Former City lawyer launches AI startup to tackle insurance claims

A former Quinn Emanuel and Allen & Overy lawyer has launched an AI startup to take on complex insurance claims.

Alex Harding, who spent seven years as a disputes lawyer in the City and most recently served as head of claims at M&A insurance broker HWF, is the co-founder of Evince, an AI platform that helps insurers and law firms analyse claims to identify patterns and improve decision-making.

Evince is targeting complex and specialty insurance disputes, an area Harding believes AI is now well placed to serve, where bespoke policy wording combines with complex facts.

Harding said his experience in private practice and the insurance market convinced him that one of the industry's biggest challenges was a lack of accessible data.

"When I was working in private practice and as head of claims at a broker, I was always struck that most parties' desired end state was the fast resolution of a claim, but a key blocker of that outcome was a lack of data,” he said.

He believes insurers are sitting on decades of valuable claims data that remains locked away in unstructured documents, preventing them from identifying recurring coverage disputes and cost trends to make better underwriting decisions.

Harding said the longer-term ambition is to create an “institutional memory” that helps insurers improve claims handling and underwriting decisions.

"The opportunity to improve that feedback loop from complex claims to underwriting is uniquely possible now because of AI," he said. "The opportunity to lead that space won't exist forever."

Built for insurance work

Harding said Evince’s tech has been built for the specialty insurance market rather than as a general legal AI platform.

"The specialty insurance ecosystem is complex," he said. "If you are building in this space, you can't provide a generalised workflow tool. You need to respect the interconnectedness of the industry and how information flows."

Harding co-founded the business with Tom Bruls, a former research scientist with a PhD in generative AI from Oxford University, who previously held AI engineering roles at Amazon and Audi.