In late August, 2025, Dan Reynolds, the editor in chief of Risk & Insurance, caught up with Grahame Cohen, the Founder and CEO, of Epoq North America. What follows is a transcript of that discussion, edited for length and clarity.

Risk & Insurance: Thanks for giving us some of your time Grahame.  What is the background and formation story of Epoq North America, and how has the company evolved over time?

Grahame Cohen: The company is officially 26 years old, though there’s some debate about the exact timeline since we pivoted from a general software entity to legal services early on. The business has defined my career, and I’ve defined the business—it’s like raising your own child.

The company started in the UK when a family member had a legal issue but lacked suitable documentation. Coming from a legal family—my father and brother were both lawyers—I partnered with a skilled software developer to create a solution that would help people get the right legal documentation in place. This was pre-.com era by about a year.

When the .com boom happened, we raised some money in the UK and survived both the boom and the subsequent crash. Soon after, we started working with insurers in the UK, and we still maintain those relationships today. Allianz is one of our longstanding customers, and Royal and Sun Alliance was our very first insurer customer.

Royal and Sun Alliance approached us when they were raising premiums dramatically and needed a positive message for their customers. We suggested they provide legal services to their policyholders, which kicked off our relationship in the insurance space. In the UK, you can’t get a commercial, home, or auto policy without being offered legal expense insurance, and we introduced the digital side of that offering.

About ten years ago, we recognized that the US market was very different from the UK in terms of how legal services integrate with insurance. The legal expense insurance model from the UK wouldn’t work in the US—it wasn’t a product-market fit because the legal market and cost recovery were different. We led with technology for ten years, and this year launched an insurance piece with a much broader offering.

We’ve spent a decade figuring out what the product looks like for the P&C market, getting it filed in 26 states and counting, and building early relationships. Now we have a novel legal expense insurance product that fits the US market, packaging law alongside property and casualty insurance. The two are natural partners because both offer protection, and together they answer questions that fall between the cracks—like prevention and supporting policyholders outside of claims.

The US has now become our bigger market than the UK, with all my focus and a growing team based there. We’re entering a growth phase after over a quarter century in business, which is quite exciting. Our relationships include many insurers in the life market and employee benefits, but P&C is the jewel in the crown.

R&I: How does your product address the legal needs in the current insurance environment?

GC: If I were speaking to you last year, it would be a slightly different conversation because we had a narrower product. Today, we have a stack of services that help insurers with matters that fall between the claim and renewal period.

The first component is documentation, which is key. For example, a contractor taking on a subcontractor needs the right risk transfer clauses and proper insurance verification. A landlord needs to ensure their tenant has a tenant policy, which in many states provides massive risk transfer—if the tenant sets fire to the building, that liability falls to them and their carrier, not to the landlord.

Farm owners holding events on their land need the right signage and waivers. Restaurants doing off-site events need contracts that specify what happens in various scenarios. These documentation elements ensure proper risk transfer, either making sure someone else is insured or clearly identifying responsibilities, which reduces the chance of a claim on your own policy.

This applies across business and personal lines. A consumer renovating their home whose builder arrives with no documentation benefits from having a contract that specifies what’s being done, payment terms, and code compliance. We have hundreds of services across commercial, home, farm, and specialist areas like landlords, contractors, and consultants.

Our technology platform allows us to parachute in what we call “lawyers in the loop” who can review documents across all 50 states. We use AI to help formulate questions, because people are typically bad at directing good questions to lawyers. Without proper context, lawyers could spend forty minutes or more on the phone gathering information before they can provide an answer.

AI is very effective at extracting this information upfront. The AI formulates the question and generates an answer, which then goes to the lawyer for review. This means the lawyer spends perhaps fifteen minutes checking an answer and reviewing a well-formed question rather than an hour and a half doing all the work, allowing us to price this as an affordable package.

Finally, we’ve introduced something groundbreaking through Lloyd’s—a reinsurance coverage where policyholders using our documents can opt for alternative dispute resolution and mediation. If they end up in a dispute around a document prepared via our platform, they have up to $50,000 of lawyer time to guide them through it, plus access to alternative dispute resolution services. This entire program gets filed by the carrier as a low-cost bolt-on.

R&I: How does your bolt-on legal service integrate with insurance policies and what value does it provide to carriers?

GC: In the UK the service is presented as a bolt-on, and that’s what the program is also in the US—no different from cyber insurance. In the UK it preceded cyber and is probably the oldest, most long-standing, and most-used bolt-on. Law is a bolt-on to the policy at a low cost against the premium.

We had to match all of that to make it work. Think about a $50 cyber plan that’s sold alongside the main insurance—we’ve put this together to match that, making it a very easy decision. Usually, it’s an opt-out where possible, but at such a low cost that it’s an easy decision for policyholders to keep it.

For the carrier, it represents multiple benefits. It’s an engagement opportunity because it’s very broad. You can have all sorts of ongoing outbound information from your agent around the program covering different things you should be thinking about. Have you got a snow removal agreement in place? Is it the right one? Do you need advice on that or need the agreement put into place because snow season is coming up?

All of these touchpoints exist, and from a carrier perspective, it’s a profit center, not a cost center. When we speak to carriers and present this to them, they ask how much it will cost them. We tell them it’s actually going to generate income because it gets filed by them—like equipment breakdown, except it’s a much broader bolt-on that doesn’t rely solely on insurance, which means policyholders have day-one value.

