Google backs London legal AI tech start-up Lawhive

GOOGLE has taken a stake in a British start-up developing an “AI paralegal” as the Silicon Valley giant backs an effort to shake up the UK’S £25bn market for high street lawyers.

Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has led a funding round for Lawhive, a London legal technology start-up, as part of a £9.5m funding deal.

The start-up said it has been able to speed up legal work done by a high street solicitor using its in-house AI bot, called Lawrence, which Lawhive said has been able to pass the exams set by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

Founded in 2021, Lawhive operates a legal network pairing prospective clients with lawyers while promising to save them money. It currently works with 100 consultant lawyers in Britain and says its fees are up to 60pc cheaper than traditional firms.

Its Lawrence bot is able to summarise evidence, draft letters and court applications and automate mundane work carried out by a paralegal or junior lawyer. A professional lawyer vets any final legal advice.

Pierre Proner, chief executive of Lawhive, said: “The consumer legal market is totally broken and hasn’t really had an update in hundreds of years.” He said that by using Lawrence the start-up’s lawyers were able to automate “repetitive legal work” while consumers are “not getting an AI chatbot, they are getting a real human lawyer working with them”.

It is the latest funding deal for the legal sector as venture capital investors plunge millions of pounds into Ai-powered “robot lawyers” amid fears the technology could upend the work of newly qualified lawyers and paralegals.

Vidu Shanmugarajah, a partner at Google Ventures, said: “Lawhive not only dramatically improves legal workflows but also makes high-quality legal advice more accessible and affordable to a broader audience.” Other investors in the deal included Episode 1 Ventures.

In January, Robinai, which is building a legal assistant based on technology from Silicon Valley AI business Anthropic, raised £20m from Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, for its contract-writing bot.

Luminance, a legal AI business backed by Autonomy founder Mike Lynch, last week secured more than £30m from investors including National Grid Partners.

Last year, a report from Goldman Sachs estimated that 300m jobs could be replaced by AI bots. It added that up to 44pc of legal roles could be at risk from AI.