Legal Generative AI Startup Lawhive Spellbook Raises $11.8M
British generative AI legal services startup Lawhive has raised £9.5 million ($11.8 million) in a seed funding round from GV (Google Ventures) and Episode 1 Ventures. Lawhive employs generative AI models to create tools for smaller law firms it claims are often overlooked by existing legal tech startups.
Lawhive AI
Lawhive’s software-as-a-service platform offers an in-house AI “lawyer” named Lawrence, who can help lawyers in completing tasks like onboarding clients, summarizing documents, and various other legal administration duties. The startup was founded with an eye toward helping law firms with tighter budgets that still want to adopt AI technology. In particular, Lawhive looks to the consumer legal market in the UK, which includes many firms that can’t afford to hire more people. The company uses a mix of third-party foundation models for its products, boosted by AI models built by the startup tailored for legal tasks.
“This represents another significant step forwards in advancing our mission of creating a better way to work for consumer lawyers and ensuring everyone has access to the law and their legal rights,” Lawhive CEO Pierre Proner said on LinkedIn. “A huge shout out to the Lawhive team, who’ve achieved outlier results over the past year. 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.”
Though Lawhive claims its focus on smaller law firms is rare, the overall demand for generative AI tools in the legal sector is accelerating and drawing plenty of cash. Spellbook, formerly Rally, raised $20 million in January and more than $30 million in total. Lexion and its AI-powered contract drafting tools have raised $45 million, while generative AI for legal and other professional services startup Harvey went from a $5 million round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund at the end of 2022 to an $80 million a year later.
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