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The Lawtech Sandbox
Transforming the UK legal sector through tech
The Lawtech Sandbox fast tracks transformative ideas, products and services that address the legal needs of businesses and society.
We work with lawtech pioneers with a readiness to test, build and push the boundaries – to explore in the Lawtech Sandbox how we can tackle opportunities and challenges with lawtech, and demonstrate what transformation looks like in the legal sector in practical ways. This isn’t about the easy steps but the hard ones. That’s where we will help lawtech pioneers make a difference.
The Lawtech Sandbox
The Lawtech Sandbox is back. This time with your choice of two new programmes, expert mentoring and regulatory pathfinding, designed to help fast-track your transformative lawtech offering.
The Lawtech Sandbox Programmes is open to all UK innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers who have potentially transformative products or services looking to address the legal needs of businesses and society.
You can read our full T&Cs here. You can read our application guidance here.
*We are not currently accepting applications.
Introducing this year’s Lawtech Sandbox cohort
The industry leading Lawtech Sandbox is supporting eight pioneers to fast-track their development and push the boundaries of lawtech.
Kate Ho
Co-founder & Chief Product & Technology Officer, Valla
Dannae Shell
Co-founder & CEO, Valla
Eliot Benzecrit
Co-founder & Director, Avvoka
David Howorth
Co-founder & Director, Avvoka
Tian Ma
Co-founder, LegalMe
Chiara McDermott
Co-founder, LegalMe
Arthur Berkley
Co-founder, LegalMe
James Neale
Co-founder, LegalMe
Wayne Lloyd
Founder, Smarter: Contracts
Cristian Gherhes
Founder & CEO, Lexyfi
Aaron Powers
Co-founder & CEO, Hunit
Jan C Berger
Co-founder & CBDO, Hunit
Romilly Eveleigh
Co-founder, What Visa?
Tim Whittaker
Co-founder, What Visa?
David Gigauri
Co-founder, Feesier
Lev Klyuvgant
Co-founder, Feesier
Click on each company logo below to read about their innovations
- Avvoka
Lawtech
Avvoka is a document automation, negotiation and analytics tool designed to help law firms, in-house legal teams and businesses of all sizes draft documents, negotiate them, and leverage data insights from that process to draft better documents, and get to “yes” faster.
- Feesier
Lawtech
Feesier makes buying legal services easier for everyone. Businesses and individuals can split the cost of legal services into instalments at no extra cost. The legal services provider receives their fees upfront to secure payment and protect their cash flow. With Feesier, legal services become more attainable and paying for them more manageable.
- Hunit
Lawtech
Hunit allows any law office, financial group or enterprise to write natively digital legal agreements. Their platform transforms today’s analogue investment agreements into legally binding smart contracts by enabling lawyers to embed self-executing actions directly within MS Word documents.
- LegalMe
Lawtech
LegalMe is an online platform that helps tenants facing housing disrepair pursue their own legal claims without the need for a lawyer. Using document automation and case management technology, LegalMe generates legal filings, manages correspondence, and walks tenants through every step of the complex claims journey.
- Lexify
Lawtech
The use of electronic communication by employees exposes companies to a series of risks that can result in litigation, cause significant reputational damage and financial loss, and damage employee morale. Lexyfi leverages the power of artificial intelligence to prevent these risks in real time, provide ongoing training, and increase trust and productivity within organisations.
- Smarter:Contracts
Lawtech
Smarter:Contracts’ data privacy and consent management platform Pulse, enables businesses to manage their customer consents around data with greater transparency, security and control.Utilising blockchain and machine learning, Pulse allows people and businesses to manage their data in the same way they manage their money.
- Valla
Lawtech
Valla is on a mission to make legal support accessible and affordable for everyone, starting with unfair treatment at work. Valla’s DIY law platform helps people resolve employment issues themselves without spending thousands in legal fees. Using Valla, people can collect evidence, generate forms and send legal letters. When they need legal advice, they can connect with a lawyer through the Valla platform at an affordable fixed price.
- What Visa?
Lawtech
What Visa? seeks to combat the complexities of the UK’s immigration system. Their self service visa evaluation enables businesses and individuals to see at a glance whether a potential employee is eligible for a work visa, without needing an expert/lawyer. The tool provides assessment, guidance on processes, and workflow tools to help employers that sponsor visas.
How does the Lawtech Sandbox support pioneers?
In addition to the one-on-one support from the Lawtech Sandbox team, pioneers get access to a range of practical support and unique connections, tailored to accelerate their development and maximise their impact.
The Lawtech Sandbox is free, government-backed, and we don’t take an equity stake in organisations that join.
WORKING WITH REGULATORS
Navigating regulations and governance can be time consuming and complicated. That is why we will provide access to regulators throughout the process, for advice, support and assurance at pace.
This includes multiple regulators in a single, fast response forum: the Regulatory Response Unit.
OUR NETWORK
We understand the power of accessing the right person at the right time to achieve your goals, whether that is a decision-maker, a client, a mentor or an expert.
We will connect you based on your needs, to our legal, business and public body network, to help you test and develop your product, and drive commercial opportunities and collaboration.
ACCESS TO DATA
We know that legal data is hard to come by and understand the immense value that greater access could have on the lawtech sector. Our goal is to help improve access to legal data.
During the Lawtech Sandbox, we will support by matchmaking you with data sources.
Who should apply to the Lawtech Sandbox?
