The company began with a question for one of the UK's few registered blind lawyers. Every sighted colleague wanted the answer too.
You'll find versions of this story on TechCrunch, on LawFuel, in half a dozen podcast write-ups.
Ex-Freshfields lawyer builds legal tech unicorn-in-waiting, raises $40 million, expands to the US.
All true.
All the same story everyone else is telling, but what most of them skip past in a single line is the two and a half years in the middle, and the fact that the man telling it had already failed once before, in a different country, for entirely different reasons. That's the part we wanted to sit inside.
Two trainee solicitors joined Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in the same intake. Nothing separated their workload. The same dense, cross-referenced contracts. The same defined terms, buried forty pages from where they were first used. The same evenings spent hunting for a clause someone had already read once and lost.
For one of them, that hunt was routine, if tedious. For Feargus MacDaeid, one of the UK's few registered blind lawyers, it was closer to a wall. Screen readers weren't built for hundred-page finance documents. Neither was the industry's default answer to everything: print it out, and go page by page.
Nnamdi Emelifeonwu noticed. He asked MacDaeid a simple question — what would make this easier? The answer was specific. Not a summary. Not a workaround. A way to see a definition or a cross-reference without leaving the page he was already on.
"If it could help him, it could help every lawyer. That spark turned into a product, and that product became a business."— Nnamdi Emelifeonwu, Co-Founder & CEO, Definely
Ask yourself honestly: how many of your own colleagues have you asked that question — what would actually make your day easier? Most of us don't. Emelifeonwu did and built a company on the answer.
The trainee who wasn't supposed to stay
Emelifeonwu's supervisor worked this out early. Within weeks of his training contract starting, she told him plainly:
"I don't actually think you're going to stay in law very long, because you're always thinking about new business ideas."— Emelifeonwu's supervisor, as recounted by Nnamdi Emelifeonwu
She wasn't wrong. Before Freshfields, before the qualification, Emelifeonwu had already tried building something of his own. On his month off after qualifying as a solicitor, while colleagues went travelling, he went to Nigeria, where he's originally from, and set up a retail concept in the middle of a Lagos market. It failed. The exchange rate moved against him, and the market wasn't formalised enough to support what he was trying to build.
That's an easy sentence to write and a harder one to have lived. The venture cost him money he didn't have much of. What we don't know — and would genuinely like to ask him — is what that failure felt like at the time, whether he saw Definely as a second chance at the same instinct, or something else entirely. His supervisor's comment turned out to be less a warning than a prediction.
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Two and a half years without a salary
Leaving Freshfields for Definitely LegalTech wasn't a clean break. It was two and a half years without a salary. R&D costs draining savings faster than he'd planned for. Eventually, a move back into his parents' house once those savings ran out.
Sit with that for a second. Two and a half years. No income, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, building a product with no guarantee anyone would ever pay for it. What would you have done at month eighteen, with the savings gone and the outcome still uncertain?
There's no framing that makes that sound comfortable, and we're not going to try one. What's worth noting instead is what it tells us about the shape of this founder story. Definely, legaltech wasn't backed into existence by an obvious, well-funded gap in the market that a dozen other people had already spotted. It was built by someone who had already failed once, in a different country, in a different industry, and chose to risk it again anyway, from inside one of the most conservative professions in Britain.
What kept the company alive in that stretch wasn't just Emelifeonwu's tolerance for risk. Long before any major Definely funding round, SEIS and EIS tax relief gave early angel investors a reason to back an unproven idea rather than walk away from it. R&D tax credits allowed Definely to recover a significant portion of its development costs when cash was tight. None of that is glamorous, and none of it makes the two and a half years sound any easier to live through. But it's worth saying plainly: an immigrant founder building a company from his parents' house was, in part, kept afloat by schemes most people never think about until they need them.
From one lawyer's need to a hundred and fifty firms
The tool that started as an answer for MacDaeid became Read, the first piece of what would grow into a full contract review software suite: a way to check a definition or cross-reference without losing your place in a document.
Then Draft, for managing terms across a contract. Then Proof, catching the small errors, the duplicated full stops and broken references, that make a document look sloppy before a client's even opened it. Then Vault, for searching a firm's own precedents. Then Cascade, which tracks what a single changed clause does to everything downstream of it. Most recently, Enhance, a multi-agent system built to sit alongside a lawyer's drafting and review rather than replace it, part of a broader shift toward legal workflow automation across the profession
The pitch, when it lands with a client, tends to land on the hours it gets back rather than the technology itself.
"You will save money that you would have spent on trainees' dinner and taxis while they Ctrl+F for hours."— Sebastian Goldsmith, General Counsel
It's a small line, but it captures something the funding announcements don't: the actual, physical tedium the product was built to remove.
Definitely, legal tech now counts more than 150 clients, among them A&O Shearman, Slaughter and May, DLA Piper, JP Morgan, Barclays and IKEA. It has raised over $40 million across five rounds, from an early angel cheque through to a Series B funding round led by Revaia, and is now pushing into the US, where it already earns close to a third of its revenue.
Since that first Definely funding round, the company has grown alongside that client list, from a two-person side project to a team of roughly 108 people.
"We are deeply committed to building human-first products, leveraging generative AI not for the sake of it, but to solve real and tangible problems that lawyers face today."— Nnamdi Emelifeonwu, Co-Founder & CEO, Definely
Emelifeonwu has also said he wants the company to grow "for the cause, not the applause" — capital efficiency over growth at all costs, a line that sits a little oddly next to a $30 million Series B funding round, but one that tracks with a founder who spent two and a half years learning what it costs to run out of money.
None of that changes what the company was built to solve first. If anything, it confirms it. The feature built for the person the industry had made no accommodation for turned out to be the feature every lawyer, sighted or not, actually wanted.
An immigrant founder's bet, twice
It's worth naming the other thread running through this, because it rarely gets the same airtime as the funding numbers. Emelifeonwu is a Nigerian immigrant to the UK. He'd already bet on himself once, in Lagos, and lost. Building Definely, legaltech was a second bet, made this time from inside a Magic Circle firm that had just told him, not unkindly, that he probably wouldn't last there anyway.
We don't know how many other immigrant founders in the UK are sitting inside similarly risk-averse institutions right now, running the same private calculation Emelifeonwu once ran. What we do know is what tipped it for him. Not a business plan. A colleague's answer to a simple question, and the two and a half years he was willing to go without a salary to build it properly.
What we'd still like to ask
Everything in this piece is built from public reporting, funding announcements and Definely's own published material. That's enough to tell the shape of the story. It isn't enough to answer the questions we're left with: what his parents said when he moved back home, whether MacDaeid remembers that first conversation the same way, what it actually felt like to watch the Lagos venture collapse before any of this began. Those are the questions we'd put to Emelifeonwu directly, given the chance.
Editorial note
This piece was compiled from public reporting and Definely's own published material, rather than a direct interview. If Nnamdi Emelifeonwu, Feargus MacDaeid, or anyone at Definely would like to add to, correct, or expand on this story, we'd welcome the conversation - reach out to the EP+ editorial desk.
Also read: The Growth and Skills Levy Could Create Britain's Next EdTech Winners
Sources: This piece draws on reporting and interviews from TechCrunch (June 2025), LawFuel (May 2024), SME Business Review (June 2025), the British Legal Technology Forum, the Legally Speaking Podcast, the Non-Billable Podcast, Definely's own LinkedIn and company materials, and background research compiled by the EP+ editorial desk.
