Monaco: Aiding access to justice
An employment law service powered entirely by artificial intelligence (AI) goes live today, offering consumers both advice and representation.
Grapple Law [1], which does not employ any lawyers, also offers support with disputes with insurers, including motor, home and contents, income protection, pet and travel insurance.
It helps too with claims against airlines for flight cancellations and baggage delays.
It has spun out of Monaco Solicitors in London, which describes itself as the largest employment law specialist firm in the UK representing individuals only.
Users will pay a subscription of £20 a month for legal advice and £50 a month for representation, sending letters to an employer, and responding to them, under the Grapple Law name. In its testing phase, users have paid 10% of what they received in compensation. Early reviews online have been glowing.
Grapple Law is not a regulated law firm, unlike the first AI-only practice that launched earlier this year, Garfield.law [2].
Grapple founder Alex Monaco told Legal Futures that he had spoken to regulators but there seemed little point in regulating a business without lawyers. “The regulators aren’t designed to regulate software,” he said, although he might look to do it in future for “branding and marketing purposes”.
The website makes clear that Grapple Law is not regulated and does not carry professional indemnity insurance. But Mr Monaco has put himself, and his reputation, at the forefront of the site to provide reassurance to users.
While the service would draft documents for users to pursue a claim at the employment tribunal, it would not go on the record and the user would have to represent themselves.
“I would like to work on a bot you can take to court with you and either have in an earpiece or on your laptop,” Mr Monaco said.
His view was that, if a case reached a tribunal, it was “either broken or your lawyers aren’t doing a particularly good job… The problem with tribunals is that they’re lose/lose.”
Mr Monaco said he wanted to extend Grapple Law to other areas of law and then internationally; indeed, yesterday it sent its first legal letter to Australia, on behalf of a 62-year-old man with dyslexia whose gym had verbally agreed with him to pause membership while he had cancer treatment, but then went ahead and charged him A$800 before he realised.
The solicitor is currently crowdfunding for £500,000 to support this before looking to raise a venture capital round of £3-5m.
He has been working on Grapple for five years, spending around £1m on its development in that time. The type of legal work it handled was more complex than the debt recovery Garfield specialises in, he suggested, because cases had more of a “narrative” element.
Monaco Solicitors uses the technology – “It makes our lawyers’ lives easier because it removes quite a lot of the heavy lifting” – and we reported two years ago [3] that he was looking to white-label it for unions, charities and advice centres.
But Mr Monaco said he pivoted to release a direct-to-consumer service first, as that was where the most demand was coming from.
Though still chairman of Monaco Solicitors, he has moved over to work full-time on Grapple Law and will oversee its output to ensure it works as it should.
He said it would aid access to justice. “There are always going to be people who have the financial ability to instruct lawyers and there are things the lawyers can do that AI currently can’t, like have phone calls and go into the psychology of your bullying boss and so on.
“But there’s probably a lot more people out there who have never had access to law firms and frankly would never consider using a lawyer.”
Monaco Solicitors would continue to benefit from the technology, he added, explaining that it was “becoming more of a hybrid firm, using lawyers and AI together in more of a symbiotic relationship”.
Grapple was much faster than instructing a solicitor, he added. “It’s less personal but there are a lot of people who are happy with that.”