The Lawtech Sandbox is open to all innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers, whether tech companies, academics, or legal businesses or consortia, who have potentially transformative ideas, products or services looking to address the legal needs of businesses and society.
The Lawtech Sandbox is open to all innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers, whether tech companies, academics, or legal businesses or consortia, who have potentially transformative ideas, products or services looking to address the legal needs of UK businesses and society.
*Please note, criminal/citizen access to justice is currently outside the remit of LawtechUK.
To apply, you must meet the following criteria:
- Your idea, product or service that you wish to put forward for the Lawtech Sandbox meets a legal need of business and / or society.
- You are based in the UK (whether headquarters or company incorporated in the UK)
Last year’s pilot cohort
Earlier this year, the industry leading Lawtech Sandbox Pilot successfully supported 5 pioneers to fast-track their development.
Minesh Patel
CEO, Amplified Global
Peter Hunn
Founder, Legal Schema
Anastasia Dokuchaeva
Head of Product, ClauseMatch
Dr. Mimi Zou
Co-founder, Deriskly
Fraser Matcham,
CEO, Legal Utopia
Click on each company logo below to read the pioneer case study
- Amplified Global
London | Lawtech
Amplifi helps customers engage with and assess lengthy, technical legal information by presenting information in a way that fits a customer’s needs and enables their understanding. They achieve this by using natural language processing to identify common elements of legal documents and use machine learning to assess the degree of likely comprehension, involving a cognitive risk score.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot enabled Amplified Global to access over 200 customer-facing legal documents and work closely with Vodafone, which helped them to develop and refine their product. Amplified Global also got answers to its emerging legal, regulatory and ethical questions through a series of workshops with key stakeholders hosted by LawtechUK.
- ClauseMatch
London | Lawtech | @ClauseMatch
ClauseMatch looks to transform regulation into digital, machine-readable form with an easy-to-use, AI-powered smart document collaboration platform, making it easier for businesses to automate and manage their compliance and to keep up with regulations.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot connected ClauseMatch to regulators through the Regulatory Response Unit, to explore and progress digitisation of the regulatory framework, as well as facilitating access to legal and regulatory experts to better understand their customer and develop a dataset in-house to train and test their AI.
- Deriskly
South East | Lawtech
Deriskly is an AI-enabled software that can help businesses detect risks of a potential legal dispute with customers, suppliers, employees, regulators, and other stakeholders. Equipped with this powerful tool, businesses can promptly prevent a dispute from becoming a costly, time-consuming, damaging lawsuit down the track.
Through its network, the Lawtech Sandbox Pilot enabled Deriskly to work with in-house teams, experts and mentors to accelerate Deriskly’s knowledge of the problem space that they are working in and develop a commercialisation plan.
- Legal Schema
Lawtech
The Legal Schema is an open-source, universal, vocabulary for embedding and structuring data in contracts and other legal documents, developed by Peter Hunn, founder of Clause and the Accord Project during the Lawtech Sandbox Pilot. The Legal Schema demonstrates the practical applicability of digital document technologies that can act as a foundation for business and future development.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot enabled Peter to conviene public bodies, law firms, corporates and SMEs from the Sandbox Network to better understand the barriers to adopting digital documents, develop use cases and produce a white paper launching the Legal Schema. The white paper can be found at: https://lawtechuk.io/explore/legal-schema-launch.
-- - Legal Utopia
London | Lawtech | @AiLegalutopia
Legal Utopia makes legal services affordable and accessible, particularly focused on the SME market, by providing recommendations and information on legal services via an intelligent legal diagnostic process that can identify and assess a wide range of legal problems.
The Lawtech Sandbox Pilot allowed Legal Utopia to gain access to multiple datasets to realise its wider data-driven development objectives, as well as obtaining multi-regulator input from the Regulatory Response Unit to support new services and tools.
“Without the Lawtech Sandbox, an organisation of our size and stage would have found it really difficult to be working, or even engaging, with a telecoms giants and the cross section of stakeholders and regulators that we did. The Sandbox has rapidly accelerated our growth and helped us to get the product to market quicker than we could have ever imagined.”
Minesh Patel, CEO, Amplified Global
Our Judges
We are proud to have insightful leaders and experts supporting the Lawtech Sandbox and will assess your applications.
Chris Grant, LawtechUK Panel Member
Sophia Adams Bhatti, Head of Strategy & Policy at Simmons Wavelength
Nick West, Chief Strategy Officer, Mishcon de Reya LLP, & Founder of MDR LAB
Matthew Smith, Manager – Policy, Innovate, FCA
Stephen Browning, Challenge Director – Next Generation Service at Innovate UK
Jenifer Swallow, Director of LawtechUK 
Alex Lennox, Head of LawtechUK
The Regulatory Response Unit brings together relevant regulators into a single, fast response forum, to make it easy for pioneers to access and navigate the rules and move forward with confidence. Especially useful for pioneers pushing the boundaries or where a product touches more than one regulatory regime.
“It is a ground-breaking initiative to bring regulators together in this way to support technology innovators in law.”
Sheldon Mills, Executive Director, Consumers and Competition, Financial Conduct Authority and Chair of the Regulatory Response Unit
Want to learn even more?
Whether you are exploring lawtech for the first time, looking for know-how and inspiration for your own work, or want to learn how LawtechUK is supporting the sector to evolve – the LawtechUK Hub is here to support you.