Delaware-based corporation DoNotPay Inc has been found by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to have made false, misleading or unsubstantiated claims about its DoNotPay Service. The service was offered as an online subscription service as well as an app.

The company made a number of claims about this service, positioning it as a “cutting-edge solution for producing legal documents.” It was also described as “capable of performing legal services” and purported to operate “like a human lawyer”.

The company’s CEO, in videos originally posted on the company’s website, “claimed that the company’s goals were ‘to be like the general counsel for the consumer’”.

The company disseminated the claims about the efficacy of its service on Google’s and Apple’s app stores as well as its own website and various social media platforms.

Subscriber complaints

Subscribers to the service “complained that the Service did not ask them to submit information relevant to their breach of contract claims, failed to consider important legal issues, and generated legal documents that were not fit for use.” And the company was sued by the State Bar of California for engaging in an unauthorized practice of law.

Following an investigation, the FTC found that the company’s claims about the service were false or misleading or were unsubstantiated.

Its investigation found that the service was based on a natural language processing model coupled with an API to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The technology underlying the service:

• had not been trained on a comprehensive and current corpus of federal and state laws, regulations, and judicial decisions or on the application of those laws to fact patterns; and
• had not been tested by DoNotPay employees to check the quality and accuracy of the legal documents and advice generated by most of its law-related features.

And the company had not employed or retained attorneys, “let alone attorneys with the relevant legal expertise”, to test the quality and accuracy of the service’s features.

In addition to the “AI lawyer” the company offered a service that it claimed “would check a small business website for hundreds of federal and state law violations based solely on the consumer’s email address.”

According to the FTC’s findings, claims about this service were false because DoNotPay’s technology cannot:

• analyze a consumer’s small business website for hundreds of federal and state law violations;
• determine that the website is in serious danger of governmental enforcement action; or
• save the consumer hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential legal fees.

And, unlike the company claimed, the service did not include “features to protect a copyright and generate a customized cease-and-desist letter for a defamation claim, non-compete agreement, and residential lease.”

DoNotPay has agreed to the FTC’s consent order without admitting or denying the allegations and has been fined $193,000.