The Federal Trade Commission finalized an order requiring DoNotPay, a company that promoted its online subscription service as "the world's first robot lawyer," to stop making deceptive claims about the abilities of its AI chatbot. [...] the company did not test whether its "AI lawyer" operated to the level of a human lawyer when generating legal documents and giving advice, and the company did not hire or retain attorneys to test the quality and accuracy of its service's law-related features.
DoNotPay sold a subscription on the claim that its chatbot substituted for a lawyer. The FTC's complaint, from September 2024, does not say the technology failed; it says nobody ever checked whether it worked. No attorney was retained to test the legal output, and no comparison against a human lawyer was ever run. The order finalised in February 2025 requires 193,000 US dollars, notice to everyone who subscribed between 2021 and 2023, and a bar on claiming any professional substitution without evidence. Read beside the Presto case: the SEC's route is securities fraud and the FTC's is consumer deception, and the failure underneath both is a claim about capability that was never measured.
