied. So Brian, I can almost feel the heat coming off of your brain. What are you thinking? Yeah, I mean I love I love what do not pays done. I think the scale is something that is astonishing and I think it's something that should really draw lawyers and legal service providers in because you guys have fought something like 250,000, you know, parking tickets. And that's like more that's like one person coming up with a way to like a framework for 250,000 people to do something. And I think that kind of pokes at the notion that the billable hour should reign supreme and kind of gives some perspective about how these computational systems, when they're really optimized for people for the people that need them, they become more of like the Iron Man suit like, you know, Daz has talked about in lectures over the years. But I think what we see with the TCPA student call registry, it gets it another point that we've been really trying to drive home and that is the idea that law is an algorithm law is already an algorithm. It's just got people, and it's got paper, and it's got, you know, these kind of really arcane processes baked into them. And so I think what you're doing is kind of saying, Okay, here's this legal algorithm that exists to effectuate people who don't want to be called and kind of helping them out when they're kind of this marginalized kind of community. And here we're going to substitute some of the computational legal reasoning in here, where it can do the job that you know lawyers aren't going to do for you know a single sort of one off call. And I think it's, it's capitalizing on such an important part of the market these days and so I'm, I'm just a huge fan is kind of what I'm getting around to. Thank you so much. Did oh yeah we've followed your work for a while and you're a good example. So let me let me ask you. How did you were very interested in innovation generally here and understanding it and you know where possible I being able to identify good innovations when, when they're coming together or perhaps even helping to set the conditions and the situations that are beneficial for creative innovations to occur and arise. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came up with the idea in the first place to leverage the do not call list and then you know it's the synthetic credit cards to you know to be able to get the information you need to identify the wrongdoers. Like this is a very creative idea and walk us through. Where did it come from. How did it come about. Yeah, so just a bit of background on do not pay my theory is that there are some of the some of the smartest engineers and designers in America and Silicon Valley and rather than getting them to work at Facebook building advertising technology I try and wrote some of them in to help with access to justice and so having this amazing team that's actually creative and solving these problems goes a long way and I don't really see do not pay as like a legal product. Another thing about legal tech is like it's confined to the like legal circles. I really see it as a mass market consumer product. So I try and think what would my mother like how would she approach this issue and the way she used to approach it was she'd actually buy what they would be selling. And so obviously we can't have people doing that. So the next best step is this virtual credit card and we're actually like experts at virtual credit cards and this FinTech stuff because just before this we launched something called the free trial credit card. And this is another consumer rights issue where people are being roped into these subscriptions where there's a free trial and then all of a sudden you're paying $128 a year. And the only way you can cancel it by sending a search card like with some gyms. And so we've given a lot of people this virtual credit card to sign up for any free trial and then it just cancels it for you and that was so popular we thought what else can we do with credit cards to do with the law. Love it. I love it. And so then basically you go you now have a surface area to identify the the violator of the do not call list based on the they have to be a merchant and have a merchant bank in order to receive the funds or to do the pre authorization and that of course comes along with all the vetting that the acquiring bank did as part of the credit card payment system and then that's your it sounds like that you're launching off point to be identify a potential defendant and then to do the legal process. Am I getting you right. That's exactly right to become a merchant you have to work with visa and the bank to give your name address phone number. And that's all transmitted through the payment network to whoever's you have the card. And so because we can give people the cards we can get all of this data. So these people they spoof the numbers so you don't and they lie about who they are. So this is the only way you can find out. Yeah, follow the money, as they said in Watergate. It's good enough to for Watergate it's good enough for some some call hackers, bad hackers. So I want to show you something. If I may, since you're one of the relatively, you know, too few people at this point in history, who's actually doing computational law and deploying these types of systems. These are something. Have you heard of the United Nations development goals. Yes. Um, so we have an sustainable development sustainable development goals. So we had an idea is we were getting ourselves together with a research program and agenda and trying to collect our point of view on computational law that it would be useful to articulate in a similar way. The computational law development goals might be this case you can think of development in more than one way, like a developer and develop the field. So let me see if I can Chrome, tell me if you're. Oh, I can pull him up if you need me to. Yeah, would you mind. I'm trying to do share. Oh, wait, optimize. I'm having I'm kind of striking out here. Desktop. Can I just do the desktop. No, that's dangerous. Open system preferences allow zoom to share your screen. I have to say, I'm having some growing pains here. I used to, I used to basically live for, for these types of things through Google, hang out on air, and then you know automatically record to YouTube and services is that they can be given and taken at a moment. So here we are in zoom land and I think it should be loading any moment. So