A former UK managing partner at DLA Piper is to lead LEXcelerate – a new Sheffield-based AI law firm.
LEXcelerate has been launched by Yorkshire AI Labs and aims to do for conveyancing what Uber did for taxis.
The firm will be led by Paul Firth (pictured), a highly respected figure in British commercial property law who also served as national head of real estate at Irwin Mitchell, tripling the size of the practice in four years. Firth is also a former CEO and chair of Creative Sheffield.
LEXcelerate is co-founded by Mark Hewitt, the architect of the firm’s proprietary AI platform and a 30-year veteran of legal and manufacturing technology.
The legal process for remortgages today typically takes six to eight weeks, with little visibility for clients. LEXcelerate’s ambition is to reduce the manual element of a remortgage to just 15 minutes of fee earner time, with transactions completed in around two weeks.
Automating approximately 90% of administrative tasks, it also aims to give clients the ability to track their transaction in real time.
The launch comes at a time of rapid change in the legal profession, the startup says: more than a quarter of legal professionals now report using generative AI in their daily work, while large firms are deploying AI for document review, contract drafting and due diligence.
Regulators have issued guidance on responsible use, while judges have warned against careless reliance on unverified AI outputs.
LEXcelerate, meanwhile, argues that legal expertise should be focused where it adds value – not absorbed by repetitive process.
“Conveyancing has become dominated by administration rather than judgement,” said Firth.
“Technology now allows us to automate the repetitive elements and give clients clarity, speed and certainty.
“That inevitably changes the structure of the workforce, but it also improves quality and consistency.”
For more than 30 years, CTO Hewitt has helped organisations transform their operations using automation, AI and workflow optimisation across manufacturing, legal, insurance and property sectors.
He previously led legal software startup Rebmark from concept to more than £1 million in annual recurring revenue before its acquisition by Verisk Analytics, a NASDAQ-listed data analytics group headquartered in New Jersey.
The software was subsequently expanded into the insurance sector and is now used to manage more than £10 billion of catastrophic injury claims reserves.
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He said: “We have built LEXcelerate from scratch as a technology-first business. Traditional firms bolt technology onto paper-based processes. We redesigned the process itself. When you automate at that level, you do not just go faster. You operate differently.”
The firm has been launched by Yorkshire AI Labs, which operates a sweat equity and cash model. Among its portfolio companies are manufacturing tech firms FourJaw and IntelliAM.
David Richards MBE, founder of Yorkshire AI Labs, said: “Artificial intelligence is not nibbling at the edges of professional services. It is tearing through them. Law, accountancy, consulting, compliance – every process-driven industry is being rewritten in real time. Firms that believe this is incremental change are misreading the moment. This is structural disruption.
“Over the next decade, AI will remove entire layers of manual professional work. The question is not whether that happens. It is who builds the new model. In Sheffield, we have decided to build it.”
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