LawtechUK Launches Hub + Legal Tech Directory

LawtechUK, the Government-backed industry body, has launched a new hub that links to educational material, its various projects and tools, and a directory that includes legal tech startups and scale-ups.

As Artificial Lawyer has covered before, LawtechUK, which operates via Tech Nation, has developed a smorgasbord of projects and resources for everyone interested in and involved with legal tech, e.g. the recent launch of a regulatory checker tool, and a protocol to help you access or share legal data.

It’s also been running a sandbox project, as well as developing some very useful educational resources that cover things such as AI tools – see here. But, one of the resources that readers may find of particular interest is its legal tech directory of companies based in, or operating in, the UK, which began at the start of this year.

The Data Commons for Lawtech, as it’s called, is provided by Tech Nation and market intelligence aggregator, Dealroom. The legal tech companies are mixed in with hundreds of others across multiple sectors, so you’ll have to dig around to find what you want.

So, for example, you can find a fairly long list of companies if you type in ‘lawtech’, (although hardly any if you use ‘legaltech’, and over 900 if you type in ‘legal tech’, although many of those are not really legal tech companies). The best way to start is to go to the main page and then click on the startups and scaleups section – then search from there.

That in turn provides you with data on a whole range of things:

  • Launch date
  • Staff numbers and growth of team over the last 12 months
  • Company valuation
  • Investors and investment sums
  • Key staff members (….although this needs some major updates)
  • And, for some companies it also shows their tech stack (see below).
An example showing Define, the drafting tool.

It also has a little map function that shows what other companies are near to the legal tech startups. (Although these days that may not be so relevant.)

And in terms of the tech stack, this is what the site says that Luminance uses, for example:

Probably not a revelation that Luminance uses Python or Google, but maybe its use of Ansible is of interest to other legal tech companies.

In short, it’s a (sometimes random) starting place, and one you’ll have to spend some time working with to get a meaningful picture.

That said, if you want to wade through, (and then double check the results against a company’s own website and other resources), you will find plenty of useful nuggets of information about legal tech startups. One factor that hit this site is just how small many startups still are even after several years of operating.

If you’re listed and that data needs updating, or you’d like to be listed, then there is a contact form on their website here.

Overall, it highlights the challenges of building any kind of directory for the complex and highly atomised, and constantly changing, legal tech market – something this site can empathise with – not to mention the challenges of building an effective taxonomy to deliver relevant search results.

But, as mentioned, there are plenty of useful data points in there, if you’re willing to explore. No doubt the results will get refined as time goes by.

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