Why legal expertise is the next innovation ceiling

Only 29% of European startups have filed for an IP right. This is according to a joint 2023 study by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO).

It’s easy to see why: accessing legal expertise is expensive, slow, and often one of the last things on a founder’s mind. For many startups, funding constraints mean that investing in quality legal support is simply out of the question, leaving founders to navigate essential legal processes on their own, or worse, forgo them altogether. Founders make this exact tradeoff too many times to count.

This is bad news not just for founders, but for European innovation as a whole.

By definition, improving access to legal expertise can only be done in a way that reduces cost and complexity without compromising on quality. AI-native services present a clear opportunity to offer a combination of purpose-built technology and genuine expertise that can streamline processes and costs while keeping oversight where it is needed.

The legal guidance startups can’t afford and scale without

Building competitive technology is only the first step to turning an idea into a successful business. To scale, a startup also needs to protect its intellectual property (IP), comply with regulation and defend its position against competitors.

Yet, faced with sky-high legal bills, many owners are opting to navigate these processes on their own, or leave valuable assets like IP unprotected altogether during early stage growth.

In a separate report, the EPO found that it currently costs on average €6,800 to take a patent application through to the grant stage for just a European patent. With attorney and nation validation fees bringing the total to €13,000 – €18,000 or more for European prosecution alone, multiple patents can represent a huge cost for an early-stage startup.

In many cases, this cost is prohibitive, as the aforementioned EUIPO-EPO joint study shows, despite evidence that startups filing for patents before their seed round are up to 10.2 times more likely to secure funding.

It’s a vicious cycle, because when things go wrong, the same startups won’t be able to afford the fees to defend their unprotected ideas or fight a dispute in court.

This is illustrated by Sonos’ 2020 patent infringement lawsuit against Google. For starters, the company acknowledged that it actually believed both Google and Amazon were infringing its patents, but chose to sue only Google because it could not afford to fight both companies simultaneously.

In an interview, former CEO Patrick Spence told TIME that taking Google to the U.S. International Trade Commission cost Sonos “millions of dollars,” and that while the company secured an import ban on certain Google products, the process remains prohibitively expensive and risky for most startups that might face similar battles with Big Tech.

Sonos was already a successful, publicly listed company – not an early-stage startup. Even so, the cost of patent enforcement forced the company to prioritise which alleged infringer to pursue. For a genuine early stage startup, spending millions of dollars to enforce their IP is a non-starter.

Such is why early ride-sharing startup Carma waited almost a decade to sue Uber for patent infringement. As founder Sean O’Sullivan explained, “To come up with the $10 million-plus to take on a big patent suit, which is what it takes these days, is not a small task.”

Of course, the most cost effective litigation is the kind you never have to bring at all. This is why the best thing that startups can do is to deploy proper IP protection early, before a dispute is even on the table.

A bottleneck for European innovation

It is no secret that AI is lowering the technical barriers to innovation, allowing individuals and small teams to build technology that previously required much larger engineering teams and budgets. As that happens, the bottleneck shifts from building competitive technology to navigating everything required to commercialise, protect and scale it.

In Europe, this challenge is especially acute. In his report, former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi showed that the EU now has around 100 tech-focused laws and over 270 regulators active in digital networks across all member states.

Draghi concluded that the net effect of this burden of regulation is that “…only larger companies – which are often non-EU based – have the financial capacity and incentive to bear the costs of complying. Young innovative tech companies may choose not to operate in the EU at all.”

We are already seeing that for some startups, the potential to make savings through relocation is proving hard to ignore. In February 2025, cloud communications software firm Bird, one of the Netherlands’ most prominent tech startups, announced plans to relocate its operations out of Europe, citing the cost and complexity of complying with European regulation as its primary motivation.

Unless action is taken to improve access to legal expertise, Europe risks losing more of its brightest innovators to competitor markets, taking crucial ideas for national security, critical infrastructure and DeepTech innovation with them.

How AI can improve access to legal expertise

Improving access to legal expertise must be done in a way that reduces cost and complexity without compromising on the quality. Here, AI presents a clear opportunity.

This is not to say that founders should simply delegate their legal admin to chatbots and LLMs. The growing trend of “vibe lawyering” – where people are using such platforms to defend themselves in court – might save on legal fees initially, but the risk of losing a case on account of inaccuracies and hallucinations in the paperwork, far outweigh any initial savings made.

Rather, AI-native services that offer a combination of purpose-built technology and genuine expertise can be used to level the playing field for startups, through streamlining the cost and complexity of legal processes.

We’ve already seen that this model works in practice: Garfield AI, a regulator-approved AI law firm, was recently used to do the documentary heavy lifting for a case that was argued by a human barrister in court, enabling the client to win and recover her fees.

Patents are a key example of where AI-native legal services like this could have the biggest impact. Filing a patent traditionally involves huge amounts of technical documentation, analysis and drafting.

An approach where AI handles the groundwork while qualified patent attorneys review, refine and take responsibility for the final application can enable startups to secure high-quality IP protection in days rather than months, at a fraction of the traditional cost.

This is good news for innovators, and great news for Europe’s startup ecosystem. Through democratising access to legal expertise, startups are encouraged to protect and scale their ideas here in Europe where the benefits can feed back into our own economies.

This also ensures that the tone of European innovation is set by the very best ideas, not just by the ones with the biggest legal budgets.