‘Lawrence’ scored 74% on mock test
The London law firm that created an ‘AI paralegal’ capable of passing part one of the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) has received £9.5 million of investment from Google.
Lawhive, founded in 2021, hit headlines last November when it’s AI-powered paralegal successfully completed SQE1, scoring 74% on the multiple choice sample questions available on the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s website.
The bot, dubbed ‘Lawrence’, successfully answered 67 of the 90 multiple choice sample questions, despite struggling with what the firm said were issues with “complex chains of logic and wider context”.
Jump forward a few months and Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has pumped £9.5 million into the firm.
Commenting on the the need for AI in law, chief executive of Lawhive, Pierre Proner, said:
“The consumer legal market is totally broken and hasn’t really had an update in hundreds of years. It came out of personal experiences of really battling an airline while trying to get money back during Covid, and feeling totally cut out of the legal system. We went to some high street firms to see if they could help and it was far more expensive than was justified to pay.”
Lawrence, he says, keeps lawyers away from “repetitive legal work”, helping clients find cheaper solutions, whilst ensuring that they’re “not getting an AI chatbot, they are getting a real human lawyer working with them”.
On the new investment, Vidu Shanmugarajah, a partner at Google Ventures, said: “Lawhive not only dramatically improves legal workflows but also makes high quality legal advice more accessible and affordable to a broader audience.”
Earlier this month, one of the UK’s top judges, Lord Justice Birss, noted how “AI used properly has the potential to enhance the work of lawyers and judges enormously”. “It will democratise legal help for unrepresented people” he said, adding that “it can and should be a force for good.”