Firth: A tech firm that does law
A new law firm that claims its use of AI will reduce the fee-earner time needed for a remortgage to just 15 minutes is to be launched by a former UK managing partner of global giant DLA Piper.
Sheffield-based LEXcelerate [1] predicts that it will be able to process remortgages nine working days, instead of the several weeks it can take now, and will make its lawyers 20 times more efficient.
Paul Firth said the firm was seeking authorisation from the Solicitors Regulation Authority, while he hoped to announce the acquisition of a conveyancing practice in the coming weeks to staff it. This was “a quicker way to market” than recruiting, he explained.
Mr Firth specialised in commercial property work at DLA Piper for 24 years, and was latterly UK managing partner, leaving in 2011 to join Irwin Mitchell to build its real estate practice as national head.
His co-founder is technologist Mark Hewitt, who created personal injury tool piCalculator, which he sold to Verisk. They were brought together by Yorkshire AI Labs.
Mr Firth described LEXcelerate as “a tech firm that does law” – this gave it a different mentality to “law firms that just acquire tech and bolt it on”. This meant it was constantly looking to improve and speed up processes.
It was Mr Hewitt’s bad experience of a remortgage that inspired them to focus on that area of practice initially, although LEXcelerate will look to expand into conveyancing and probate.
“These are all areas where client satisfaction is very low and expectations are very low. We we believe that we can change those.”
He said there were already arrangements in place with brokers to introduce work.
Mr Firth said the aim was to provide clients with transparency like taxi app Uber, so that they could log in to see what has been completed, what remains outstanding and a projected completion timeline that updated dynamically.
As a result, clients would not need to chase the firm for updates.
AI will handle around 90% of the administrative work and the solicitor estimated that each lawyer would have to spend no more than 15 minutes on each file, mainly to check the title (although the system will have already checked it against the lender’s requirements and the remortgage offer).
This would increase the efficiency of lawyers “about 20 fold”. The firm would operate on the basis that structured, repeatable work would be increasingly automated and fewer fee-earners required for services such as conveyancing.
LEXcelerate will mainly employ qualified solicitors and licensed conveyancers, with Mr Firth saying the technology would do the work other firms give to paralegals.
The system is built to cut out possible human errors in what are usually straightforward transactions, such as missing second mortgages or transposing redemption figures incorrectly.
“We think conservatively that we can do a remortgage in nine working days, including opening the file and dealing with ‘know your client’,” Mr Firth said. This compared to six to eight weeks elsewhere in the market.
Moves such as that of Nationwide, which this month become the first lender to allow a mortgage deed to be signed electronically and without the need for a witness, would only speed it up.
But he was not going to go as far as the likes of Garfield [2] and Grapple [3] in becoming law firms whose services are entirely provided by AI. “There still needs to be some human involvement,” Mr Firth said. “I don’t think many people would trust a fully automated system yet.”
David Richards, founder of Yorkshire AI Labs, said: “Artificial intelligence is not nibbling at the edges of professional services. It is tearing through them. Law, accountancy, consulting, compliance – every process-driven industry is being rewritten in real time.
“Firms that believe this is incremental change are misreading the moment. This is structural disruption.
“Over the next decade, AI will remove entire layers of manual professional work. The question is not whether that happens. It is who builds the new model.”