one of them is human center. So Brian was mentioning that a little bit and you can look at that many different ways but what you said about about basically not looking at it from the perspective of legal practitioners. Exactly. But what about the people who are held to have to comply with the law, just people are humans and how does it play in businesses and small businesses. How does that play as part of their life? How can they access and use the law. You're flipping around there and then the other things for there we go. That's good right there. And you're seeing some of the we gave a presentation at a graduate course today and he just got a little sneak peek there. And the other thing is for attorneys, you know, we very much look at this as a way to enhance their role like to what we at MIT or the media lab in particular we sometimes call AI we look at the aspect of it that's extended cognition. We're not necessarily replacing people 100% as 100% of the goal, but where people are trying to serve the optimal position and role in what we're doing. How can we extend their capabilities, as much as possible put the human in the center. I would say the names of them we'd like to measure things and see how close we're getting to the goals that we can state. We like it when law expresses itself as data. And you know there's plenty of data flowing in your system. And so, you know, when you have a registry service where people have their telephone number on a do not call list that's being able to connect that back to their phone and then a credit card, getting the call record the the payment records the more interoperability there can be unless manual, you know, toil of wrangling data we think the better to connect apps and services down more like automated chains. And of course, you know, finding those those ways that law and business and civic institutions and industry can can work together, we think is another key goal and something that's made available on when the law is computational. Let me just ask you, having kind of heard and seen some of those, you have any impressions on any of these objectives as they relate to do not pay the they connect they not connect or what are your thoughts. I'm just saying this, but these goals are basically our company philosophy in approaching the whole problem. As we spoke about human centered law and like thinking about the consumers and number one measure we measure everything. So we treat this as like a tech company so if you look at like success rate on individual products time spent on individual product products engagement how often people come back. That's really everything we focus on Laura's data is also very important and universal inoperability that's the one I wish, you know, we had complete control over because some of these things we're hacking together, and we shouldn't have to have to be there should be an API for do not call registration unfortunately at the moment we have a bot that does it and that obviously takes much longer to build and then industry and civic partnerships is probably the one that we connect the lease with because a lot of the stuff we're doing is quite edgy so like a bank doesn't necessarily want to be involved with the card but we're trying our best. Indeed. Um, so that sounds like a complete hit Brian says so far. So you're in computational law space for our development goals and so far so good it sounds like are we missing any that you can see any gaps here. I think I think that maybe maybe one is sustainability. I see a lot of organizations they have great aims, but they don't have a sustainable business model. And that's even something that do not pay struggled with for the first few years, you know, we were a free product we didn't know what to do with ourselves. Now we charge $3 and it's great. People don't seem to mind paying $3 for all our services. And we know we can be alive. So I think sustainability is perhaps one I would add. That makes a lot of sense. So it's not just a heroic app that you built one day and kind of works right now but something that could be a have a business model and a community and the capability of existing over time and being reliable and sustained. The best things have 24 seven people working on them and that's what we need to make this sustainable. Yeah, it's not it's not the the Icarus of computational law that flies so close to the sun that it winds up crashing and burning it's the kind of sustainable, you know, Jetway that keeps flying and keeps flying whenever you need to rely on it. Um, so you, you're doing. So I think what you guys are doing with the synthetic sort of burner credit cards is something that's really fascinating. It's kind of getting into the social engineering space a little bit. And so this, this kind of got me wondering, you know, what is, what's the next sort of thing that you guys are starting to look at what sort of kind of holistic design process do you want to tackle next what do you see is kind of like the, you know, this is going to be the next thing that we want to take a shot at and kind of solve for a large number of people. And just quick tech thing. Could you stop the sharing. I just want to make sure that we're able to camera switch to the people and don't know enough about zoom. Okay, great. You're so what's the next Joshua. Okay, so the most exciting thing we have coming up next first why should say we're just swamped at the moment we have 10,000 cases pending for the robot balls. But once we're out of that and the next few weeks. We're launching this thing that basically when you travel it will make your travel experience a lot better using a lot of the existing customer service promises that airlines and hotels are offering you. And I don't spoil it too much but basically the idea is every customer deserve to be treated with respect and dignity and just because you're not a frequent fly doesn't mean a big company has the right to drag you off an airplane or make you fight with other customers in line and things like that. So we have a thing that will level the playing field and actually improve your experience a lot. It's very exciting but I don't want to ruin it too much. Okay, teaser teaser. So that sounds very, very interesting. Have you heard of the company justice dot cool in in France. And no I haven't but let me take a look seems like a cool domain to start quite quite literally. So they're very interesting. This