Fmr. UK Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab joins Index Law

The Rt Hon. Dominic Raab has joined Index Law's founding team as a Founding Senior Advisor.

Dominic has seen the legal system from an unusually wide set of angles. He began his career as a lawyer, later served as Foreign Secretary, and as Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor was responsible for the Ministry of Justice, the courts and the legal aid system in England and Wales.

Then he left government and started a business. Suddenly, he was on the other side of the table: finding advisers, explaining what he was trying to build, paying firms to structure it properly, and still wondering whether everything had been done the right way.

That experience will be familiar to almost any founder. Legal services are full of brilliant people, but the experience of buying them can still feel remarkably difficult: work is fragmented between firms and specialists, context has to be explained repeatedly, timelines are unpredictable, and the customer often ends up managing the process themselves.

Index exists because we think AI makes it possible to design that experience differently.

What if you built a legal services provider after AI?

Most legal AI today helps lawyers do their existing work faster. That is already a significant change.

We are interested in what happens one level above that. If AI can increasingly research, draft, review, compare documents, gather information and coordinate work, why should a customer still have to navigate all of the machinery of a traditional law firm?

Our goal is simple: when a company has legal work, it should be able to send it to Index.

Tell us what you are trying to accomplish. Index understands the matter, gathers the context it needs, performs the work it can, coordinates the rest and brings in qualified specialists when their judgement, licence or representation is required.

The customer should not need to work out which type of lawyer to call, chase five different people, or understand how a law firm staffs a matter.

They should be able to say: review this contract before we sign it. Set up this company. Prepare the documents for this transaction. Help us respond to this claim.

And then the legal work should happen. That is the abstraction we are trying to build.

The difficult part is not generating a contract

AI can already produce a credible-looking NDA in seconds. The harder problem is knowing when it is wrong.

Legal work is unusually consequential. A document can read perfectly and contain the wrong governing law. An answer can be technically correct but commercially useless. A system can sound confident while missing the fact that something requires regulated advice or specialist judgement.

So the real research problem for us is not simply making models more capable. It is building the system around them.

When should the AI act autonomously? When should work be checked? When should a specialist enter? What qualifications are required in each jurisdiction? How do you evaluate quality before something reaches a customer? Who is accountable for the result?

We think evaluation, supervision, licensing, insurance and escalation are part of the product. Software is global; legal authority is not. Building one simple experience over that complexity is much harder than putting a chatbot in front of legal documents.

It is also much more interesting.

Why Dominic

That is where Dominic's experience becomes particularly relevant.

Index sits at the intersection of technology, law, regulation and international business. If we succeed, we will need to build something that can move quickly like a technology company while behaving with the seriousness expected of a legal institution.

Dominic has spent much of his career around those boundaries.

His role is to help us think through the harder questions as the company grows: oversight, professional accountability, regulation across jurisdictions, international expansion and the standards a company doing consequential legal work should impose on itself.

Those questions become more important as AI gets better, not less.

Where this goes

We do not think the future of legal services is simply an AI lawyer answering questions in a chat window.

The more interesting end state is a system that can take responsibility for getting legal work done from beginning to end.

AI performs what it can do exceptionally well. Software handles coordination. Specialist lawyers enter where their judgement or professional status genuinely matters. The customer experiences one legal team rather than orchestrating the machinery themselves.

For a large company, that might mean handing Index a workflow that currently consumes hundreds of hours of internal and external counsel time.

For a startup, it might simply mean never having to ask, “Does anyone know a good lawyer for this?”

Just send it to Index.

We are still early. We are starting with defined areas of work, learning where the technology performs reliably, and building the regulatory and professional infrastructure required to take on more over time.

But the direction is clear. As intelligence becomes cheaper, legal services should become faster, more accessible and much easier to use. The law firm itself can begin to feel less like a collection of people you have to coordinate and more like a service that is simply there when you need it.

That is the company we are building, and we are very glad Dominic is helping us build it.

If you have legal work you think should be dramatically easier, send it to me at q@indexlaw.com and I'd love to work with you or your legal team.