Reportedly, the UK consumer legal market valued at £25 billion, has come under fire for its unaffordable costs and complex, jargon-heavy, and alienating processes. As a result, each year around four million individuals and one million businesses are left facing serious legal problems without any professional legal assistance.
London-based legal-tech startup Lawhive, an AI-powered platform for lawyers combats this challenge. It has raised £9.5 million in seed funding led by GV aka Google Ventures (invested in StatusPRO and Midi Health) with participation from Episode 1 Ventures. This follows the £1.5 million investment it secured back in 2022.
The startup plans to use the newly-raised funds to expand its team and is hiring for several roles, including AI engineers and software developers. Also, it will use the latest funding to advance its mission to make it easier and more affordable for consumers and small businesses to access quality, expert legal help.
How was the idea born?
Lawhive was founded by Pierre Proner, Jaime van Oers, and Flinn Dolman in 2021. After experiencing firsthand the disparity in legal access when their flights were cancelled during the pandemic and the airline refused any refund. After discovering that the cost of legal advice would exceed the cost of the flights, and that access favoured the wealthy, the trio with a background in AI for social impact launched the idea.
AI-powered platform for lawyers
Dubbed the ‘Shopify-for-law’, Lawhive operates an AI-powered platform for lawyers. Lawyers can work with their clients or be matched with consumers and small businesses through the Lawhive marketplace. By using cutting-edge AI to handle many aspects of legal work, the platform enables huge time-savings for lawyers and major cost and efficiency benefits for their clients. As a result, Lawhive can tackle a vast array of common legal matters that up until now have been the domain of traditional high-street law firms.
At the centre of the Lawhive platform is an AI lawyer, Lawrence, built on top of Lawhive’s own fine-tuned LLM which has demonstrated better results than any other LLM at carrying out legal work. Lawrence passed the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) scoring 81% against a pass mark of 55%. Lawrence can carry out legal work at the level of a junior lawyer or paralegal, augmenting the work of senior lawyers, and leaving them to focus on handling the high-value parts of a case and supporting their client.
Currently, Lawhive works with more than 100 solicitors and lawyers across the UK and has built an operating system for consumer law that automates day-to-day, repetitive administrative tasks including KYC/AML, client onboarding, and document collection.
Pierre Proner, CEO and co-founder of Lawhive said: “Access to the law should be a basic right, available to everyone. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Our vision is to combine AI and best-in-class lawyers to reduce the time and cost of providing high-quality legal support, increasing access for millions of people who need it. This isn’t about AI replacing humans. Our AI lawyer Lawrence is doing work that human lawyers don’t want to do and are wasting their valuable time doing. AI is allowing more people to access high-quality legal help from a qualified professional at an affordable price, while also allowing some of the country’s top lawyers to work more efficiently on the parts of the law that they enjoy, and earn more money doing so.”
Vidu Shanmugarajah, Partner at GV, said: “As a lawyer by training, I have experienced firsthand how needed technology-driven innovation is in the legal sector. Lawhive represents a transformative shift for both lawyers and consumers. Through combining a feature-rich platform with groundbreaking AI, Lawhive not only dramatically improves legal workflows but also makes high-quality legal advice more accessible and affordable to a broader audience. This investment underscores our belief in Lawhive’s potential to redefine the legal industry.”