doesn't sound directly on point but it's maybe adjacent as a business case. One of the many cool things that they're doing is under the EU law there's a interesting rule where if your flight is delayed more than a certain amount of time like two hours or hour and a half or something like that. And some other metrics like that, you're entitled to a certain payments and a lot of people are either unaware of this or the paperwork is so painful that they don't go ahead and do it. They've come up with a really simple app that you know it does a few things auto fill stuff if you've given the flight number and does a few other things and make sure it gets filed in the same place and they've been really making some some serious headway in that space and they're starting to build out to other areas as well kind of the do not pay model it seems to me and in this case it's actually in transportation and air air airplanes. Yeah, I think with all of these things. There are so many tools that have started like they've been here for decades as small claims court as these laws in the EU. There's credit card charge backs, but no one knows about them and technology is really good at connecting the infrastructure like the laws with the actual results and getting people money back. Now speaking of charge backs, you're bringing me back to my payment network days and I'm just wondering like there's some number of calls, you know may have been in violation of do not call or they may have fit under an exception such as relationship or something like that. To the extent that people, what is there an issue of one of your credit cards being used for a valid charge that is maybe that appears to be you know have the same criteria as a violation of do not call but actually it's a charge that's valid and ought to be enforceable and would you be on the hook for those charges. No, so our cards are programmed to decline in this case decline every transaction. So really it's just for getting those details through and we're definitely no one's on the hook. Just because you decline a transaction doesn't mean you agree to it. And so the answer is now. And it's up to the consumer whether they want to use it so we're not going in and we weren't thinking when we first started this maybe just have a bot to all the work. But then we decided that that's never that's not technically possible yet so the consumers still have to choose which calls to use this for. And you probably been following I would assume like I think it's Google or others now have a little bot that will like handle the first several minutes on the phone with like a pizza parlor or someone like that to place orders and they go pretty far in the in the interaction before people figured out or they may never figure it out that raises another question which is the you mentioned a pretty solid portfolio of of cases that that have arisen from this app or actually sounds like you're suing the the defendants are the violators of the do not call list and wonder what who pays the filing fees and who's are people represented by council or is a small claims or some administer procedure. You talk us through a little bit of the of the legal aspects of that. Yes. So the first thing I should say is that surprisingly robot callers have a higher settlement rate than almost all other defendants for any sort of demand. And the reason is that what they're doing is also usually criminally illegal and also they just don't want to out there like that shady activities in public record. So they'll actually settle more often than not. If they don't settle it becomes a small claims court case where the user is pro say and everything is done for them from generating the filing forms to even a script to read in court and in California that lawyers are banned. So if you have a script and everything to say you're in a good position. So the user is responsible for their own filing fees. And I actually think that's a good thing because it prevents a lot of frivolous cases. One of the biggest criticisms we get is just do not pay make it easier to you know engage and sue anyone by pressing a button. And I think the answer to that is no because there are still all these checks in the system that mean that you have to be serious before pursuing your case. Yeah. And frivolous. I think part of the definition of frivolous is there is no proper cause of action to start with. I mean the mere fact that you're assessing people and in exercising their rights to me seems like the perfect antidote to frivolous lawsuit accusation. Well, so Brian and I were talking before this about if we had an opportunity to talk to Joshua. What are the things that we would most want to know. And one of the big questions was based on your relatively unique experience being a few years in now actually building and deploying successfully some computational law apps. What have you learned from this experience that that could be helpful potentially to others who are listening and watching now who have their own ideas about potential computational law applications and services or even platforms. You know there's a lot that goes into the experience of actually building something and deploying it and maintaining it. Is there any wisdom or experience that you could share that could be helpful for others. This is Brian's question. I should have probably got sorry but he gets credit. You did a good job of asking. Thank you. Yeah, that's such a great question. I think when do not pay got started. I was just almost freshman in college and I thought you needed a PhD and like artificial intelligence to build anything proper that would actually be useful. And what I realized as I went through college and continued with do not pay is that it's an amazing time to be alive. There are all these plug and play platforms that anyone can use. And as long as you have the subject expertise or willing to collaborate with those that do you can build something that's amazing without having that PhD. So for us we do things like matching what the user is said to a legal defense so the user can say in their own words what's wrong with that parking ticket and then it matches you to like a signage defense for example. And we're not out here building like these neural networks. We just have plug and play things from Watson and Google that help do that. Another thing is speech to text. There's, you can now have speech to text and speak and text to