Setfords shortlisted in two categories at the Legal Technology Awards 2026 

Setfords has been shortlisted in two categories at the Legal Technology Awards 2026 – Technology Team of the Year and Technology Venture of the Year. It is the only organisation named as a finalist in both. 

In Technology Team of the Year, Setfords is shortlisted alongside DLA Piper, Microsoft and HF. In Technology Venture of the Year, it is shortlisted alongside AIIC Group, Lewis Silkin and Simplify. 

Both entries reflect the firm’s decision to build its own technology rather than licence it from third parties. Setfords’ technology function was consolidated into a dedicated group company, Setfords Technology Solutions Limited, in 2025 and has grown from eight people to more than 30 in-house specialists in two years, covering software engineering, data, AI, digital, UX and cyber security. 

The Technology Venture award entry is Halo, the legal intelligence platform Setfords designed and built in-house, combining case, accounts and practice management in a single system. The firm migrated its entire business onto Halo over one weekend, moving millions of historical documents, all 650 consultants and every back-office team without running the old and new systems in parallel.  

Halo is built on Helix, the firm’s governed data foundation, which consolidates nearly twenty years of operational data into one of the largest proprietary legal datasets in the UK. 

Chris Setford, co-CEO of Setfords, said: 

“Twenty years ago we said that if you give great lawyers the right support, they can do their best work. What that support means in practice has changed a lot since, and it now means owning the systems our consultants work on. 

“Most firms run on software they neither own nor change and wait months for a vendor to deliver improvements designed for hundreds of other firms. We took a different view and decided to build something for Setfords. Our consultants tell us what they need, the delivery team sits one floor up, and work that used to take months now takes days.” 

Finalists were selected by an independent judging panel chaired by Sheila Flavell CBE, President of techUK. Entries were up more than 21% year on year. 

The shortlisting follows a year in which Setfords reported revenue up 35% to £67.7m and adjusted EBITDA up 45% to £11.0m, topped The Lawyer’s Top 100 for growth, and was the sole UK law firm in the Financial Times’ Europe’s Long-Term Growth Champions index. 

Winners will be announced at a ceremony on Wednesday 18 November 2026 at City Central at the HAC, London.