Legal App Upgrade Launches in UK Following £300k Funding & Innovate UK Project Completion

Jurit is proud to support Legal Utopia in a number of ways …with various client engagements, compliance advice and general support. We also applaud the development of innovative technology based ways for legal services to be made available to people who would not normally be able to access appropriate advice and guidance.

Legal Utopia – a LawTech start-up founded in August 2017 – was awarded £45,534 in grant funding by Innovate UK as part of a £300k follow-on investment into its technology and business development in 2020/2021. The £106,000 innovation project developed, tested, and released a range of new, affordable legal services, including the launch of a new consumer account to its existing small to medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) account.

Legal Utopia has successfully launched it second phase in its product and service delivery roadmap, following its MVP launch in January 2020, and as part of this new full-suite service offering, Legal Utopia has gone from a team of 4 to 20 with active recruitment ongoing for a further 10 staff by the end of the summer.

In this phase two service expansion:

• Legal Utopia has launched a consumer supported account within our mobile application providing access to all our existing and new services for individuals with exclusive new ‘credit’ purchases making the Legal Checker™ accessible from £0.99 and access to Legal Aid qualifying support, as well as Covid Support and Brexit Support at no cost.
• Legal Utopia has launched a ‘Find-A-Lawyer’ geographical mapping search of all 10,030 SRA-regulated law firms and their 15,000+ offices around the world with custom recommendations for Legal Checker™ subscribers. Users can now filter and find any SRA-regulated firm, as well as their company number, structure, licence status, authorisation date, website, email, and more from one place.
• Legal Utopia has launched ‘Free Docs’ a digital repository of legal document templates and agreements, along with HMCTS court forms, IPO services forms, Pension Regulator forms and templates, HM Land Registry forms, HMRC forms, Companies House forms, and The Insolvency Service forms, in total, comprising more than 5,000+ searchable documents! We’ve included the ability to filter by area of law, as well as document type, language type, court type, and government agency to make it even easier to find what you need, alongside keyword search and sorting.
• Legal Utopia has re-launched the Legal Checker™ to assist both SMEs and consumers in identifying more than 400,000 everyday legal problems (from the previous 186,000 in 2020). The Legal Checker has also had a design update making it even easier to navigate with the introduction of update notifications (for when the law changes), saved results, embedded feedback, as well as more than 1m recommendation combinations and 24,000+ FAQs on top of the 10,000+ pages of legal guidance now available.
• Legal Utopia has introducing a new ‘Corporate Memberships’ option to allow thoughtful employers, insurers and banks, to name a few, to offer on-demand legal support via the Legal Utopia App to their key customers, clients and employees under a new membership unit pricing; making access to legal services even more affordable at significant scale.
• Legal Utopia has released our waiting list for our new ‘Book-A-Lawyer’ service coming early summer 2021. This new service allows SRA-regulated firms and registered freelance solicitors to purchase an annual membership to ‘list’ on our user booking and video-conferencing service; free from referral and commission fees.

SRA-regulated firms can list as a booking option on the Book-A-Lawyer service within the Legal Utopia App for £149.99 per annum, inclusive of 2x listings, and registered freelancers at just £99 per annum. Legal Utopia provides the booking, management, and audio/video-conference solution along with new client leads reducing overhead and generating revenue returns.

Firms seeking to develop their national reach and brand have an exclusive opportunity to join our Premium Membership, enhancing their firm’s profile across our Find-A-Lawyer and Book-A-Lawyer services at just £499 per annum, inclusive of 10 x listings, limited to 100 x UK firms.

Additionally,

• Legal Utopia has launched a completely new end-to-end mobile design making the user-experience even simpler and quicker to identifying legal problems and the resources to solving them;
• Legal Utopia has doubled our capacity from supporting 186,000 common legal problems to over 400,000 autonomously and on-demand, meanwhile, decreasing the number of words required to classify legal problems from 150 to 100. A win-win for everyone!
• Legal Utopia has introduced additional support across more than 10 legal practice areas and 150 sub-areas, including free Coronavirus Support and Brexit Support. We’ve also made all civil legal aid qualifying problems free;
• Legal Utopia has introduced more than 24,000 new FAQs and 1,000,000 guidance recommendation combinations (included within credit and subscription purchases) across the 400,000 legal problems supported through our Legal Checker self-help service;
• Legal Utopia has incorporated and deployed a new Covid-Tracker service within our application allowing users to access all coronavirus-related laws and regulations from one place, updated weekly, with a filter by related practice area and sorting options;
• Legal Utopia incorporated, believed to be the first, government services integration within our application allowing users to access government legal portal services and information in-app! Users can now make money claims, incorporate a company, appeal a benefits decision, or petition a divorce from the Legal Utopia app;
• Legal Utopia has deployed our re-trained, patent-pending NLP machine learning technology improving our platform’s overall accuracy, as well as introducing new technologies and data science techniques to increase our platform’s performance by a 2x factor.

