Startup Spotlight: Intoducing Advocatr!
Sharessa Naidoo
Introducing Advocatr!
In our first term of infancy, KCL Legal Tech society is doing big things. We’ve secured talks with heavy hitters such as Elliot Portnoy (Former Founding Dentons CEO) and Dom Conte (ex-Hogan Lovells lawyer, now Purple Co-Founder). We are not stopping here!
We have partnered with 39 Essex Chambers barrister Saara Idelbi to bring you a unique opportunity to contribute towards building legal tech. You read right! Saara Idelbi has co-created a platform specifically for law students which provides tailored AI feedback for advocacy tasks that the platform sets. Advocacy relates to the skillset lawyers need to represent their clients in court e.g. being able to explain complex ideas simply and systematically in front of a judge, jury and/or witness, having confidence when speaking, thinking on the fly etc.
How do you get involved?
Starting with the release of this blog, we are challenging all law students (whether you are an aspiring barrister who wants to work in court or not) or any interested non-law student to:
Sign up to Advocatr here with your KCL email addresses.
Follow detailed instructions to complete Advocatr’s tasks, either choosing the ‘Video Exercises’ or ‘AI-Powered Exercises’. You will first need to watch a video where Saara walks you through Advocatr’s privacy policies that you will have to agree to.
After completing all 3 tasks in your chosen exercise format, scroll down to any webpage on Advocatr’s website to click ‘feedback’ to submit your thoughts on how you found the experience of using Advocatr.
You will then be entered into the draw to win a personalised 1:1 mentoring session with Saara Idelbi in February 2026. This session is completely at the winner’s discretion and can involve a CV review as well as discussion about career objectives, pathways and opportunities. Saara is approachable, has a genuine passion for widening access to the bar and is an advocacy trainer at Gray's Inn. A session with her would be invaluable.
The above must be completed by 31 January 2026 midnight. If you by mistake register a non-KCL email, please fill out this form by the same date. The winner will be randomly drawn the following week, announced and contacted.
If you are an aspiring barrister, Saara has designed Advocatr to give you a real taste of the exact exercises you will encounter at pupillage interviews. So why not give this a try to put yourself in a more competitive position?
But if you’re still new to law and do not understand court systems, read Pinson Masons guide on civil court proceedings and the Crown Prosecution Service’s webpage on How a criminal case works.
As a society, we’ve really enjoyed understanding how law firms and in-house teams are using AI in their workflows, but Saara’s tech presents us with uncharted territory, where we see educational legal tech specifically designed for students for the first time.
In closing, we interviewed Saara about Advocatr last month. Read the Q&A interview below!
1: Explain a bit about your background and why you decided to become a barrister?
“I’m a Londoner by birth. I knew that I wanted to be the lawyer who appeared in court, even though - when I was younger - I did not know exactly what a barrister was. Hard though it is to believe, when I was thinking about going to university it was not as easy to find information about a career in law, especially if one went to a comprehensive like mine. Therefore, I had no idea that you did not need a law degree to become a lawyer, and so I studied law at the University of Warwick. People like to argue about whether it is better or worse to do a law degree or not; self-actualisation at its finest. My own view is that there are benefits and disadvantages to both, and ultimately the profession is richer for having that diverse academic knowledge across the practitioners.”
2: What is Advocatr and why have you decided to create it?
“Advocatr is the first, as far as we have been able to find, AI-powered legal advocacy training platform. It is a space where lawyers can record themselves practising their advocacy skills and receive feedback either through a guided self-appraisal process or - most importantly - from AI. We have launched our MVP and so are in our Alpha testing phase. This means that Advocatr is offering advocacy exercises that mirror cases encountered in pupillage interviews or early practice, for aspiring lawyers to practise in preparation for interviews.
Our long term goal is to build a secure platform for practising lawyers to upload their case papers and be able to practise submissions and/or cross-examination, to identify the weaknesses in their case.
The idea for Advocatr came from the convergence of thoughts I had around the same time: how can you practice outside the pressure of the courtroom or an interview; can you make mistakes in a safe space where you don’t feel watched or judged by others; how can self-appraisal be supported given a career at the Bar can be solitary and appraisals are not a feature of the self-employed Bar; how can I develop my own passion for advocacy.
I then turned to my husband and said something to the effect of, “I have an idea.” He said something like, “Oh no, another one.” And I persuaded him that we should create what is now Advocatr.”
3: How have you programmed Advocatr’s feedback to accommodate different advocacy styles that individuals may have?
“Advocatr is currently designed to focus on the core principles of advocacy and give feedback on that rather than be beholden to advising on a particular style. We hope the feedback from our Alpha test will give us new insights on how to improve the product to make sure that the feedback is bespoke without implying that a particular approach to advocacy is supreme.”
4: What skills will future barristers need to master in a world where AI is becoming more dominant?
“In the same way that a surgeon needs to know how to undertake surgery without the aid of a camera, future barristers will continue to need to master the skills needed for practice, on the basis that they may not have access to AI. Being a barrister can be a bit of a meta-profession. You are the academic, the public-speaker, the medical/financial/stats/ etc (depending on the practice area) expert, the social worker, the marketing manager, the PR manager, the administrator, the educator and the student. The effect of synthesising so many jobs into one means that AI will affect every part of your professional personality in different ways, which in turn means that the skills you need to master will depend on where AI for the masses is most beneficial to the particular part of your professional personality.
However, I think it is important for everyone, not just barristers or lawyers, to understand what AI technology is, the risks and benefits, to carefully balance a sceptical mind with an openness to the opportunities it presents.
We have to remember that, currently, LLMs are trained on data sets, which means that its ability to intuit is constrained by that training data. I saw an interesting comment in a social media reel that suggested that if AI had been trained on the scientific data that had been available before Galileo proposed the earth travelled around the sun, AI may have told you that Galileo’s theory was wrong. That really interested me because it reminds us that in training AI now we assume that we have acquired sufficient knowledge of the world we live in, such that AI may assist us with that final knowledge stretch, but what if we have not?”
5: Do you believe using AI to train lawyers will become more widespread?
“Absolutely. The question is in what ways it will become widespread and how organisations choose to use AI for training.
I hope that using AI to practise case theories may reflect sobering realities of cases to practitioners that may encourage earlier settlements. We are all at risk of becoming siloed in our thoughts, less amenable to considering alternative views from others and we dismiss them perhaps because we believe they don’t know what we know or they are affected by their own biases etc. AI offers an opportunity to challenge ourselves. That is not to say AI is not without its documented biases, which would be the reason I am sceptical that AI should be decision making, but that it offers us a challenge opportunity, a boxing partner, to test our limits.”
6: What kinds of students are you looking to use Advocatr now?
“Any student who aspires to be a courtroom lawyer - whether a barrister, solicitor or indeed an international lawyer practising elsewhere. We are at that stage where all feedback is good feedback for us to make it a platform that delivers value for users so they feel that they can train to be the best advocate they can be.”
