UK Solicitors Regulation Authority Approves Garfield.Law as First AI-Driven Law Firm
Garfield.Law Ltd · United Kingdom
In May 2025 the UK Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) authorised Garfield.Law Ltd, co-founded by Philip Young and Daniel Long, as the first law firm authorised to deliver legal services entirely through AI technology. Garfield operates an AI-powered litigation assistant for small claims debt recovery up to £10,000, guiding users from calculating amounts owed through filing for default judgment, and charges per document rather than hourly. The SRA authorisation included safeguards such as client confidentiality protection, conflict avoidance, user approval at each stage, and controls preventing the AI from proposing case law to address hallucination risk.
Overview
In May 2025 the UK Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) authorised Garfield.Law Ltd, co-founded by Philip Young and Daniel Long, as the first law firm authorised to deliver legal services entirely through AI technology. Garfield operates an AI-powered litigation assistant for small claims debt recovery up to £10,000, guiding users from calculating amounts owed through filing for default judgment, and charges per document rather than hourly. The SRA authorisation included safeguards such as client confidentiality protection, conflict avoidance, user approval at each stage, and controls preventing the AI from proposing case law to address hallucination risk.
The challenge
Small businesses in the UK are owed billions in unpaid invoices but cannot economically pursue claims under traditional legal fee structures, leaving a gap in access to justice for small claims debt recovery.
The solution
Garfield.Law, co-founded by Philip Young and Daniel Long, operates an AI-powered litigation assistant for small claims debt recovery up to £10,000, guiding users through the entire process from calculating amounts owed to filing for default judgment, and charges on a per-document basis rather than hourly rates. In May 2025 the UK Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) approved Garfield.Law as the first law firm authorised to deliver legal services entirely through AI technology, with safeguards including client confidentiality protection, conflict avoidance mechanisms, user approval at each stage, and controls preventing the AI from proposing case law to address hallucination risk.
Reported business value
The SRA's approval represents a regulator explicitly sanctioning a business model where AI, rather than human labour, constitutes the primary mechanism of legal service delivery, and Garfield targets a small-claims debt recovery market that traditional law firms cannot profitably serve, expanding overall access to legal services.
Sources
Open any source and check the claim yourself — that is the point of the register.
Other legal entries in the register.
Darrow raises $35M for an AI that parses public documents for class action lawsuit potential
Darrow, a legal tech startup founded in 2020, built an AI-based data engine that crawls thousands of sources of publicly available information (newsfeeds, social media, consumer complaints, regulatory filings, SEC filings, environmental reports, court dockets) to identify class-action litigation potential in areas such as data privacy violations, environmental contamination, and discrimination, and to predict likely legal outcomes and case value. A team of legal data specialists, including former lawyers, reviews the AI-surfaced insights before lawyers use the platform for case review and discovery. Around 50 law firms, covering hundreds of lawyers, were using the product, and active cases stemming from Darrow's data insights totaled around $10 billion in claims at the time of the funding round.
IDEXX Laboratories cuts contract sanctions review from weeks to 20 minutes with Luminance AI
IDEXX Laboratories used the AI-powered contract automation platform Luminance to review its entire contract database for connections to sanctioned countries and entities following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, completing in 20 minutes a review that would typically have taken weeks manually. Separately, Koch Industries' in-house legal team uses Luminance Corporate to automate generation of NDAs, master service agreements and IT-related contracts, including self-service contract generation for non-legal business units, and Deloitte used Luminance on a project standardizing 4,500 contracts across 14 European entities for client BT in two weeks, estimating a 50% time savings versus manual review.
Noxtua's sovereign European legal AI in use at Allianz, Deka and law firm Nordermann
Berlin-based Noxtua (formerly Xayn) has built what it says is Europe's first 'sovereign' legal AI, with large language models trained exclusively on European legal data and hosted on EU cloud providers. The tool, which helps lawyers research, analyse and draft documents, is already in use by law firms such as Nordermann, the legal department of Allianz, and German savings bank Deka. Noxtua raised an €80.7m Series B led by legal publisher C.H.Beck in April 2025.
Was this helpful?
Your feedback helps us improve our use case database