Lawhive raises $12M to expand legal tech AI platform for small businesses

Image credits: Lawhive Team (LR) Jaime van Alls, Pierre Proner, Flynn Dolman

Lawhive, a UK-based legal tech company that provides AI-based in-house “lawyers” through a software-as-a-service platform aimed at small law firms, has raised £9.5m in a seed round to expand ( The company raised $11.9 million. A range of AI-driven services for “main street” law firms.

So far, most legal tech startups implementing AI have focused on the large and attractive market of “Big Law.” This means large national or global law firms that are enthusiastically implementing AI into their workflows. These include Harvey (US-based, raised $106 million); Robin AI (UK-based, raised $43.4 million). Spellbook (Canadian-based, raised $32.4 million). But startups pay little attention to the thousands of “main street” lawyers who have far smaller budgets and are harder to monetize.

Lawhive targets its platform to small law firms and solo lawyers who run their own shops. Lawyers can use its software to register and manage their own clients and match them with consumers and small businesses through its marketplace feature.

The startup applies a variety of fundamental AI models as well as its own in-house model to summarize documents to help both lawyers and clients across repetitive administrative tasks such as KYC/AML, client onboarding, and document collection. Speed ​​up legal processes. According to Lawhive, its in-house AI lawyer “Lawrence” is built on a proprietary Large Language Model (LLM) and has passed the Bar Qualification Examination (SQE), where he scored 81% against a passing score of 55%. It claims to have achieved a score of . .

Pierre Proner, CEO and co-founder of Lawhive, told TechCrunch by phone. “Nearly all of the existing legal tech is targeting the corporate market, including AI companies such as Harvey, Robin AI and Spellbook. We’re trying to solve problems in the legal sector, which is a very different and distinct market both in the UK and around the world. There are currently 10,000 small law firms offering this service in the UK.”

He said small firms face higher costs and a shrinking market: “Small firms have all the high costs of staffing, paralegals, junior lawyers, trainees, and so on. There are only one to three senior lawyers who earn an income,” he said. some money. Therefore the model doesn’t work. There’s a huge exodus of people like mid-career lawyers from the high street and high street models, and a lot of them are becoming freelance self-employed, and that’s where we’re seeing a lot of traction through our self-employment platform. became. We hired a lawyer who uses our AI lawyer. ”

The UK consumer law market is worth an estimated £25bn, but like most legal markets it is groaning under the weight of its own costs. This means that approximately 3.6 million people each year have unmet disputed legal needs and approximately 1 million small and medium-sized businesses are left to handle their legal matters on their own. Therefore, there is a huge opportunity for automation to help increase productivity in this area.

Proner added: “We combine it with base models from OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as open source models. But this is our own model, trained on data that we’ve been able to collect from thousands of cases. ”

Proner said the startup plans to use the seed round to expand into other markets, and “we’re looking at other markets that aren’t public yet.”

By looking at Lawhive’s lead investors, it may be possible to deduce where the planned market expansion will be focused. The seed round was led by GV, the venture capital investment arm of Google’s US-based parent company Alphabet. London-based Episode 1 Ventures, which made a £1.5m investment in April 2022, is also participating.

Vidhu Shanmugaraja, partner at GV, said in a statement: “As a lawyer by training, I have experienced first-hand how much technology-driven innovation is needed in the legal field. Lawhive represents a transformational change for both lawyers and consumers.”