LegalTech startup Genie AI raises £2M to empower lawyers with collective knowledge

Genie AI, a LegalTech startup working to make knowledge more accessible to lawyers, has announced it raised a £1.2 million seed round and has won an £800K grant from UK Research and Innovation. The company’s intelligent contract editor, ‘SuperDrafter’, is currently piloting with law firms Clifford Chance, Pinsent Masons and Withers.

SuperDrafter processes confidential data to give previously unavailable insights to lawyers and make smart recommendations during drafting, negotiation and review. The result is an increase in drafting efficiency - by 52 percent, according to a vote of 61 lawyers at the Barclays Legal annual offsite. Key to this innovation is the fact that SuperDrafter does not require a human to tag or train the data - the algorithm learns by itself.

In future, SuperDrafter will benefit from algorithms created as part of Marta Kwiatkowska’s research project ‘Enabling Rapid Adoption of Artificial Intelligence through an Anonymised Data Protocol and Explainable Models’ funded by UK Research and Innovation, a new organisation that brings together the UK Research Councils, Innovate UK and Research England (UKRI).

UKRI has awarded a £1.5M grant to Genie AI’s consortium - Barclays, Withers, the University of Oxford, and Imperial College London - to answer two of the biggest challenges to the adoption of AI in UK services: access to confidential data and understanding the decisions machine learning models make. The project aims to answer these challenges with the combined capabilities of Genie AI’s SuperDrafter, Oxford University’s research into robust recurrent neural networks to explain the accuracy of machine learning decisions, and Imperial College’s research into the de-identification of legal contracts to anonymise confidential data while retaining critical information.