Meet the AI Law Firm That's Beefing with Conveyancing
Plus: DocuSign moves into contract review; Steno raises $49M; New York wants to regulate AI legal advice
Hey, happy Sunday
This week we saw a new AI-native law firm launched in the UK, a significant regulatory bill is gathering pace in New York, and DocuSign has made a meaningful move into contract review territory. On the podcast front, a new episode of the Best Practice Podcast just dropped with the CTO of General Legal.
Let’s dig in
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This Week in Legal AI
The vegan food entrepreneurs building Britain’s next law firm
Founders Andy Shovel and Pete Sharman has previously built THIS - the plant-based food company behind those uncannily convincing bacon and chicken alternatives - have launched their new venture Keith raising £2 million in seed funding led by Backed VC, with participation from Breega, ahead of a planned Q3 2026 launch pending authorisation from the Council for Licensed Conveyancers.
The name belongs to the AI client-service agent that will be available 24 hours a day via phone and WhatsApp. Behind the scenes, a network of specialised AI agents handles document review, drafting, and client communication, with qualified conveyancers retaining oversight at key checkpoints. The founders estimate up to 80% of the process can be automated.
The market context is not difficult to argue. More than 530,000 UK property transactions fall through every year, and the average time from instruction to completion has risen to 123 days since 2019. The firm is pursuing CLC rather than SRA regulation for now, a deliberate choice the founders describe as better suited to a disruptive approach, with SRA authorisation planned when Keith expands into other practice areas. That expansion strategy, notably, includes rolling up other firms and adding Keith’s technology into them.
Why it matters
Keith sits within a growing wave of AI-native firms that are being built from scratch around AI infrastructure rather than grafted onto existing practice structures. Several have already been backed by Y Combinator in the US; Conveyd has been working the same conveyancing territory in the UK since early 2025.
The direct competitive threat to established law firms is limited in the short term. But, if consumers begin to experience conveyancing that takes weeks rather than months, with full transaction visibility and around-the-clock responsiveness, they will carry those expectations into other legal relationships.
Worth Knowing
DocuSign moves into contract review. DocuSign this week launched an AI-powered contract review assistant built on its Iris agreement AI engine, integrated into its Intelligent Agreement Management platform. DocuSign reports its own legal team has saved up to 15 minutes per NDA and cut MSA negotiation time by 30 to 60 minutes using the product. The launch is a significant move into territory previously occupied by dedicated contract review platforms - and signals DocuSign’s ambition to own the full agreement workflow, not just the signature at the end of it.
UK law firms lead the world in AI adoption. The Profitability in Law: Global Report 2026 has found that 31% of UK legal professionals use integrated or legal-specific AI tools daily - the highest rate globally and over fifty percent more than the figure for Australia and New Zealand. In total, 62% of UK practitioners describe themselves as active, regular AI users. The UK, the report suggests, is not just ahead today but compounding that advantage through familiarity and institutional uptake. It’s a meaningful data point for those still debating whether legal AI adoption in this country is real or performative.
Best Practice Podcast
It was a pleasure speaking to Javed Qadrud-Din on my podcast.
We discussed:
→ Javed’s extraordinary background and how General Legal came about
→ The difference between being AI-native and being AI-powered
→ What the economics of flat-fee legal services look like under pressure, and whether $500 per contract goes down as AI improves.
→ Why founders using free ChatGPT to draft contracts are “yoloing it”.
→ His vision for what the legal industry looks like in 2030 - and what lawyers should be doing today to prepare.
If you’d like to feature on my podcast, please email george@georgehannah.com
Funding & New Partnerships
Harvey has raised $200 million in a new funding round co-led by GIC and Sequoia, pushing its valuation to $11 billion - up from $8 billion just three months ago. The raise brings Harvey’s total funding to over $1 billion and is one of the largest rounds yet seen in legal AI. The company’s products are now used by more than 100,000 lawyers across 1,300 organisations, including the majority of the AmLaw 100. The capital will be used to expand Harvey’s AI agents and grow its embedded legal engineering teams, which work directly inside client organisations to build and improve the workflows running on the platform.
Legora has launched the Legal AI Scholars Program, a formal initiative embedding its enterprise platform into the curricula of nine US law schools. The founding cohort includes Stanford Law School, University of Chicago, Cornell, Northwestern Pritzker, and UCLA, among others. Participating schools receive access to the same platform deployed at leading law firms, alongside dedicated faculty training and curriculum support.
PointOne, the time entry startup, has raised a $16 million Series A led by 8VC, with continued participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator. PointOne automates billing capture using AI. The 8VC involvement is notable, with the firm has historically backed deep enterprise infrastructure, suggesting PointOne is positioning for broader workflow integration rather than remaining a single-capability tool.
From the Courtroom
New York’s Senate is advancing a bill - the S7263 - that would make AI chatbot operators legally liable when their tools provide advice that, if given by a human, would count as practising law without a licence. It passed committee unanimously in late February and is now headed for a full Senate vote.
The bill has attracted criticism on two fronts. First, the drafting is loose: it never defines what counts as “substantive” legal advice, leaving courts to figure that out. Second, there’s an access to justice argument - the people most likely to turn to AI for legal guidance are those who can’t afford a lawyer. A rule that treats AI legal information as unauthorised practice may end up hurting them most.
It’s a US bill, and the UK’s reserved legal activities framework is narrower, so any direct equivalent here would look quite different. But the underlying question - where does AI information end and legal advice begin - is one that regulators on this side of the Atlantic will eventually have to answer too.
In Other AI News
Not all the most interesting AI funding this week came from legal tech. Halter, a New Zealand-based startup that makes AI-powered collars for cattle, raised $220 million at a $2 billion valuation in a round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The company has now sold one million of its solar-powered, GPS-enabled collars to over 2,000 ranchers across New Zealand, Australia, and the US, with plans to expand into Ireland and the UK later this year.
The collars use audio cues and gentle vibrations to guide herds across virtual boundaries, meaning a farmer can move an entire herd from a smartphone without physical fencing. The proprietary AI layer powering this is, magnificently, called the “Cowgorithm,” trained on seven billion hours of animal behaviour data.
It would be easy to file this under novelty. But Halter is deploying AI in exactly the way the most successful applications tend to: in a sector that is vast, fragmented, and almost entirely undigitised. Agriculture and conveyancing, it turns out, have more in common than their respective lobbying groups would probably prefer to admit.
That’s everything for this week.
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See you next week,
George