Google-Backed Lawhive Raises $11.8 Million for Online Legal Platform

Online legal platform Lawhive has secured 9.5 million pounds ($11.8 million) in funding from GV (Google Ventures) and Episode 1 Ventures.

The company will use the new funding to further its mission of providing an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform designed to help lawyers save time and earn more, Lawhive said in a Monday (April 15) post on LinkedIn.

The company is also hiring across engineering, AI, product and operations, Pierre Proner, co-founder and CEO at Lawhive, said in a post on LinkedIn.

“A huge shout out to the Lawhive team, who’ve achieved outlier results over the past year,” Proner said in the post. “In that short period of time we’ve gone live with Lawrence the AI lawyer we’ve been working on since 2019, seen hundreds of lawyers sign up, and thousands of individuals and small businesses access legal help through Lawhive.”

Lawhive’s online legal platform combines a tech platform with a regulated law firm, according to its website.

Potential customers answer questions about their legal matter so that the firm’s legal assessment specialists can create a personalized plan and fixed-fee quote, the website said. If the customer decides to pay the fee, they will be connected to a lawyer in Lawhive’s network within 48 hours. The customer will also be given access to the firm’s secure platform to communicate with the lawyer and share documents.

The lawyer will then handle the case, as outlined in the quote, and Lawhive will close the case when it has been resolved to the customer’s satisfaction, per the website.

“Our fixed fees include VAT, eliminating hourly billing and unexpected charges for clients,” Lawhive said on its website. “We regularly check our prices to stay competitive. On average, we’re 30% cheaper than traditional high-street law firms.”

The company attributes the savings to the lower costs enabled by using its secure online platform.

Lawhive’s AI paralegal, Lawrence, is designed to support lawyers by performing monotonous and repetitive tasks for them, according to the firm’s website.

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that generative AI has the potential to redistribute traditional law firm workloads in ways that can liberate junior associates, who perform labor-intensive research and document drafting, to conduct more complex, value-added work.

Sixty-two percent of legal professionals believe that effective use of generative AI will differentiate successful firms from unsuccessful ones in as little as five years, according to “The Confluence of Law and AI: An Inevitability Waiting to Happen,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and AI-ID collaboration.