Nagtegaal: Already passed break even
Two of the founders of a subscription-based legal service in South Africa which has advised over a million clients have launched an alternative business structure (ABS) in England and Wales aimed at SMEs.
Jackie Nagtegaal, director of Lawyerly, said the law firm did not set a maximum amount of time clients could spend with their solicitors once they paid their monthly subscriptions.
She also said she had “30 years of data” from her South African firm, Law For All, to help design Lawyerly’s “costing and capacity”.
She said Lawyerly, which has 130 SME clients, had already passed break even.
Having found that Law For All’s subscription model worked “really well” with business clients in South Africa, Ms Nagtegaal explained that they decided to make Britain the first international expansion for a number of reasons, such as the similarities in language and legal systems, and being allowed to own a law firm under the ABS regime.
Lawyerly was incorporated in 2024, but Ms Nagtegaal said it really only “officially” got going in mid-2025 and received its ABS licence at the start of this month.
“We needed to test the market, do a lot of research and speak to a lot of business owners. We’ve designed the business portal around their needs.”
Two particular reasons for becoming an ABS were the ability to handle commercial leases and the “credibility and accountability” that regulation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority brought.
“There aren’t many bodies that oversee alternative legal services and we want to have client protection and be covered by the Legal Ombudsman.”
Ms Nagtegaal is head of finance and administration, with solicitor Patricia Tinn the head of legal practice.
The law firm operates on a virtual basis, with clients and its four full-time solicitors spread across the country. The first step is for clients to meet a solicitor, who gets to know their business, understand what they need and create a roadmap.
Subscription rates are linked to the size of the business, starting at £379 per month plus VAT for startups which are not trading or in their first year.
Ms Nagtegaal said she founded Lawyerly with her brother Jan-Jan, and they remain the owners. They are also majority shareholders in Law For All, which has revenue approaching half a billion rand (£22.5m).
She said they were funding Lawyerly themselves and not looking for external funding; Ms Nagtegaal said she expected to have doubled the legal team by this time next year.
AI was built into the client hub to help solicitors with researching, drafting and reviewing.
Before she founded Lawyerly, Ms Nagtegaal, who has a law degree from Stellenbosch University, obtained a PhD in futures studies from Stellenbosch Business School.
She said the course was about “designing the future we want to see”, rather than being scared of it and the subject of her thesis was “law as a tool to design the future”.
Describing herself as a “terrible optimist”, she predicted that the legal services market would change but “there will always be a place for lawyers if they listen more and attend to their clients’ needs”. They still offered “incredible value in transactional work”.
She added that she believed AI enhanced access to justice and legal education, and was “such a valuable tool” it should be “celebrated rather than feared”.
Lawyerly is not the first subscription-based service to come to the UK from abroad, following LegalVision from Australia, which last year took private equity investment [1].