How use of bespoke AI in legal services is revolutionising the way we work: Director Lee Stutt discloses the one thing about us that isn't human...

We're known for being human, normal people, more than most law firms, where personality gets lost in the need for conformity and following the corporate brand, until the people inside end up acting like robots. We're the exception to that.

But we have an exception of our own: Gluvias.

Gluvias, named after the founding saint of Penryn, where academic life in Cornwall has its deepest roots. It's our in-house AI legal consultant. We built it from the ground up, shaped around the workflows, practice areas, and standards that matter to our firm.

Every instruction it follows and every document it produces reflects deliberate choices we made, based on years of experience in practice.

No other firm has Gluvias, or anything close to it. It was built by us, it belongs to us, and it isn't going anywhere else.

The result is an AI that consults the leading practitioner texts. It drafts court documents in the right format. It checks legislation directly on legislation.gov.uk. It searches case law through The National Archives. It looks up companies at Companies House, for due diligence.

It runs on Claude and Gemini, including their frontier models, so we're always working with the most capable AI currently available, not locked to a fixed or outdated version of the technology. It also means the two models can cross-check each other: where one reaches a conclusion, the other can be asked to verify it independently. That layered approach adds a level of accuracy that a single-model system simply can't offer.

Harvey is the AI platform used by some of the world's largest law firms for their highest-value, most complex work. Gluvias runs on the same frontier models. But Harvey is a commercial product, sold to firms and shaped around what its developers think legal teams need. And access to it is therefore limited to high-end clients of those firms.  

Gluvias is homemade: built by us, tuned to our workflows and our styles, and answerable to nobody's priorities but our own. No marketing team decided what it should do or how it should do it. We did, based on decades of doing the work ourselves. We’re not held hostage to subscription hikes that would force us to abandon it.

And it's fixed to what we do: litigation. Dispute work. It's not deployed across a dozen different departments, shaped by committee decisions about what's most important this quarter. We control how it's layered and how it develops. So that frontier-level legal research and drafting is available to anyone who comes to us, not just clients with the kind of budget that gets you through the door at a magic circle firm.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR OUR CLIENTS

In most legal matters, the clock starts running before anything useful has happened. Research needs doing, a document needs drafting, a position needs setting out. That groundwork costs time, and time costs money. Getting up to speed is the first inefficiency in legal expense.

With our workflows, work that would previously have taken hours of billable time to get off the ground can now begin immediately. Particulars of Claim, witness statements, letters before action, contract drafts, legal research memos: Gluvias handles the first pass to a standard that would take a legal assistant hours to reach, in minutes. It can handle seriously heavy lifting too: large document reviews, complex multi-source research, and finding the needle in a haystack that changes the whole picture.

When Gluvias is working on something, it’s completely focused on it. No calls coming in. No other files pulling at it. No background noise from the rest of the day. The time it takes is focused, uninterrupted time, the kind a person doing the same task rarely gets. Realistically, the human version of that task means a day: other things to pick up, the phone going, and the natural stop-start of any busy practice. The time Gluvias saves is the difference between work that gets done today and work that gets put back weeks.

That means more of our lawyer time goes into the things that genuinely require human judgement: advising on strategy, understanding a client's situation, and applying years of real-world experience to what the law actually means for them. The machine handles the groundwork. We handle the judgement. Our clients get the benefit. In practical terms, that means we can act for clients who have been quoted retainers elsewhere that put proper legal advice out of reach. We can work to tighter deadlines than a traditionally staffed firm can match. And we can work through documentation that is disorganised, incomplete, or genuinely messy, and still produce accurate, reliable output.

BUILT TO IMPROVE, NOT JUST TO DEPLOY

Most legal AI tools are fixed products. You use them as they are and work around their limitations. Gluvias is different. Because we built it ourselves, we can continue to develop it. As legislation changes, as our practice evolves, and as we identify better ways of doing things, we update the model. It's a working part of the firm that grows with us.

That also means we can respond directly to what our clients and matters require. If a new area of practice demands a new workflow, we build it in. If something isn't working as well as it should, we fix it. The feedback loop is short and entirely within our control.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF COLLABORATION

One of the genuine advantages of working with an AI rather than a junior team member is iteration. When a draft needs reworking, there's no awkwardness, no bruised feelings, no reluctance to push back. We work through a document together until it’s right, without the friction that sometimes comes with human collaboration on sensitive or detailed work.

Gluvias holds us to a high standard, too. It flags legal risks, questions assumptions, and will tell us when something needs more thought. It can construct a watertight logical argument and, equally, spot the fallacies in one. It’s a professional tool, and it takes our SRA obligations as seriously as we do.

WHY NOT JUST USE AI YOURSELF?

General-purpose AI can produce something that looks like a legal document. Sometimes that's good enough. Often it isn't, and the difference isn't always obvious until it matters. Gluvias is built on our workflows and our knowledge of what legal work actually needs to achieve. It knows the format a court expects, the structure a well-drafted contract requires, and the difference between a letter that protects your position and one that quietly undermines it.

There's also a protection worth knowing about. In the ordinary way, work we do for a client as part of giving legal advice attracts legal advice privilege, and litigation privilege where proceedings are contemplated or under way, provided the usual conditions for privilege are met. If you use your own general AI tool to develop a position or draft documents outside a solicitor-client relationship, that protection is far less likely to be available, and you could find yourself required to disclose everything you asked it and everything it told you.

Keeping this work within a properly conducted solicitor-client relationship gives you the best chance of that protection holding. When a solicitor uses AI as part of their legal work, the output is covered by legal advice privilege and, where proceedings are involved, by litigation privilege. That means nobody can demand disclosure of our working. If you use your own open AI to develop your position or draft your documents, that protection may not apply, and you could find yourself required to hand over everything you asked it and everything it told you. Working with us removes that risk. And Gluvias is built and operated by lawyers with decades of experience in the areas it assists with. They know when its output is right, when it needs pushing, and when to override it entirely. That's the difference between a capable tool and reliable legal advice. MODERN TECHNOLOGY. REAL EXPERIENCE BEHIND IT.

We're proud to offer clients something genuinely rare: the most current legal AI technology, built and operated by specialist lawyers with deep roots in practice. The AI brings speed, consistency, and breadth. The experience behind it ensures those advantages are applied with proper professional judgement.

If you’d like to know more about how we work, or how Gluvias might make a difference to your matter, get in touch.