Robin AI: Why we exist
Legal advice is really expensive, but when you think about the dynamics of the industry, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. There’s huge demand for legal advice and legal services, but only a (relatively) small number of lawyers. Everyday millions of people and businesses need legal advice, but becoming a lawyer takes years of training and costs thousands of pounds — so getting good advice from the best professionals can quickly wipe out your budget. And this small group of in-demand practitioners don’t have the right technology to help them do their best work. Most consumer and business transactions involve both payments and contracts. But while the way we make payments has been completely transformed over the last 20 years, the way we handle contracts hasn’t changed since the 90s; and it doesn’t work very well.
That dynamic is bad for everyone. The people that can’t afford expensive lawyers typically go without — which means they either don’t know their rights or have no idea how to enforce them. The companies that can afford to pay are still resentful about the experience, and end up unhappy when they see their sky-high legal bills. And the lawyers have it pretty bad too: they work obscene hours (sometimes all day and all night) doing long manual work to keep-up in an increasingly intense and gruelling industry.
On the whole, while the legal industry has gotten bigger, more sophisticated and more global recently, the reputation of the industry has never been worse. Lawyers were once considered ethical. Now only about 50% of people trust them to tell the truth — fewer than the Police, priests, or hairdressers.
You might think that this is just bad news for lawyers, but people and businesses need a functioning and accessible legal industry to help protect them and their companies from wrongdoing and harm. So the fact that people and business think lawyers are risk-averse, expensive and untrustworthy is a pretty serious problem.
I think lawyers and the legal industry needs to change. We need to ensure that people and companies can afford access to lawyers’ services. We need to make sure that the industry is welcoming and inclusive of people from all walks of life — not just people prepared to endure punishing round-the-clock work. And we need to restore people’s faith in lawyers again.
That’s why the emergence of new, highly advanced technologies, especially artificial intelligence, is such an exciting opportunity for the legal profession to chart a different course. We can use those technologies to build new infrastructure for our customers, and use that infrastructure to reimagine legal services — so they’re faster, simpler, and much more affordable. Our mission is to make technology that makes contracts simple. We want to help lawyers do their job better, faster, and more accurately, so that legal advice is cheaper, more specific and more human.
But we can’t rebuild one of the oldest and most important industries in the world with the same approaches we’ve used in the past. To change the industry, we have to do things differently. I was a solicitor for over 6 years at some of the biggest law firms in the world — I’ve seen first-hand how we can shape technology to help lawyers do their jobs. My business partner, James Clough, is a scientist who spent years using machine learning in healthcare to diagnose diseases — he knows how to engineer products in sensitive, regulated environments where the stakes are high. Together, we’ve already begun to construct a team of optimistic scientists, software developers and forward-thinking legal professionals to help change the way legal work is done. And they already look different to the teams of the past. We want to build Europe’s most diverse software business, to tackle one of the industry’s biggest challenges.
Our products help companies adopt a new, modern infrastructure for their contracts, helping them build agreements, negotiate them, and ultimately manage them long after they’ve been signed, using a pioneering combination of machine learning and the expertise of human legal professionals — We call it AI+. Some of the world’s biggest law firms like Clifford Chance and the world’s most ambitious companies like Babylon Health are using our service to close deals faster, reduce costs, and (most importantly) make their team happier. And this is just the beginning.
If you’re an investor interested in ambitious legal technology businesses, please reach out to us on LinkedIn.
If you’re a lawyer looking to implement new technologies in your business, reach out to us — we’d love to chat.
And if you’re a talented person looking for a meaningful career, we would love for you to apply for one of our many open roles.
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