Key Points
- Alesis, an AI assistant developed by L25 Group, has gone live for UK legal organisations, according to Legal IT Insider.
- The system is designed around the laws of England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and checks answers against primary sources.
- L25 says information processed through Alesis is held in the UK and processed in the UK and EU, with information separated between firms and not used to train systems for other organisations.
- Alesis can connect with UK legal and government sources including case law, Companies House, ombudsman information and regulatory material.
- L25 co-founders Luke Roberts and Alex Clayton previously worked in the public sector, including at the Ministry of Justice, before moving into private-sector consultancy.
- Roberts previously worked as a consultant to the Solicitors Regulation Authority during its digital transformation programme.
- According to Legal IT Insider, 25 firms representing about 150 users were using Alesis when the report was published, with reported average usage of six hours per user per day.
- The current users are primarily firms with between 25 and 50 people, while larger firms have also expressed interest, according to L25.
- Alesis uses a credit-based pricing model rather than a subscription, with £25 reported to last around 17 days on average.
- Ben Parslow, managing director of New South Law, described Alesis as an option for SME firms concerned about AI reliability and cost, while stressing that lawyers still need to sign off its work.
- L25 has applied to join the Government’s AI Growth Lab for legal services, which is intended to help AI innovators navigate regulatory frameworks and develop automated workflows.
What is Alesis and why has it launched for UK law firms?
Alesis has gone live as an AI assistant specifically designed for legal work in the UK, with L25 Group positioning sovereignty, source verification and access to UK legal information as central elements of the product.
The launch was reported exclusively by Legal IT Insider on 28 September 2026. The publication’s report says Alesis is grounded in the laws of England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and checks its answers against primary sources. The article does not display an individual author byline, so the report is attributed here to Legal IT Insider rather than assigning an unverified journalist name.
Alesis has been developed by L25 Group, a company focused on artificial intelligence for regulated sectors. The product is intended to function as an AI assistant for legal professionals while maintaining a specific focus on UK legal and regulatory information.
According to Legal IT Insider, information processed through Alesis is held in the UK and processed in the UK and European Union. The report states that information is kept separate from other firms and is not used as training data for other organisations. Alesis can also access UK case law, Companies House information and ombudsman data.
The company’s own website similarly describes Alesis as an AI assistant for UK legal work that answers questions using matter documents and official sources, cites where information comes from and indicates when it does not have sufficient support for an answer. L25 also states that its system is built and held in the UK and that users’ work is not used to train another organisation’s system.
Who founded L25 Group and developed Alesis?
Alesis was developed by L25 Group, whose co-founders are Luke Roberts and Alex Clayton.
Legal IT Insider reports that both Roberts and Clayton spent several years working in the public sector, including at the Ministry of Justice, before moving into private-sector consultancy. Their work included advising in-house legal teams and law firms on case management and on moving away from incumbent systems.
Luke Roberts also previously worked as a consultant to the Solicitors Regulation Authority during its digital transformation programme. The report states that L25’s investors include the owners of New South Law, a specialist disputes law firm with offices in Birmingham, Bristol and Sussex.
The company’s background in public-sector and regulated environments is relevant to the way L25 describes Alesis. Rather than presenting the product as a general-purpose consumer chatbot, L25 has focused its development on organisations where confidentiality, data governance and traceability are important considerations.
How does Alesis use UK legal and government sources?
One of the central features described by L25 is its connection to official UK information sources.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Luke Roberts said L25 had spent eight years helping organisations use AI and had worked with the Cabinet Office on making very large quantities of data accessible to civil servants. Roberts said the same principle could be applied to law firms, which also manage substantial volumes of information.
Roberts described Alesis as a chatbot comparable in broad form to systems such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini, but said its architecture was specifically designed around sovereignty and the UK legal environment. He said data would not leave the UK or EU, with Ireland being the EU processing location referenced in the interview.
Roberts also told Legal IT Insider that Alesis can search Companies House filings and retrieve case law from the National Archives. He said the system incorporates information from organisations and sources including the Financial Ombudsman, Pension Ombudsman, Financial Conduct Authority, Solicitors Regulation Authority and HM Revenue & Customs.
These connections are intended to allow lawyers to use the assistant alongside established legal and governmental information sources rather than relying exclusively on the underlying language model.
How does Alesis attempt to prevent fabricated legal citations?
A major issue in legal AI development is the possibility that a system may generate an apparently convincing answer that cannot be supported by an authoritative source.
Luke Roberts told Legal IT Insider that Alesis was architected to make this problem difficult. He said that when the system considers a citation, it must read the full source before providing the answer and is required to restrict its response to information supported by that source.
Roberts said Alesis provides links to citations so that users can check the original material. He also said the system places citation markers that allow users to open the relevant passage or clause.
The same approach is applied beyond case law, according to Roberts. He said Alesis can check ombudsman decisions and different versions of regulatory or other handbooks. For example, where a claim relates to 2022, he said the system can retrieve the appropriate historical version of a handbook rather than automatically relying on a current version.
Alesis’ own website also emphasises that the system should tell users when it cannot find adequate support for a point rather than presenting an unsupported answer as fact. The company says every output must be reviewed by a qualified professional before it is relied upon, sent to a client or submitted to a court.
