AI for lawyers, by builders.
Moonlabs is the operator-led AI Academy in Derby. We run three live companies — Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk — and we teach twelve students per cohort to ship a real AI product, sell it to a real customer, and raise on it. Three pillars: Coding, Commercials, Investment. Twelve weeks. £6,000.
Moonlabs is what we are. Two operators — James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow — who run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk, have raised £5m+ for their own companies, and have been AI-native in the editor since the week ChatGPT shipped.
The Academy is what we do. A twelve-week, in-person, twelve-student cohort in Derby. You build a real AI product. You sign a paid pilot on it. You write a deck and a financial model. You leave with a deployed system, a paying customer reference and a live investor pipeline. Coding, Commercials, Investment — the three pillars taught in equal weight every week.
Why this page exists. Almost every ‘AI for legal’ conference talk is about what AI could do; almost no working lawyer can build the systems that are causing the disruption. The Academy is built for the senior lawyer or in-house counsel who has read the conference proceedings and wants the muscle memory. Retrieval over a contract library. Agentic review tools that catch what a paralegal might miss. Hallucination evals, before a judge ever sees the output. Secure, on-prem-capable deployment. You return to your firm or your in-house function as the lawyer who can ship the AI, not just argue about it.
Coding · the legal-AI engineering brief
Retrieval over your firm’s contract library. Hallucination evals from week one (a New York firm has already been sanctioned for failing to run them). On-prem-capable deployment that survives a Magic Circle InfoSec review. A deployed legal-AI tool by week twelve — the engineering hygiene that decides whether legal AI ships or gets pulled.
Commercials · selling AI into a law firm or in-house function
Pricing the AI tool against the billable hour. Procurement, InfoSec sign-off, partnership cuts, internal sponsor. A one-page pilot agreement with one practice group. A paid pilot by week six — often inside the firm you arrived from, sometimes selling the same tool out to peer firms.
Investment · raising on legal-AI
Harvey raised at $1.5bn pre-product-market-fit; Spellbook, Lexis+AI, Robin AI all have live cap tables. Cap table from week two, ten-slide deck, financial model, term sheets. We make warm introductions to UK angels who write cheques in vertical AI. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
I have never coded. Is this realistic for a lawyer?
Yes. AI tooling has collapsed the on-ramp dramatically. We have taken senior non-coding professionals through to a deployed product in twelve weeks. More on that here.
Are lawyers actually attending this kind of course?
Increasingly yes. The profession that takes the next decade seriously is not the one with the most CPD seminars on AI; it is the one with partners and senior associates who can ship the tools their colleagues will use.
Can my firm pay for this?
Often yes — many firms now have explicit AI upskilling budgets. The Apprenticeship Levy can apply where the engagement is mapped against a qualifying apprenticeship standard. Full funding routes here.
Will I learn how to evaluate vendor legal-AI products too?
Yes. After twelve weeks of building you can read a Harvey, Spellbook, Lexis+AI demo with operator-grade scepticism. The procurement conversations you have on the other side are fundamentally different.
I am in-house, not at a firm. Is the course still right?
Yes — arguably more so. In-house counsel who can build internal AI tooling are short and increasingly senior. The Academy graduates are a strong match for the brief.
More Academy entry points.
The Academy is one course with many doors. Each of these pages is a different entry point into the same twelve weeks.
Build it. Sell it. Raise on it. In twelve weeks.
Tell us what your firm or in-house function looks like and what AI tool you would build for it. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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