Yorkshire AI Labs has announced the launch of LEXcelerate, a Sheffield-based law firm designed to “do for conveyancing what Uber did for taxis.”
The firm will be led by Paul Firth, former UK managing partner of DLA Piper and a highly respected figure in British commercial property law.
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. Together, Firth and Hewitt combine deep legal credibility with industrial-grade software expertise.
The legal process for remortgages today typically takes six to eight weeks. Clients often have little visibility into progress. Emails are chased. Calls are unanswered. Timelines slip. LEXcelerate’s ambition is radical. Reduce the manual element of a remortgage to just 15 minutes of fee earner time. Complete transactions in around two weeks. Automate approximately 90 per cent of administrative tasks – and give clients the ability to track their transaction in real time.
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When you book a taxi, you can see where the driver is, when they will arrive and how long the journey will take. LEXcelerate applies that same transparency to legal services. Clients can log in, see what has been completed, what remains outstanding and a projected completion timeline that updates dynamically.
The launch comes at a time of rapid change in the legal profession. More than a quarter of legal professionals now report using generative AI in their daily work, nearly double the proportion of the previous year. Large firms are deploying AI for document review, contract drafting and due diligence. Regulators have issued guidance on responsible use. Judges have warned against careless reliance on unverified AI outputs.
The direction is clear. Structured, repeatable work is increasingly automated. As that trend accelerates, fewer lawyers will be required for high-volume transactional services such as residential conveyancing.
Firth has 35 years at the top of the legal profession. As UK Managing Partner at DLA Piper, he helped steer the firm through global integration and structural change. He later became national head of real estate at Irwin Mitchell, tripling the size of the practice in four years, is a Legal 500 Hall of Fame inductee and consistently ranked as an Eminent Practitioner by Chambers & Partners.
He said: “Conveyancing has become dominated by administration rather than judgement. 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.”
LEXcelerate platform creator and co-founder of the business Hewitt has 30 years experience of bringing automation to the property, legal and insurance sectors and previously led a legal software start-up from concept to more than £1 million in annual recurring revenue before its acquisition by Verisk Analytics, the 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.
He added: “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.”
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.”
LEXcelerate will initially focus on remortgages and residential conveyancing before expanding into other high-volume legal services. – for a profession that has changed slowly for decades, this represents a clear signal. Law is moving from analogue to digital.
