An online legal services platform which cost millions to build has been sold for a nominal sum of £1 after administrators were unable to find a buyer who wanted it. Lawbit Ltd, the company behind LawBite, an online service which promised to ‘democratise’ legal advice for small businesses, went into administration after falling £5.8m into debt.
Administrators William Antony Batty and Hugh Jesseman, of Antony Batty & Company LLP - who were appointed in 2024 - said this week that the administration is over and the company is now to be dissolved.
Batty wrote in a progress report that the net property of the company after administration was nil and so no money was available for unsecured creditors.
A significant proportion of the book debts due to LawBit related to services provided through its new-model firm, Lawbriefs Ltd., which was subject to an SRA Intervention.
‘Subsequent to the Intervention, all cases managed by LawBriefs would have been allocated to other firms, meaning related WIP/debtors would have been transferred as appropriate. No recoveries were ultimately achievable’, Batty wrote.
It was hoped the sale of the LawBite platform would pay off some debts. The firm’s subscription service and platform was established in 2014 and offered four tiers of subscription service to small and medium-sized businesses. The administrators had the firm’s technology valued by Axia Valuation Services, but kept the valuation confidential while the business was being marketed, to ‘avoid prejudicing the outcome of any negotiations’, Batty explained.
‘Now that a sale has been concluded, I can confirm that Axia had given a valuation for technology assets and business intellectual property together at £210,000 on an in-situ basis and £2,000 on an ex-situ basis’, Batty wrote. ‘Without being able to maintain the platform and without any support for the relevant code/software, the most appropriate basis would have been the ex-situ basis.’
Batty said despite continuing efforts and several expressions of interest, no acceptable offer for the business and assets was received. Therefore, a sale to ADG Corporate Ltd (trading as PrefCap) - which held a floating charge worth £975,116 over Lawbit’s assets - was agreed on 22 September 2026 for the business and assets of Lawbit for £1.
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