Stresing: Recruiting a housing lawyer
An online platform that provides free legal advice and assessments for renters has applied to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to become an alternative business structure (ABS).
Michael Stresing, co-founder of Remedy Legal, said the startup has raised £300,000 so far and was hoping to raise a further £2m this autumn once it became an ABS.
Services currently offered by Remedy for renters include helping them check if they can reclaim up to 12 or 24 months of rent from landlords without proper licenses and reviewing deductions from deposits to ensure they are fair. The platform also offers help in housing disrepair cases and evictions.
Mr Stresing, a law graduate, said that since its launch in January this year, over 800 tenants had contacted the website with a range of problems. More than 50 of them have been referred to lawyers. Website traffic was doubling every five weeks.
He said Remedy employed two full-time developers, a legal engineer and a part-time commercial lawyer, who would act as the firm’s COLP when it became an ABS.
The startup was recruiting an experienced housing lawyer, who could be a solicitor or a barrister, to run cases.
The primary business model would be to charge clients for the work, mainly on a conditional fee basis, but also via legal aid once Remedy Legal was registered as a legal aid provider.
Remedy Legal refers work to around 20 partner organisations, split equally between law firms and charities. It does not charge for referring legal aid work or charge charities for referrals.
“We also regularly send people to larger charities with which we have no direct or formal partnership.”
Mr Stresing grew up in Canada, arriving in the UK in 2014. He studied law at UCL before working for SeedLegals, an online legal and fundraising platform which helps startups and small businesses automate their legal documents and raise investment.
He began in customer support, where he recruited half a dozen people and managed the team before moving on to become a software engineer.
Leaving Seedlegals early last year, he met Remedy co-founder Miles Covers, an accountant who worked for PwC and set up a fintech company which used AI to automate the recovery of tax.
Mr Stresing said the “impetus” for creating the service was the rapid development of AI. One future use of AI could be ‘voice agents’, which can converse in a natural way like a human being and could even laugh.
The use of WhatsApp to set up claims, track deadlines and chat enabled those who did not speak English to access Remedy. Around a quarter of users were accessing the site in other languages.
Mr Stresing said Remedy raised £200,000 last autumn by being in venture capital firm Antler’s accelerator programme. It had since raised a further £100,000 from angel investors.
Looking forward to next year, Mr Stresing said the startup was looking at covering family, employment, debt and civil claims. Conveyancing was not on the list, but consumer rights issues, such as parking tickets or delayed flights, could be.
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