The Legal Checker™ service now supports self-learning and ‘legal problem pattern recognition’ to enable the service predictions to develop, in scope and accuracy, with new diagnosis combinations, meanwhile identify new legal problems and their frequency to enable a targeted, data-driven expansion of the Legal Checker service.

The 6-month Innovate UK project was successfully funded as a recipient of the January 2020 Innovate UK Smart Grant Competition. The competition “has invested up to £25 million in the best game-changing and commercially viable innovative or disruptive ideas (Innovate UK)”.

Quotes

Fraser Matcham (Chief Problem Solver) said:

This brings something new to the LawTech sector in these uncertain times. The new funding and investment has ensured that we continue to introduce new ways of accessing on-demand legal services in the UK.

Our services will test the introduction of new business models in legal services, as well as technologies, at a time when the market is going to need it. It also highlights the potential new solutions that can benefit small businesses and consumers when industry data is put to use.

Legal Utopia has been backed by its shareholders, securing £495,023 of funding since incorporating in August 2017. The management team includes Chief Legal Officer Robert Marcus and Chief Problem Solver Fraser Matcham, as well as Investor Directors Charles Sterling and Paul Harper.

Robert Marcus (Chief Legal Officer) said:

This new service is an important step in opening up access to law to citizens who have all to often been unable to access the right legal advice in a competitive and timely way.

Jenifer Swallow (LawtechUK Director) said:

Dealing with legal problems should be as easy as using an iPhone app. Legal Utopia offers exactly this, helping regular people and businesses get support. It has been fantastic to see the vision, commitment and progress of the team during the Lawtech Sandbox and we wish them every success in changing the landscape of the legal services market.

Innovate UK project statement

This project seeks to implement successful research development outputs undertaken in 2018 and 2019 to establish a commercial application to benefit the lower-means demographic of legal consumers in need of legal support in the UK.

At present, a comprehensive legal assessment of an individual’s legal problem is unsustainably and disproportionately inaccessible to the lower-means demographic. The project will use a researched and feasibility tested legal problem diagnosis process that leverages machine learning algorithms to identify legal problems by consumers simply explaining or describing them.

The commercial application will be delivered in the form of a mobile application direct to consumers in need to provide a new, greater degree of access to legal guidance, services, resources, legal aid and more.

Notes to Editors

Legal Utopia had previously successfully completed one of the UK’s largest national legal consumer research projects looking at the needs of, and demand for, legal services by low-means consumers and businesses in collaboration with the University of Westminster. The substantial, 15-month research project was funded by the European Regional Development Fund and Legal Utopia Limited with its findings published in January 2020.

Legal Utopia was a previous resident of the Barclays LawTech Incubator and cohort member of the Wayra UK Accelerator in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh. It had previously collaborated with Norton Rose Fulbright and the Information Commissioner’s Office as part of the Regulator’s Pioneers Fund, funded by BEIS, on automated decision-making data protection regulation. The company received further valuable pro bono support from Mishcon de Reya, Baker McKenzie, and Dentons in its early MVP development.

Legal Utopia was a previous cohort member of the LawTech UK Sandbox Pilot by TechNation and the Ministry of Justice to accelerate the development of new solutions for the benefit of small businesses in the UK. Legal Utopia is currently a participant on the SRA’s Comparison Websites and Quality Indicators Pilot Scheme.

Legal Utopia Links

Social: @AiLegalutopia / Legal Utopia (LinkedIn & Facebook)
Contact: Fraser Matcham (fraser@legalutopia.co.uk)
Website: https://legalutopia.co.uk/index.html
Blog: http://blog.legalutopia.co.uk

Innovate UK Links

Social: @innovateuk / LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/innovateuk/)
Contact: Press Office (press@ukri.org / 01793 234 136)
Competition Site: https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/515/overview

Innovate UK drives productivity and economic growth by supporting businesses to develop and realise the potential of new ideas.

We connect businesses to the partners, customers and investors that can help them turn ideas into commercially successful products and services and business growth.

We fund business and research collaborations to accelerate innovation and drive business investment into R&D. Our support is available to businesses across all economic sectors, value chains and UK regions.

Innovate UK is part of UK Research and Innovations.