About

Building the infrastructure of justice.

Portia exists to make the structure civil litigation runs on reachable for the people, and the small businesses, who face it without a solicitor. This is not a campaign. It is a construction project.

From the founder

I built Portia because I needed it, and it did not exist.

I represented myself in a civil case. I was not a lawyer, and I could not afford to become someone else's full-time client. What I learned, slowly and at some cost, is that the hardest part of litigating without a solicitor is not the law itself. It is the structure the law runs on: the causes of action, the elements each one demands, the evidence a court expects, and the order it expects it in. None of that is secret. But it has always been locked behind representation, and when you are facing someone who has it and you do not, the gap is not knowledge. It is footing.

I felt the weight of that. The long nights, the sense of being outmatched on procedure rather than on the merits, the particular helplessness of needing to put your case properly and having no idea how. And somewhere in it I realised the problem was structural, not personal. What I needed was not someone to rescue me. It was the structure a solicitor would have brought, in a form I could use myself.

So I built it.

Portia's founder

The gap

It was never just one case.

That experience is not unusual. Every year, many thousands of people go to court in England and Wales without a lawyer, held to the same procedural standards as the parties who have one. Small businesses face a version of the same thing: a dispute that matters, an opponent who can afford representation, and a bill for matching them that is hard to justify against the value of the claim.

In both cases the problem is the same. The structure a court runs on is not out of reach because it is complicated. It is out of reach because it has always come bundled with a solicitor. Separate the two, and that structure becomes something a capable person, or a capable business, can use directly.

The other way

Most legal AI makes the strong stronger.

Most legal AI is built to make lawyers faster. It helps trained professionals draft, review, and manage more work in less time, and it does that well. But if AI only sharpens the people who already have representation, it widens the very gap Portia exists to close. The advantage compounds for those who already had it.

Portia is built the other way. Instead of amplifying expertise that is already there, it puts recognised legal structure directly into the hands of the people who do not have it: the litigant in person, and the business handling a matter without outside counsel. It does not begin with drafting. It begins with the foundation a case needs, and it is honest about being a tool, not a lawyer.

The name

Why "Portia".

The name is deliberate. Portia stands for intelligence used in the service of fairness, through clarity and command of legal structure rather than force or theatre. It is what we want the tool to be.

It also names the principles the company is built on:

Precision over rhetoric.
Structure over speed.
Intelligence applied with integrity.
Fairness grounded in recognised standards.

Vision and mission

Our vision. Redesign how we all access justice infrastructure.

Our mission. Build the infrastructure that makes justice accessible, transparent, and achievable for all.

Portia begins with civil litigation in England and Wales. Over time the ambition is wider, because legal systems everywhere run on structure that can be encoded and made reachable. But it starts here, with one jurisdiction and one honest tool.

Responsibility

Portia supports preparation.

It is not legal advice, and it does not replace a solicitor or barrister. You remain responsible for your case, for what you file and what you decide. We think being clear about that is part of being trustworthy, not a disclaimer bolted on at the end. It is one of the principles the whole thing is built on.

Portia is early, and that is honest. This is a construction project, and it has only just begun.

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