Alesis, an AI assistant grounded solely in the laws of England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and which checks its answers “exhaustively” against primary sources, has gone live, we can reveal.
Alesis’ selling point is that all information run through Alesis is held in the UK, processed in the UK and the EU, kept apart from every other firm, and never used as training data for other organisations. It can access UK case law, Companies House and ombudsman data, among other UK source data. It is already being used in SME law firms and by in-house departments, including a major pension provider.
Alesis is the brainchild of L25 Group, which specialises in AI for regulated sectors. In the coming months it will form a critical part of an AI-native case management system L25 is developing.
The co-founders of L25 are Luke Roberts and Alex Clayton, who both spent several years working in the public sector – including at the Ministry of Justice – before moving into consultancy in the private sector, advising in-house legal teams and law firms on case management and moving away from incumbent systems.
Roberts was a consultant to the Solicitors Regulation Authority during its digital transformation programme. L25’s investors include the owners of New South Law, a specialist disputes law firm with offices in Birmingham, Bristol and Sussex.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Roberts said that L25 has helped the industry to leverage AI for eight years, including working with the Cabinet Office on making millions of terabytes of data easily accessible to civil servants.
He observed: “The applicability of that is the same when you get to law firms that have a huge amount of data. Alesis is a chatbot. It is your Claude, your ChatGPT, your Gemini, whatever flavour you choose, but it’s specifically designed, one, for sovereignty. No data leaves the UK or the EU, depending on which inference you want or how clever you want it to be. But the EU location is Ireland, and so it’s still UK.
“It is designed with military grade or government grade security. It checks all the boxes that a compliance officer needs. Really importantly, it understands the UK landscape. So if you talk to it and you say L25, it will go and look at Companies House. It will read all the filings on Companies House, understand it. If you mention some case law, it will go to National Archives and find it. We keep that updated every single second of every single day, so it always have access to all of the information. All ombudsman are in there. So all of the Financial Ombudsman, the Pension Ombudsman, all the source books and guides from the FCA, the SRA, HMRC, every governmental body and any governmental data source that exists, we have as a first party connection.”
Roberts said that unlike other assistants, Alesis is explicitly designed to help lawyers do their job in the UK. “It has a great understanding of England and Wales laws. It has a good understanding of Scotland and Northern Ireland as best it can. It doesn’t lie. It cannot fabricate citations, it cannot make things up, and it’s not sycophantic. So unlike your consumer grade tools, if you are wrong, it will very happily tell you you’re wrong and why, and truly help you understand the complexity of what you’re in.”
Twenty five firms are using Alesis, representing 150 users, and they average six hours of use per user per day, with Roberts observing, “it’s a really sticky system and we’re not seeing any churn. Nobody is leaving and the feedback we’re getting is very, very good.”
Currently firms are in the 25-50 person range but there is interest from larger firms. Firms are able to connect to other systems, such as legal research providers, that they have a license for. Roberts says: “It just becomes another data source for it to go and grab,” although he adds: “We have parity in terms of the actual case law and assessment and the documents that underlie those judgments.”
In terms of why Alesis can’t hallucinate, Roberts says: “The architecture, how we built Alesis, is designed to be very, very hard.” Where other models have a goal to please, even if that means citing a case that doesn’t exist, Roberts said of Alesis “as soon as it thinks about a citation, it immediately has to go and read the full source copy and it’s only allowed to say things that are true. And then it provides a link to the citation, so you can go and check the original.”
He adds: “It will drop citation markers where you can click immediately and see it and it highlights the right relevant passage or clause. It does the same thing, not just against case law, but against ombudsman decisions, against handbooks from different years too. So if you’ve got a claim from 2022, it will go back in time to the right version of the handbook. Companies House, DVLA, all of these integration points with central government are all in it. It has to citation and fact check itself continuously.”
Alesis is funded by credit, not a subscription. On average, £25 currently lasts around 17 days.
Ben Parslow, managing director of New South Law, said: “Alesis is an exciting option for SME law firms that want to adopt AI but have concerns about its reliability and cost. Our experience is that Alesis acts as a very well-informed junior lawyer, whose work you still have to sign off but is of impressively high quality.”
L25 has applied to join the government’s new advisory AI Growth Lab for legal services to support its development of automated workflows. The lab is designed to accelerate the development of AI by helping innovators navigate regulatory frameworks.
