Rise of the robot lawyer

British AI startup Robin AI has secured $10.5m to enhance the development of a robot lawyer with the ability to draft legal contracts.

The fundraise was led by Plural and a group of angel investors, including the founder of Monzo Tom Blomfield, and executives from Bridgepoint, Apollo, Clifford Chance and Barings.

The AI tech provider aims to utilise its partnership with Anthropic, a developer of “large language models” to enhance the AI algorithm and produce reliable information.

The aim of the technology is to reduce legal costs and provide wider access to legal services.

The machine learning model has been trained using data from 4.5 million legal documents and claims to speed up the drafting of contracts by 60-80%, thus saving on legal fees. The technology aims to help read documents, highlight key legal issues and suggest edits to contracts. A human lawyer will be expected to approve any changes made by the bot.

CEO and founder of Robin AI, Richard Robinson, commented: “We have grown revenue 20x since our last fundraise and are already cashflow positive, reviewing over 12,000 contracts per year. We are adding a set of customers to our existing base of private equity and financial services clients, including law firm Clifford Chance and impact fund Blue Earth Capital.”