In 2015, British entrepreneur—and current Stanford junior Joshua Browder—launched DoNotPay, a site offering consumers free help fighting parking tickets. DoNotPay is a chatbot and, using artificial intelligence, asks its pro-bono clients a series of questions and plugs those answers into a form letter template. Then, a pdf is available to save, email, or print.

In the two-plus years of operation, Browder estimates the chatbot has beaten 375,000 tickets in the U.K., New York, and Seattle.

DoNotPay’s parking ticket success led Browder to an ambitious goal to provide legal help of all kinds – for free – and on Wednesday, DoNotPay is adding about 1,000 consumer categories to its portfolio for all 50 states.

Some of the matters relate to legal claims, but much of the help is simply with writing strongly-worded lawyerly letters for things like formulating requests for compensation from airlines, requests to landlords, reporting discrimination, filing for maternity leave, dealing with defective products, or disputing a credit report entry or credit card charge.

The bot’s surge forward took about a year. Around eight months ago, Browder managed to automate the creation of bots by creating a code-less backend he could use. “I could go from building a bot in a month to building it in an hour,” he told Yahoo Finance. With a tech-free way to make bots, Browder managed to recruit four lawyers on a volunteer and part-time basis, via Twitter, to lend a hand.

Even with the lawyers and two friends helping, the process of jumping from handling a few tasks to 1,000 was delayed due to Browder’s student status. “I try to do this on the side, so it took a year when it should have taken two months,” he said.

How bots can handle legal issues

Browder and his lawyers found that two categories of situations were ripe for DoNotPay’s bots. “The first category is just filling in documents to ensure you can send something off—filling in a PDF or automating a letter,” he said. “The second thing is getting people to the right document and ensuring they’re eligible. Whenever there’s a thing when there’s a huge decision tree, then a document, that works particularly well.”

Of course, there are significant limitations of the platform currently, like going to court. “We tried to go with things that are both legally accurate and needed,” said Browder. “Obviously, we didn’t try to do everything. The bot doesn’t help you get divorced, for instance.”

Disrupting the legal industry

As an entrepreneur looking to disrupt the legal industry, Browder is very critical of lawyers and legal services that too are often cost-prohibitive, shutting out those who can’t afford to pay fees necessary to escalate a small consumer complaint.