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Paul Millar has spent 27 years as a developer, including time inside a law firm and a close look at how legal technology gets built and bought. He came to LawtechUK as Chief Technology Officer of Old Oak Legal, the company behind his first product, an AI-assisted legal operations suite covering drafting and billing.
LawtechUK, the Ministry of Justice-backed initiative delivered by CodeBase and Legal Geek, gave Paul something engineering alone hadn't: a candid, commercial view of what the legal industry would buy. He moved through LawtechUK's accelerator programmes, Builder and Scaler, alongside its Mentorship scheme, and the honesty he found there changed what he built next.
Today Paul is co-founder of AirGapSign, a compliance-driven e-signature platform that anchors a cryptographic fingerprint of each agreement to the blockchain, so documents can be signed and verified without any provider ever holding them. Alongside it sits Orbit, a local AI engineering system for building full software without cloud dependence.
This is a case study on how the right guidance, at the right moment, compounds across a founder's ventures.
Paul's founder journey is rooted in 27 years as a developer, including time inside a law firm working with a decades-old document management system. He saw how hard it was to connect modern tools to legacy platforms, and how, when systems went wrong, blame tended to land on whoever sat lowest in the pecking order.
That experience fed into Old Oak Legal and its flagship product. It began as a clause builder and, as AI arrived, grew into a suite that could draft documents on voice command and automate most billable-hours management. Technically, it was an advanced piece of software.
What it needed was a route to the people who'd pay for it.
When Paul joined LawtechUK, Old Oak Legal had engineering depth most early-stage legal tech companies would envy, and his first product proved it. What the business lacked was commercial footing. Paul had worked in commercial roles as an employee and knew the difference: as a founder, you have to be everything at once.
He was also building for the legal industry, which he describes as incredibly slow-moving, where even excellent software can fail to gain traction. And he needed a clear-eyed view of which of his ideas deserved his time.
LawtechUK offered candid expertise from people who had been through it.
Paul came into LawtechUK through the Builder programme, where the aim is to take an idea beyond the building stage to a working MVP. What struck him first was the candour. Founders and experts on the programme didn't soften their feedback, and that honesty helped him understand the errors he was making before they became expensive.
One piece of advice from an experienced operator on the programme stuck with Paul: don't dive in too quickly with a co-founder. He admits likeability might once have swayed him. The programme reframed that. A co-founder means trusting one person to lead with a single vision, so the test is whether they can drive the business forward, with commercial and compliance knowledge to match. Around 20 conversations in, he's holding that line.
Mentorship carried that candour through to Scaler. Working with mentors Andy and Callum, Paul faced an honest verdict on his first product: technically excellent, commercially a long shot. Rather than defend it, he listened, and the programme helped him steer toward something the market could grasp.
That something started life as a product called Immutable and, with Callum's guidance on positioning and promotion, became AirGapSign. The mentoring gave Paul a picture of the mistakes ahead of him, so he could avoid them rather than discover them once it was too late to change course.
By the time he left the programme, Paul had a clearer sense of which product to lead with and what kind of co-founder the business needed.
The lessons from LawtechUK now run through everything Paul builds. AirGapSign has gone to market as a compliance-first e-signature platform designed to meet eIDAS 2.0, GDPR and SOC 2 requirements, with multi-factor authentication built in. His focus is Europe, where he expects demand to grow as eIDAS 2.0 takes hold, and he has begun reaching out to European companies.
Orbit, built on the componentised architecture behind his first product, sits alongside it. Running locally and containerised, it lets teams test full systems for little more than the cost of electricity. Paul expects AirGapSign to be the bigger product, and Orbit to reach the market faster because its value is grasped immediately.
The commercial lessons show in his pipeline too. Most of his interest comes from in-house legal teams rather than law firms, and he's now searching for a CEO co-founder with compliance and commercial expertise.
LawtechUK, delivered by CodeBase, gave Paul more than support for a single company. It gave him honest counsel at the moments where direction matters most, and a way of thinking that has carried well beyond the venture he arrived with.
For ecosystem builders, government, academia, and corporates, Paul's story shows what happens when a highly technical founder is paired with candid commercial guidance early enough to change course.
Follow AirGapSign on LinkedIn for updates on product releases and European expansion.
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