Alex Denne
Growth @ Genie AI | Introduction to Contracts @ UCL Faculty of Laws | Serial Founder

3 UK Legaltech Startups Winning Customers' Hearts

16th Nov
4 min
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Each of these startups win customers' hearts in different ways

Startup #1 - Legl

Legl homepage

About Legl

Link: https://legl.com/

Digitise and automate core business processes, harness rich data insights, understand risks and accelerate payments.

Julia Salasky - Founder

There can be a perception that law firms don't want to adopt technology, but actually technology that does work for the law firm and for the end client can be so powerful and actually really delightful.

The environment that law firms is operating in is changing all the time and I think it's actually quite difficult to run a legal business. You have:

  • macroeconomic factors
  • changes in regulation
  • changes in what clients are demanding

It's really clear to a lot of law firms that Innovation and Technology are going to change the way not only that they deliver legal so services but the way that their clients experience legal services.

Technology can automate a lot of things that lawyers just can't bill for.

The main problem that we set out to solve for law firms is that a lot of their processes are very manual, very fragmented, they can't bill for them and they create a really bad client experience.

So when we founded legl what we did is digitize a lot of those processes. Things like:

  • compliance
  • onboarding
  • payments
  • CRM

And this enables law firms to do these processes in a way that drives faster revenue, drives more cash flow and creates efficiencies.

This ultimately results in a better margin for the firm and a better client experience.

The great thing about running a technology business is that you can adapt very very quickly and at legl we hear customer feedback, we evolve the product and we change things very very quickly. So whilst we're still doing the same core thing we started off with and our vision remains the same, the product has evolved tremendously.

We also see additional knock-on benefits that we maybe didn't expect at the beginning. So things like for example reducing administrative burden on staff and that's super rewarding for us because that's not necessarily something we we expected when we when we roll it out legal.

Are you a law firm? Book a demo with Legl today.

Startup #2 - Orbital Witness

Orbital Witness homepage

About Orbital Witness

Making tens of thousands of property transactions much more efficient each year by giving lawyers and other professionals the technology they need to get the job done.

Link: https://www.orbitalwitness.com/

Ed Boulle - Co-founder

While researching the status quo - we looked at desks stacked high with paper and we thought there must be a better way than this.

Clients are having to pay lawyers to sift through stacks of this information manually to find legal issues and find legal risks that affect their deal. That's very expensive and that takes a lot of time.

Legaltech really comes into its own here as it can:

  1. Do that job near-instantly
  2. Help the client get better upfront information
  3. Help reduce the cost burden of legal services
The average commercial property transaction is 1200 pages of reading which is the same as War and Peace.

Orbital Witness is automating and speeding up the legal diligence process for property transactions by building software that thinks like a lawyer. We're helping lawyers to be far more efficient when it comes to delivering those services to their clients.

We help lawyers and law firms to:

  • save time
  • be more profitable
  • getting back to their clients with much needed advice

When lawyers see Orbital Witness for the first time it's a little bit like having the veil lifted. They see a whole new way of working which requires them to spend way less time going to multiple different websites trawling through paper documents just to provide an answer for a client.

Investment funds and asset managers need to continually assess risk across hundreds or sometimes thousands of properties and that's a job that's impossible to do with traditional legal services.

Lawyers don't scale well to very large and complex projects

With technology we can continuously and efficiently assess risk across even the largest property portfolios.

Legaltech doesn't get tired and doesn't need to take a break and it's scalable to allow you to look at thousands of properties all at once.

Keen to streamline your property due diligence? Book a demo with Orbital Witness today.

Startup #3 - Genie AI

The Genie AI homepage
Genie AI homepage

About Genie AI

You can now produce high-quality, market-standard community-reviewed contracts yourself. Market-accepted contracts in under 15 mins from start to finish.

You shouldn't have to pay a lawyer or law firm to know that your contracts are legally sound.

Link: https://www.genieai.co/

Rafie Faruq - Co-founder

The interesting thing about legal is it's not so much an industry it actually sits across many different Industries. Legal services is a component of every industry.

Why do we even make legal agreements? In a business context you're trying to complete some sort of business activity (e.g. hire an employee) and so

If you make Legal Services more efficient you're actually making all industries more efficient.

So at Genie AI our mission is to open source the law and help businesses complete their agreements faster. We use machine learning to help contracts be really understandable.

We have summarized every single clause in a small really readable summary above every single clause in our contracts across 1,500 contracts.

Our research shows that small changes like this really help people to understand legal agreements and give them the confidence to send or sign them without pushback.

The impact on everyday people's lives is fascinating.

We now have over 2,000 companies signed up to our app and we see a range of companies for example:

  • Major high-street retailers on London's Oxford Street,
  • Established companies tackling difficult issues such as social justice and gender bias in their policies, operational and HR documentation
  • Startups looking to hire their first advisor or raise equity investment
  • SMEs hiring their first employees (or first senior employees)
  • Tech scale-ups figuring out how to do partnerships with partnership agreements
  • Manufacturers dealing with distribution, supply and resale contracts
  • Universities formalising commercialization of research projects

It almost feels like you're powering a small part of the economy because these people are creating work, creating business, employing people, selling products. I think that's super exciting for us and and for the growth of hopefully the industry.

We don't need Lawyers to work on repetitive, well-structured and well-understood areas of the law.

What we really need is for lawyers to work more and more on the complex areas of uncertainty in the law.

Lawtech UK

Link: https://lawtechuk.io/

The lawtech UK homepage
Lawtech UK homepage

Lawtech UK is supporting the transformation of the UK legal sector through technology, working to meet and exceed the evolving demands of business and society. Managing risk and accelerating transactions, creating a smarter economy.

Note: You can find the original version of this article in Video format from Lawtech UK on Youtube

Legaltech Research & Resources

  • Lawtech is estimated to be worth up to £22bn to the UK economy annually (Source: Frontier Economics 2021 pdf)
  • Organisations are missing out on 9% of revenue each year due to poor contract management (Source: World Commerce & Contracting)
  • It's taken 20 years to get to the start line, the next 20 years is when it gets really interesting (Source: Saul Klein, Founding Partner @ LocalGlobe)
  • The UK has a global leading legal system and lawtech market (Source: Frontier Economics 2021 pdf)

Interested in joining our team? Explore career opportunities with us and be a part of the future of Legal AI.

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