Would you entrust a personal-injury claim, divorce settlement or high-stakes contract to an algorithm? A growing number of apps and digital services are betting you will, attracting millions of Silicon Valley investment dollars but raising questions about the limits and ethics of technology in the legal sphere. Among the leaders in the emergent robo-lawyering field is DoNotPay, an app dreamed up by Joshua Browder in 2015, when he was a 17-year-old Stanford University student, to help friends dispute parking tickets. The app, which relies on an artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot, became popular, and has expanded its focus to other consumer legal services. In June it hit the million-case mark, helping save people upward of $30 million since it started, Mr. Browder says. It raised a new $12 million round of funding the same month.

With the rising anxiety about robots taking over human jobs, now even lawyers may have a reason to be on the edge of their seats. A 19-year-old Stanford University student, Joshua Browder, impressively taught himself how to code and ended up creating what he claims is the "world's first robot lawyer," according to The Guardian. Over the past 21 months, the artificial intelligence (AI) lawyer chatbot has successfully helped void 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York. The bot has done it all for free. Remarkably, DoNotPay chatbot has taken on a quarter of a million parking ticket cases, and the AI lawyer has won 64 percent of them. To quantify the impact, the chatbot has saved about 4 million in fines that no longer have to be paid.