What inspired you to create Valla, and how did your own experiences shape the platform’s focus on accessible workplace dispute resolution?
I created Valla to help everyday workers with settling employment disputes – so far, we have provided over 13,000 people with support to win their legal cases.
Our goal is to provide intelligent legal support for everyone. Valla provides workers with the tools they need to collect evidence, generate documents and send legal correspondence.
How does Valla’s AI guide users through evidence collection and document generation. What are the key steps in the process?
Our first application of AI isn’t client-facing, it’s woven into our platform to level up 1-1 calls with legal professionals. We use AI to brief the legal expert, take notes on the call to record actions and next steps, and to draft the follow-up materials.
With over 12,000 users to date, what common patterns or pain points have you seen in workplace disputes?
A very common pattern we see is that people don’t know how to raise an issue at work, or when they do, they don’t know what process their employer is required to follow to deal with that issue. This can lead to the problem escalating later on, and improving this alone could resolve many more workplace issues much earlier.
We also see a lot of issues stemming from misunderstanding about what a disability is according to the Equality Act and what employers need to keep in mind to support their workers who have disabilities.
Finally, we see all kinds of employees struggling with the Tribunal process itself. It doesn’t matter if their claim is more straightforward – like unpaid wages – or something more complex like whistleblowing, the process itself is hard to understand and hard to navigate. Employees are at a massive disadvantage here, as most employers can afford to hire legal representation who know all the processes and practices. Only one side knows the rules of the game, and that leads to a lot of issues for employees trying to look for a fair outcome.
How does Valla balance providing DIY tools with ensuring users know when to seek professional legal advice?
When we started, we were a pure DIY platform, offering the case management platform, templates, and educational material. We quickly learned that people still needed to talk to experts, so we then added our “legal coaching” product, where people can book time with experienced Tribunal litigators to ask questions, talk strategy, or prepare for a hearing.
What measures do you have in place to keep sensitive user data secure and confidential on the platform?
Valla’s founding team comes from a fintech background, and we treat our customer data in the same way that we’d treat sensitive financial data.
How did you structure Valla’s recent £2 million funding round, and what are the top priorities for deploying that capital?
The round was led by Ada Ventures, with Active Partners, Portfolio Ventures participating, as well as follow-on from existing investors Techstart Ventures and The Resolution Foundation.
We’re using this round to continue investing in more AI features, to tell more people about Valla, and to build relationships with unions, law firms and insurers, all who can benefit from offering’s Valla’s products to their own members and customers.
You’ve been likened to the “Martin Lewis of employment disputes”. How do you see Valla’s role evolving as a trusted adviser to workers?
It’s so important for people to understand what options they have when something goes wrong at work – right now, many people in the UK wouldn’t recognise many legal issues at work at all. Even if they recognised the issue, they need a trusted guide who can help them make an informed choice and support them along the way, and that’s what I want Valla to be.
What challenges have you faced in educating both employers and employees about the benefits of a tech-driven dispute resolution model?
While Valla is a tech company, I think our fundamental innovation is changing the delivery model itself of legal services, “unbundling” a traditional service and sharing out the work between the user, legal professionals and technology. That’s very new in the legal space, but it’s familiar now in other markets like financial advice and accounting. The biggest challenge is helping someone move from the mental model of “I can’t afford a lawyer so I have no options” to “I could represent myself.”
How do you measure success and impact in helping people resolve workplace issues?
Our big success criteria is to help people make an informed decision with intelligent tools – to understand what their workplace issue actually is, apply a label to it, understand the potential outcomes, and then decide if it’s worth taking forward or not.
As one of Innovate UK’s Top 50 Female Entrepreneurs, what advice would you give to other women building tech startups in the legal sector?
AI is transforming our industry at a breathless pace and it’s creating all kinds of new opportunity, but I see fewer female founders adopting AI tech.
Many of the female founders I’ve spoken to seem to still have the perception that AI is “not for them” – they view it as a deep technical field that requires prior coding knowledge, whereas they could be seeing it as an emerging general-purpose technology gives them a massive boost to getting into market and validating their ideas.
