Creditors of a company behind an online service which promised to ‘democratise’ legal advice for small businesses have approved plans for it to be wound up.

Administrators appointed to Lawbit Ltd proposed to the company’s creditors that it should be sold, after concluding that the business, which ran a service named LawBite, cannot be rescued as a going concern.

The company - which was established in 2014 by barrister Clive Rich - has 33 creditors who are owed a total of £5,810,615.51, Companies House documents show.

A document uploaded on 10 December reveals the creditors approved plans for joint administrators Antony Batty and Hugh Jesseman, of Antony Batty & Company LLP, to continue to manage the company while they market its business and assets for sale.

Meanwhile the website for LawBite, the trading name and platform of Lawbit Ltd, remains online and the Gazette understands customers can still access its platform. An estimated financial statement gives a book value of £4,814,400 to the company’s technology assets, which would include its website. 

One client who spoke to the Gazette said: ‘They were a good firm, they seemed to have blown too much on this, it’s bad they’re gone, leaves a hole, sucks. weren’t perfect, weren’t the best lawyers, did make me unhappy a few times - but they were very efficient, maybe the most efficient (48-hour turnaround is really good, on a reliable basis), probably the cheapest.’

Batty remarked that the value of the company’s platform will ‘depend on the commercial benefit which purchasers envisage’.

LawBite had partnered with a number of digital only financial services companies such as Stripe-Atlas and Tide. 

On Thursday, Tide still featured a promotional offer for its customers to get £75 and one year of free bank transfers if they opened a business current account using the code ‘LAWBITE’. 

While a product manager at Stripe-Atlas informed customers - in a post that remains online - on ‘X’ in February that ‘Atlas companies get access to fixed fee packages with our legal partner LawBite’. They shared a link to the LawBite website which still offers to provide the ‘best-in-class legal help from LawBite for your Stripe Atlas company’.

Neither Stripe-Atlas nor Tide responded to requests for comment.