When Law Meets AI: Meet Kyra Law

Kyra Law is a fixed fee law firm built around AI. Every quote is agreed upfront, no hourly rates, no surprise invoices. Every matter is done or supervised by a qualified solicitor. And we’re fast, we aim to turn everything around within 24 hours, with plenty of reviews coming back a lot quicker than that. That’s what being AI-native actually means for us, not a buzzword, it’s the reason we can offer fixed fee and same-day turnaround at the same time, which most firms can’t do because they’re built around billing hours.

A template tool can get you a document fast but nobody’s actually looked at it. A traditional firm will look at it properly but you’re waiting weeks and paying by the hour. We built Kyra to do both at once.

One distinction worth drawing, because it trips people up: Harvey and Legora are software companies. They sell AI tools to law firms. We are the law firm. You do not log into anything and you do not operate the tool, you talk to a lawyer who is accountable for the advice. They would sell software to your law firm. We are your law firm.

Why Is Now The Right Time To Build An AI-Native Law Firm?

Because legal work has been overpriced for a long time and everyone in the industry knows it. The UK legal market is worth over £55 billion a year and City firms are still charging £600 to £2,000 an hour for work that, honestly, is often routine. AI has been available to those firms for a couple of years now. They haven’t passed the savings on. Profits have gone up, not down. That’s not really surprising when you think about how those firms are built.

Partners make money by billing out teams of junior lawyers by the hour. AI that actually makes lawyers faster cuts into that model, so they can’t adopt it properly without hurting their own numbers. At the same time, the AI itself is good enough now. Some studies suggest LLMs are beating the average human on bar exams. The technology is ready and the old firms structurally can’t use it. That’s the gap we built Kyra to fill.

Where Does The AI Stop And The Lawyer Start And Is Client Data Safe?

The AI does the first pass. It drafts, reviews and redlines against our own precedent library and each client’s house style. Then a qualified solicitor checks it and signs it off before it ever reaches the client. That’s the rule, no exceptions, nothing comes into or out of Kyra except through a qualified lawyer.

The AI just means the lawyer isn’t starting from a blank page, so their time goes on judgement instead of admin or basic legal work. On data, everything is processed through enterprise infrastructure, none of our AI providers train on client data, everything’s encrypted in transit and at rest, and we hold Cyber Essentials certification. Clients can ask us to delete their data at any time and we will.

How Do You Price Things And What Should A Startup Expect To Pay?

Fixed fee, agreed before we start, every time. A few typical ranges: drafting or reviewing commercial terms and conditions, £800 to £1,800. Setting up an employee share option scheme, £1,000 to £2,500. A funding round including SEIS and EIS advice, £5,000 to £8,500. Founder or shareholder agreements, £750 to £1,500.

A lot of our clients also use us as an ongoing part of their team, more like a retainer, and for the bigger clients that works out cheaper than hiring a fractional GC or building out their own legal function.

How Fast Can You Turn Work Around?

We aim for 24 hours on everything, and plenty comes back well inside that. A contract review is often the same day. Bigger pieces like a full funding round obviously take longer, but even then you are not waiting weeks for a first draft, and we will give you the timeline upfront rather than leaving you to guess.

The reason we can do that is not that we work longer hours than anyone else. It is that the AI has done the first pass before a lawyer picks it up, so their time goes on judgement rather than starting from a blank page. In a traditional firm your matter sits in a queue until someone has a gap between billable commitments. Ours starts moving when it arrives.

What Kind Of Work Does Kyra Focus On And Why?

We built this firm around the stuff every early-stage founder actually needs, because between the three of us we’ve lived that stage ourselves. We’ve built and sold startups, we’ve been through the fundraising grind, we know exactly what lands on a founder’s desk in the first few years.

That’s your first terms and conditions, buying from suppliers and selling to customers, employment contracts, share option schemes, and drafting or reviewing the everyday commercial paper that keeps a business running. Fundraising is where we go deepest. Term sheets, SEIS and EIS, SAFE notes, the whole round, done fixed fee and fast, at a stage where most founders can’t justify City firm rates but still need it done properly.

What Don’t You Do At Kyra?

Quite a lot, and we are upfront about it. We do not do litigation or anything contentious. We do not do employment disputes, though we are happy with employment contracts. We do not do complex M&A, and we do not do specialist IP or patent strategy.

We advise on English law only, so a pure Delaware or US-law question is not for us, although we can handle the English-law side of a UK subsidiary. And we do not do reserved work like conveyancing or probate. If you come to us with something outside that, we will tell you straight away rather than having a go at it, and usually we can point you at someone who can do it for you.

When Is A Template Or A Platform Good Enough And When Isn’t It?

Sometimes: If you need a standard mutual NDA to get a conversation moving, a decent template can do the job. Platforms are genuinely good at the standardised, high-volume end, and a lot of our clients use one alongside us.

Where it gets risky is anything with negotiation in it, anything where the other side has their own lawyers and anything that will govern a relationship for years. A shareholders’ agreement is the obvious one. The template is fine on the day you sign it, and then you find out what it does not cover three years later when a founder leaves. The other thing a template cannot do is tell you what to worry about. That is usually where clients get the most value, not from the document itself.

How Should A Founder Go About Choosing A Law Firm?

We would say you should ask four things. First, do they actually work with companies your size?

Plenty of firms say they do startup work and then hand you to someone whose other clients are twenty times bigger, and you will feel that in the response times for example. Second, will they give you a fixed price before they start?

If they will not, you are carrying all the risk of the work turning out more complicated than anyone expected.

Third, who is doing the work, and can you speak to them directly?

And fourth, which matters more than people think, will they tell you when you do not need something?

The best sign you have found the right firm is when they talk you out of work you were ready to pay for. We have done that plenty of times and it has never cost us a client.

How Does Kyra Work With Companies That Already Have In-House Counsel?

That is actually a growing part of what we do. Many in-house teams at the early stages are one or two people who are permanently underwater, and the problem is not capability, it is capacity. So we take the overflow: the contract review queue, the routine commercial paper, the fundraising documentation that lands on top of everything else.

Your GC keeps the strategic work and the internal relationships, which is where they add the most value anyway, and hands us the volume. Because we are fixed fee, they can budget it properly rather than going to their CFO for an open-ended engagement. For some of our larger clients we are the reason they have not needed to hire a second lawyer, or the reason they did not need a fractional GC in the first place.

How Does Someone Get Started With Kyra?

Some clients directly send us what they are dealing with, or book a call, whichever is easier. On a first call we will work out what clients actually need, which is sometimes less than they arrived expecting, and then come back with a fixed price. Nothing starts until clients have agreed to that quote.

There is no minimum commitment and no onboarding process to sit through. Many of our clients tried us out for a first piece of work and liked us so much that they frequently come back. So I would say give us that first piece of work and let us impress you!

Where Do You See Legal Services In Five Years?

Cost coming down, and down, and down. AI is deflationary for legal work in the same way it’s been deflationary everywhere else it’s landed properly. Firms that don’t adapt, that keep charging 2024 rates for work AI can now do in a fraction of the time, are going to be in real trouble.

And I think it’ll be good for lawyers too.

Right now the profession runs on long hours and a huge amount of admin. When AI takes that load, lawyers get their time back, they can work from wherever they want, and you’ll see a lot more entrepreneurship inside the profession instead of everyone funnelled into the same partnership track. That shift is already happening. We just think it happens faster than most people expect.