That qualification remains important: Alesis is presented as an assistant to legal professionals, not a replacement for professional legal judgement.
How widely is Alesis being used?
According to the Legal IT Insider report, 25 firms representing 150 users were using Alesis at the time of publication.
Luke Roberts said those users averaged six hours of use per person per day. He described the system as having strong user retention and said L25 was not seeing churn among the firms using it. These figures are statements reported by Legal IT Insider from Roberts and should therefore be understood as company-reported usage information rather than independently audited adoption data.
The publication reported that current users were generally firms employing between 25 and 50 people. However, larger firms had also expressed interest in the technology.
Alesis is also being used beyond conventional SME law firms. Legal IT Insider reported that the system was already being used by in-house departments, including a major pension provider, although the report did not name the organisation.
Can Alesis connect with other legal research systems?
The system is designed to work alongside other information sources and legal research services that firms already use.
According to Legal IT Insider, firms can connect Alesis to other systems, including legal research providers for which they already hold licences. Luke Roberts described those services as additional data sources from which Alesis can retrieve information.
Roberts also said L25 maintains parity around the underlying case law, assessments and documents supporting judgments. This approach means firms do not necessarily have to abandon existing information services when introducing Alesis.
The model instead places Alesis within a broader legal technology environment in which information can be drawn from multiple authorised sources and then presented through an AI interface.
What did Ben Parslow say about Alesis?
Ben Parslow, managing director of New South Law, also commented on the launch.
As reported by Legal IT Insider, Parslow said Alesis could be an option for SME law firms interested in adopting AI but concerned about reliability and cost. He described his experience of Alesis as comparable to working with a highly informed junior lawyer, while stressing that its work still requires sign-off by a qualified professional.
The distinction is significant because AI-generated legal work remains subject to professional responsibility. The product’s role is therefore positioned as supporting legal work rather than transferring responsibility from a solicitor or other qualified professional to an automated system.
Alesis itself states that it assists qualified professionals and does not replace them, and that its outputs must be reviewed before being relied upon in professional or court-related work.
How does Alesis charge law firms?
Alesis uses a credit-based model rather than a conventional subscription.
Legal IT Insider reported that £25 currently lasts around 17 days on average.
The company’s website currently describes the service as having no subscription and says firms can start with £25 of free credit. It also says users top up when they choose rather than paying a recurring subscription.
This pricing structure places the product in a different model from legal technology services that require firms to commit to a recurring licence fee. However, actual costs will depend on usage, so the reported £25 duration should not be treated as a fixed period for every firm.
What is L25 planning next for Alesis?
The launch is also connected to a wider technology project being developed by L25.
According to Legal IT Insider, Alesis is expected to become a critical component of an AI-native case management system that L25 is developing.
This indicates that the company sees the assistant as part of a broader legal technology infrastructure rather than as an isolated chatbot.
L25 has also applied to join the Government’s new advisory AI Growth Lab for legal services. The lab is intended to support AI development by helping innovators navigate regulatory frameworks, while L25 wants to use the programme to support the development of automated workflows.
The move comes as legal organisations continue to assess how generative AI can be introduced while maintaining appropriate controls over confidentiality, professional responsibility, data governance and verification.
What does the launch mean for legal AI in the UK?
The launch places Alesis within a growing UK legal technology market in which law firms are evaluating how AI can be incorporated into research, case management and document-heavy workflows.
Its stated differentiation is not simply the use of generative AI. Instead, L25 is emphasising UK data handling, access to UK government and legal sources, citation checking and the separation of firm information.
The company’s own product information says Alesis can work from a matter’s documents and official sources, while showing where information originated and indicating when it does not know.
The approach also reflects the particular requirements of legal work. Lawyers need to be able to establish where a proposition comes from and verify the underlying material before relying on it. Alesis’ citation-led architecture is therefore presented as a response to that requirement.
For organisations working with legal technology, these developments also highlight the importance of understanding how AI systems handle data, how they retrieve authoritative information and how professional users verify machine-generated outputs.
As the use of AI expands across regulated professional services, knowledge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Legal, Contracts and Procurement can become relevant to professionals examining how technology, compliance, contracts, legal workflows and information governance interact in practice.
What happens next for Alesis and L25 Group?
Alesis has now moved from development into live use, with Legal IT Insider reporting adoption across 25 firms and approximately 150 users at launch.
L25’s next steps include further development of its AI-native case management platform and its application to the Government’s AI Growth Lab for legal services.
For law firms, the development provides another example of how AI suppliers are attempting to address the specific requirements of regulated professional environments. The focus on UK-based data handling, official sources and traceable citations distinguishes the product’s stated proposition from a general-purpose AI assistant.
The launch also leaves professional responsibility firmly with human users. Alesis says its outputs require review by qualified professionals, while L25’s approach is centred on giving users access to the sources behind answers rather than treating AI-generated text as automatically authoritative.
The immediate significance of the launch, therefore, lies in the combination of generative AI with a UK-focused legal information architecture. Whether the model can scale beyond its current user base, how larger firms respond, and how L25’s proposed case management system develops will determine the company’s next stage of expansion.