Jephson: Clients need to know what they are paying for
A legal tech startup led by a solicitor turned behavioural psychologist is aiming to capture the “invisible knowledge” of senior lawyers for the benefit of both junior lawyers and clients.
Wendy Jephson, chief executive of Let’s Think, said the startup had raised £800,000 from US and UK angel investors and from City law firm Kingsley Napley.
“In law firms there is a lot of judgement and a lot of decision-making that takes place in people’s heads – invisible thinking.
“When you’re really good at your job, you do a lot of thinking automatically, and you’re not always aware of it and you undervalue it.
“It means that people often don’t explain their thinking to clients or to the people they have to brief, whether it is trainees or other colleagues.
“All that complex thinking, the really valuable part, does not go into firm databases. It is what junior lawyers would pick up by being in the room, but they’re not in the room anymore.”
Ms Jephson said it was important for clients to know what they were paying for, with research showing that a fifth of legal fees were written off because clients did not understand them.
She qualified as a solicitor with City firm Richards Butler, which merged with US firm Reed Smith in 2007. After that she became an in-house lawyer with Xerox and then at US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.
Ms Jephson said that since she decided to switch from law to behavourial psychology 20 years ago, she had been “on a mission to improve human decision-making”.
When people came out of law school, the rules seemed “much more straightforward” than when you “enter an organisation and see the complexity of judgement and decision-making”.
Interested to “see how people made decisions and what influenced them”, she studied business psychology at the University of Surrey.
Having a “route into financial services” because her brother was a fund manager, she helped set up the fintech startup Sybenetix, which built behavioural science models to detect financial crime in asset management firms.
The company was bought by Nasdaq in 2017 for an undisclosed sum. After working for Nasdaq, Ms Jephson was thinking of another fintech startup when she met and discussed her ideas with Sarah Harris, director of innovation and knowledge at Kingsley Napley, who “just got it”.
Let’s Think was founded in 2022 by Ms Jephson, chief scientific officer Anna Leslie, a behavioural psychologist, and chief operating officer Clare Fisher. The three women are the firm’s owners. The fourth co-founder, chief technology officer Mike Unwin, joined in 2024.
The startup operates as a virtual firm, though it has been using Kingsley Napley’s offices for meetings. Ms Jephson said Let’s Think’s legal tech had been rolled out across the law firm.
She said the startup trained GenAI in its own behavioural science frameworks, so it could ask “the right questions” to get people thinking and extract “invisible thinking”.
The “manual version” required a lawyer to sit down with the AI tool for a couple of hours, but a faster version was designed for lawyers to “think with for five to 10 minutes”.
The output from these conversations was sent to the lawyers so they could review and refine it, or if necessary delete it. Ms Jephson said none of the data from these sessions would be used to train the AI.
“GenAI is very good at thinking for people. What we need is for people to think first. If we want people to get better at their jobs they need to think first before they go rushing off to find the answers.”
She added: “The biggest risk with legal AI isn’t that the technology won’t work, it’s that it will stop us from growing lawyers who can think.
“Firms that automate without re-engineering how juniors learn will quietly strangle the pipeline of future senior lawyers.”
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