The claim is that a fifth of British funding rounds now skip the law firm. That number is a forecast somebody made in 2019.

Start with the claim, because it travels well. SeedLegals, the London platform that lets founders complete a funding round without a law firm, is routinely described as handling around twenty per cent of all UK funding rounds. It turns up in conference biographies, in profiles, and on a chatbot built in the founder's likeness.

Follow the figure back and it thins out. The earliest version is not a measurement at all. In 2018 the company was the largest closer of funding rounds in the UK, and was forecast to process twenty per cent of all UK rounds by the end of 2019. That is a projection about a year that ended more than six years ago, repeated in the present tense ever since.

The company's own current claim is different, and narrower. Its founder's conference biography says around a third of early stage SEIS and EIS funding rounds in the UK are now done on the platform. That is a real claim about a specific slice, and a much smaller slice than all UK rounds. Both figures come from the company. Neither has an independent check.

Here is what is independently counted. Beauhurst, which tracks share-issue filings at Companies House rather than press releases, reported with Mercia in January 2026 that UK equity deal numbers fell 7.87 per cent in 2025, and that 2,489 UK companies raised a first funding round that year, up 23.6 per cent. Set that against the 5.7 million private sector businesses the government counted in Britain at the start of 2025. The entire population of British companies doing a first round is a few thousand a year. Any share of it is a share of something very small.

One thing has changed. The company's founder has announced on LinkedIn that SeedLegals now ships an MCP server, meaning the platform runs from inside Claude or ChatGPT: the last human step, gone. That is the company's own announcement, and no independent report of it has been found.

The assumption underneath all of this, that AI is taking this work off solicitors, does not survive contact with the older data. Most of it had already gone.

Company formation went first, and went completely. Registering a limited company is a government transaction: one hundred pounds online at Companies House since 1 February 2026, up from fifty. Formation agents charge ten to fifty pounds on top. A solicitor has been optional for decades.

And when a small British business hits an actual legal problem, the profession is already a minority player. The Legal Services Board, the regulator, surveyed 10,228 small businesses in England and Wales between July and September 2021. Around a third had hit a legal issue in the previous year. Only a quarter of those got professional help of any kind. Accountants were the most used source of that help, at 40 per cent. Solicitors' firms were used by 8 per cent.

That survey closed more than a year before ChatGPT was released. Which is the point.

Why it matters here. The honest reading is not that AI has emptied the routine end of British legal work. It is that a long, quiet emptying has been running for forty years, that the last routine layer is going now, and that nobody is counting it: not the regulator, not the government, not the industry. We are being sold a change we cannot measure, using numbers supplied by the people selling it.

Disclosure: Anthropic builds the models this desk runs on, sells legal AI directly through Claude for Legal, and powers Harvey. SeedLegals says it now runs inside Claude, which if correct means our supplier distributes the platform at the centre of this piece; we have not been able to confirm that independently and we are not going to state it as though we had. Every part of this story touches our supplier, and the part we cannot check is the part that touches it most.