LawFairy ‘Technology-Only Law Firm’ Gets Regulatory Approval

LawFairy, a ‘technology-only’ law firm that uses deterministic workflows rather than lawyers to provide help to clients, has received official approval from the SRA (Solicitors Regulation Authority). See AL Interview below.

It’s the second primarily tech-led law firm to get approval in the UK, with Garfield last year – which uses AI to handle small claims – also getting the go ahead from the SRA to operate as ‘a law firm’.

The SRA is the body in England & Wales that regulates lawyers, so their approval is a big deal in terms of the development of NewModel legal businesses, which in the LawFairy case is not using genAI, but it is still a NewModel, or NewMod, given its tech-first approach.

Seb Jenks at LawFairy told Artificial Lawyer: ‘We’ve just received SRA authorisation for what we believe is the first deterministic, technology-only law firm in England & Wales, operating without traditional lawyers delivering the outcomes.

‘Unlike probabilistic legal AI [ i.e. via LLMs ], our regulated outcomes are generated through pre-validated statutory rules with a fully auditable reasoning trail.’

The focus for now will be on complex immigration cases, on which they commented: ‘Immigration law is one of the most…high-risk regulatory domains. Yet eligibility and compliance decisions are still commonly made using fragmented guidance, spreadsheets, and keyword-based tools that were never designed to support defensible outcomes.’

AL Interview with Raj Panasar, CEO of LawFairy.

Can you tell us more about the approach here?

It is deterministic (or symbolic) AI. The AI tools that have dominated public conversation in recent years are probabilistic large language models. They generate outputs by predicting statistically likely text. That makes them powerful for many tasks, but their outputs can vary and they optimise for plausibility rather than correctness.

LawFairy uses deterministic AI – what we call Trusted Legal Intelligence – legal outcomes produced through verified, auditable rule application rather than statistical inference.

Instead of generating answers, the system applies codified legal rules to structured inputs. The same facts produce the same result every time. There is no statistical variability, no improvisation, and no hallucination risk. Every outcome can be traced back to the specific rule that triggered it.

Technically, it is a proprietary rule-based legal logic engine – FairyLogicTM. The statutory and policy criteria are encoded into structured decision pathways and validated by lawyers. The system then executes that logic consistently and transparently.

Whose technology are you using?

The core legal intelligence engine is proprietary to LawFairy. The rule architecture and decision framework were designed and built in-house by the Founder, a lawyer with 30 years’ experience in practice, translating statutory and policy criteria into structured, machine-executable logic.

That matters beyond competitive differentiation. Because we own the legal logic layer entirely, it can be audited, updated and verified as the law changes. There is no dependency on a third-party model whose behaviour we cannot fully control or explain.

When rules and laws change, we update the encoded legal logic directly, and the system immediately reflects those changes.

We use standard secure enterprise infrastructure for hosting and delivery, but the legal intelligence that drives outcomes is our own.

What legal work is it doing? Who for?

The initial focus is UK immigration – one of the most rule-dense and fast-moving areas of law, where small factual differences can change outcomes entirely.

The platform conducts eligibility assessments for visa routes including Skilled Worker applications, as well as settlement and citizenship determinations.

It generates structured eligibility reports, evidence checklists and reasoning packs – what we call decision- ready outputs – forming the foundation of a complete application file.

The platform serves three audiences: individuals navigating the system directly, regulated immigration advisers, and commercial law firms. For firms, it handles the rule-application stage of a matter, producing a structured, auditable case file before strategic legal advice is layered on top.

How is it priced?

Pricing is transparent and structured around access and usage rather than hourly billing – a deliberate departure from traditional legal charging models.

For individuals who need a one-off assessment, a single eligibility report covering both Visa & Sponsorship and Settlement & Citizenship is £149, with no ongoing commitment. We also offer a free SOC code search tool, requiring no account, that goes beyond keyword matching, helping users check true role alignment, eligibility context, and salary thresholds before committing to a full assessment

For lawyers and advisers managing ongoing immigration work, there is tiered subscription pricing.

The principle is predictable, outcome-aligned pricing. When the mechanical layer of eligibility checking is handled by technology, the cost structure should reflect that.

Why are you doing this?

Because immigration decisions are life-changing, and the infrastructure supporting them has not kept pace with the complexity of the law.

Settlement periods have doubled. Salary thresholds have risen sharply. The government’s official job classification system has been restructured in ways that materially affect who qualifies for which visa routes. These are structural shifts, not marginal adjustments.

Yet many eligibility decisions are still being made by manually cross-referencing policy documents, spreadsheets and fragmented guidance that were never designed to deliver consistent, defensible outcomes.

Where the law operates through defined rules – fixed thresholds, statutory tests and precise eligibility criteria – technology should apply those rules consistently and transparently.

This is not about replacing legal expertise. It is about recognising that consistency and explainability are themselves forms of expertise.

More broadly, legal AI in regulated environments should prioritise certainty and auditability over language generation. Trusted Legal Intelligence embeds validated legal logic into technology so that outcomes are defensible by design.

There is also an access to justice dimension, which was effectively the incubator for this part of the platform. We are announcing a pro bono initiative with a leading charity and a top global law firm next week. The cost and opacity of traditional legal services place them beyond the reach of many people with legitimate and urgent needs. If deterministic technology can deliver reliable, auditable outcomes at the rule-application stage, it expands access in a way that hourly billing structures cannot.

Thanks and good to see another NewMod coming to market!

–

Legal Innovators Conference News

Legal Innovators California, the landmark West Coast legal tech event, will take place on June 10 and 11, in the heart of the Bay Area, the home to many of the world’s leading AI businesses – and plenty of legal tech pioneers as well! More information and tickets here.