Pierre Proner: Tackling the $1 Trillion Legal Problem with Lawhive

Lawhive’s idea of making the law accessible to everyone started with airline tickets.

It was 2019, and Pierre Proner had moved from London to Dubai with Jaime van Oers, a software engineer, and Flinn Dolman, a data scientist. The three had just launched a company focused on alternative credit scoring and relocated to the Middle East to work on a pilot for a major bank.

Then Covid hit, and the bank shut its offices, and cancelled the project. At the same time, the airline cancelled their flights back to London and refused to issue refunds.

The trio could have booked new tickets and moved on. But something felt wrong. A few hours of research revealed that, under EU regulations, airlines are legally required to refund passengers for cancelled flights. So, partly out of curiosity, Proner, van Oers, and Dolman decided to see what it would take to enforce that rule.

Every one of the High Street law firms told them the same thing: Yes, they could help, but just to review the case would cost more than the value of all three flights combined. Total fees could run into the thousands of pounds, with no clarity on the final cost or timeline. It struck them as deeply unfair and shockingly opaque. For ordinary people, access to their legal rights was priced out of reach. That frustration became the spark for Lawhive.

Lawhive: An AI-first consumer law platform

Founded in London in 2020, Lawhive is now changing the way consumers and small businesses access legal help. The world’s first AI-native regulated law firm, it has $35 million in annual revenue. The business model is unique: they both build proprietary AI tools and employ 450 lawyers supporting areas like family law, immigration, employment disputes, landlord-tenant issues, and wills, trusts, and estates. After doing business in the UK for five years, the company expanded into the U.S. in 2025. Also in 2025, Lawhive became the first legaltech platform to acquire traditional law firms, with its purchase of Woodstock Legal Services in the UK and Singular Law in Arizona, bringing human lawyers and AI systems together under one roof.

As part of our series of conversations with European startup founders, Pierre Proner discusses how AI is helping boost revenues for small law firms, why he believes unmet demand in the consumer legal market is massive, and why the UK will continue to be an important base for Lawhive .

What was your vision for making consumer law better and more transparent with Lawhive?

Pierre Proner: We wanted to change the economics of accessing the law as a consumer by allowing much of the routine legal and administrative work of an attorney to be automated. We believed that if we could reduce the amount of time lawyers spend on each client matter — by taking away repetitive legal work and back office administration — they would be able to take on a higher volume of cases and provide much more transparent pricing, without losing money. In fact, in our model, lawyers can earn more. It would be a win-win: Attorneys would earn more overall and clients would pay more predictable, transparent fees.

Has that math worked out in practice?

PP: On average, with Lawhive, we’re seeing about a 2.8x lift on lawyer earnings and a roughly 30% reduction in prices for consumers. We expect both of these trends to continue as efficiency increases and savings are passed on to consumers.

We’re also extremely optimistic about the size of the market. People picture lawyers as these wealthy, well-dressed people, like on Suits. But these corporate lawyers are a tiny fraction of the market. Of the 1.3 million attorneys in the US, roughly 70% are solo practitioners or work in small firms. Same in the UK: 80% of the 150,000 lawyers are at High Street firms.

Demand is massive. We estimate that unmet legal needs in the US are five times the nearly $200 billion spent annually in consumer legal matters. That suggests a $1 trillion market or more. There are untold numbers of people with serious legal problems who simply can’t afford help, so they give up, delay, or conclude that the system isn’t built for them.

What aspects of a lawyer’s practice is Lawhive automating?

PP: Lawhive uses AI agents to automate intake — collecting and assessing client information and mapping it against a firm’s capabilities. Can the lawyer help? Does the case have a reasonable chance of success? These are really time-consuming tasks that lawyers don’t usually generate fees from.

Once a client is engaged, AI agents help with onboarding the client and support legal work itself — drafting research, preparing divorce forms, completing immigration applications, and the like. Some tasks that once took days can now be done in minutes

That said, our model combines humans and AI. We don't believe in a world in which humans don't have a job in the law. For compliance and supervision reasons, I don't think that ever happens.

Which countries represent the biggest opportunities for Lawhive?

PP: The UK remains a priority, but the US is the largest consumer legal market on the planet and the one with the largest unmet need. That makes it our biggest opportunity. Eventually we will also turn our attention to Europe, where you also have a lot of small firms and significant unmet consumer demand.

Why do you see the UK as an attractive place for a startup like Lawhive?

PP: Having worked in both the UK and the US, I know there is world class talent in both. In the UK, you can bring in the top 1% of technical talent from anywhere in the world. People are often eager to move to London and a flexible visa system makes the process relatively easy. In the US, the visa situation has always been more complicated. Now it's very challenging.

The second reason is regulation. In the UK, there’s one national regulator, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), with a single set of rules and a progressive stance on legal tech innovation, which benefits Lawhive.

Looking ahead five years, what does success look like for Lawhive?

PP: Success will be the creation of a global consumer law firm that runs on an AI operating system, transforms legal practice for consumer lawyers, and makes legal help accessible to everyone who needs it. Society only works when the rule of law is applied fairly, and that can’t happen if most people can’t afford representation. That’s the dream we had from the beginning.

We can already see glimmers of success in the UK, where half of the people who use Lawhive say that, had they not found us, they would not have been able to afford legal help. That’s tens of thousands of people who have been able to access their legal rights because we exist. We want to see that happen around the world.

Pierre Proner is the CEO and co-founder of Lawhive, an AI-native law firm building the future of consumer law. GV first invested in Lawhive’s seed financing in 2024, and has participated in their subsequent Series A and B rounds. GV General Partner Vidu Shanmugarajah sits on the board. Prior to founding Lawhive in 2020, Proner was co‑founder and CEO of AMPP Group, a marketplace platform for helping government and enterprise clients grow and transact in emerging markets.