speech are the quality of Siri as an independent developer just by using API's. So I think anyone who get wants to get started should just use this plethora of API's to build their dream and not be too dawn to that you need the technical expertise yourself. That's awesome. Yeah, I think that's probably one of the biggest challenges to getting people into this idea of computational law. It's, you know, law itself requires you to go to law school to get licenses and attorney, you know, computation. That's another domain where there's a lot of education that's required in order to become a subject matter expert. And so I think demystifying some of the stuff and saying, No, it literally is easy as if you're a lawyer finding a developer who knows how to use API's if you're a developer finding somebody who's familiar with these legal processes and actually just focusing on something that is near and dear to the hearts of you or your clients and coming up with something that can work in some small case, you know, that's really the key goal because when you have it in a computational form, you can then scale it to as many people as you want to. Yeah, and even you can build things even with not a single line of code these days with using things like Webflow. It's amazing time to be alive. Yeah, and you know that what you said toward the end about speech to text and text to speech we have a computational law telegram group that is partly how we're growing the community and we recently shared a simple open source library of some text to speech and speech to text, what sort of a collection of libraries just for a quick start, and it really underscored the, you know, the rich tapestry of new user interface and user experience tools that are available to make it to make law more accessible and to make and to reduce the complexity of getting engaged in different legal processes and and basically like simplifying and streamlining what otherwise might be the domain of, you know, experts and wizards so that so that we can actually deploy this stuff population wide. Yeah. Okay, so is there anything else we should cover Brian before we So, so the only thing that we didn't go over that you and I did go over before the call. And this is, you know, this is not in the show notes of the Google Doc that we share. But this is a kind of important question. What is your favorite website, besides do not pay and why. This is the toughest question I've been asked this week. I've been asked a lot of questions. I think I think it has to be. I mean, obviously, you have use a lot of useful websites like superhuman is an amazing email client, like 100 times better than Gmail, and but I'm not going to talk about productivity tool because that's boring. My favorite website that's kind of niche is way back machine. Nice. I thought org baby. Yeah, and the reason is my favorite is everything that's on the internet is permanent. So the IRS made a mistake recently where they said that, like, gamers who like pay credits who get in game currency are now tax and that was a huge mistake. The way back machine everyone figured it out and the IRS became very embarrassed. So for me and like consumer rights, the fact that you can see these websites on a day by day basis, really I love and also it's really interesting to see how things change on the internet. So that's probably my favorite. I'm really curious what you guys's favorite is as well. I generally go with Wikipedia for similar reasons. It's a way to democratize knowledge and make it more accessible to everybody and make it so that it's kind of in a way sensor resistant. But for it is for, you know, the a little bit the same sort of quality of, you know, benefiting large groups of people democratizing information and making it so that everybody's on kind of a same playing field. And DASA what is I'm curious about yours as well. Me too. Well, so when you were talking I just like quickly looked at my browser history to be like, what am I looking at. So it seems like one thing I seem to enjoy doing is when there's a new story or something that's got my attention. I'll go to Google News and they've got a little feature we can click a button and see all the stories from all these different perspectives and parts of the world on that topic. And so I like to see different vantage points on a topic and scroll around there. The other one's a little bit practical but honestly always thrilling and fun. It's something called hack MD.io. Oh, man, we use that a lot. We use it a lot with everybody that I'm collaborating with. So just to quickly have a single note notepad basically you can do collaborative shared notes, but without all the overhead of I know Google Docs is okay and it serves a purpose hack MD is great because it basically is this text pure text mentality with a little bit of markdown it goes right to get hub and, you know, there's no fuss and bother with formatting or anything like that. It's pure signal and collaboration so I like it because it brings people together. They just had a new feature. I don't know if you saw if you've seen this desert but it's with the you can now do kind of these like live interactive graphics and things. Whoa. So the future is bright. I got to get me some of that. Yes. The future is bright and it sounds like it's going to be bright with with a nice among other things a nice roadmap for do not pay that we've got some things to look forward to in the airline context so we'll be very interested to see that and I just want to thank you, Joshua. And of course, Brian for taking time out of your, your Airbnb, you know, cozy space to help, you know, share the share some of the, you know, what really is at the cutting edge of application for computational law today. And your law is increasingly expressing itself as data as as legal processes that are accessible to everybody through web browsers. It can be engineered to get better results and to achieve more justice and more efficiency and unlock value. And it's a great pleasure to see how you've been exemplifying that through do not pay and just want to thank you for joining us. Thanks, Joshua. Thank you so much. It was so nice to meet you guys and hopefully if you're ever in the Bay Area, please stop by. And there you have it. Another perfectly good example of computational law in action. Find out more about computational law and how you can participate in this burgeoning community at law.mit.edu.