All these touchpoints fall between a policy renewal and a claim, which rarely happens. Policyholders often wonder if something is claimable under their policy. Usually, it’s not claimable under the policy, but we’ve got a solution for them, giving carriers the opportunity, often via their agents, to deliver these messages.

That’s the angle we’re going for, which means we keep our costs very tight. That’s why we’re a tech business—we have to lean on the tech as much as possible and bring in lawyers the minimal amount we can. Obviously, we’re dealing with things like unauthorized practice of law, so we have to be compliant in the legal market, which we understand really well because we’ve been in the US market for twenty years in the life market and others.

We understand all the regulatory aspects of the legal market. We also have to deal with the regulators and make sure our program can be filed. In some states, it’s been harder than others, but we’re about to file in New York for the first time.

R&I: Does your product play a part in addressing the nuclear verdicts and social inflation that are driving up premium rates and creating challenges for casualty underwriters in the US legal environment?

GC: We do have a part to play in helping with social inflation, though we’re not the panacea to it in its entirety. Nuclear verdicts involve organized groups going after mega corporations for $100 million or $200 million in product liability or other types of liability cases. That’s not where we fit.

We fit with small and medium-sized enterprises who typically don’t have access to lawyers to fight effectively. Where we really hit home is creating an off-ramp away from court proceedings. We want to take businesses away from that court experience because that’s how small and medium-sized businesses go out of business and get distracted from their core operations.

Part of the solution is providing legal advice beforehand. If businesses had proper guidance, they wouldn’t have sent that problematic email or used those specific words. Even if the other side rejects a settlement offer, the business is now in a better legal position and will be viewed as reasonable rather than unreasonable if it goes to court.

We provide Q&A access to lawyers because these businesses try to avoid spending money. They might seek advice on Google or ChatGPT, but it’s probably wrong or they haven’t expressed themselves properly. You really need someone looking over that to make sure you’re not screwing up, to put it bluntly.

We also ensure businesses get the right paperwork in place with proper warranties, indemnities, and risk allocation to the appropriate parties. Then we provide that off-ramp away from court through mediation. This is where it gets really interesting.

In the UK, if you go to court with these types of cases, they will push you to mediate. They won’t even hear you until you’ve attempted mediation first. This isn’t quite happening yet in the US, but it’s starting in New York’s commercial division and in Florida’s state and federal courts where they’re either requiring or strongly encouraging mediation.

Online mediation has become much cheaper and effective since COVID. Mediation solves 80 to 90 percent of cases because people go there with the intention to avoid court. They’re already in that mindset of avoiding the pain of litigation.

When you put a program like ours together—connecting documents preparation, preventive questions to avoid mistakes, and mediation as an off-ramp—we’re helping reduce elements of social inflation. We can’t do everything, but we’re going to help. For insurers, this provides massive value-add messaging between claims, which might only occur once every five or eight years on personal lines.

We’re now working much more deeply with agents, and there’s a stark difference I’ve noticed between brokers and agents. The really large brokerages actually have in-house counsel to help their policyholders. Agents don’t have that.

When agents get asked legal questions, they’re either breaking the law by trying to answer them or they can’t really help, pointing clients away from solutions they could offer with their carrier. We can help with all of that.

Although we’ve been in the P&C market for ten years, the breadth of this product is literally launching now. Before this year, it was solely document preparation. But now we’ve proven that we can scale it, carriers like it, and we’re expanding.

R&I: What feedback are US carriers providing about your product, and what specifically attracts them to your solution?

GC: We go out of our way to accommodate some of our carriers. For instance, one of our super regional carriers in Pennsylvania was particularly interested in the contractor side of our offerings. They had specific requirements around risk transfer and coverage expectations, so we actually amended our contract language to meet their needs.

While we try to avoid excessive customization, we can adjust our content for carriers that are large enough. For them, it’s about answering the key questions: what happens between claims, and how can we transfer and manage risk effectively? There’s also a novelty element at play right now since we’re early to market.

It’s similar to cyber insurance fifteen years ago—early adopters gain a competitive message for their agents. We have carriers telling us they can get ahead of competitors in their states because they offer something unique. However, we don’t expect this novelty to last forever, as we want this solution to become more ubiquitous.

Our perspective is that we want to help people. The business was started because a family member had a problem, and it’s all about ensuring people have the right access to the right help. Law is complicated, generally inaccessible, and expensive, so we’re trying to bridge that gap.

Our distribution method allows us to bridge that gap at a sensible price point. Because we’re a bolt-on product rather than standalone, it changes the pricing mechanics—we don’t have to capture new customers ourselves since they’re brought to us. We avoid the high costs of customer acquisition and renewal, which means we also avoid adverse selection by being included in existing policies.

This allows us to provide something that would typically cost thousands of dollars for just $50 or $100. The reaction we get is, “This is such good value, I can’t believe how amazing it is—you just saved me so much headache and hassle.” That’s exactly what insurers want to hear, and that’s what we can deliver for them.

R&I: What are your final thoughts on Epoq North America’s positioning in the evolving insurance market?

GC: I’m optimistic about our position in the market. The industry is moving away from a reactive “repair and replace” model to a proactive “predict and prevent” approach, and that’s exactly where we fit. This shift aligns perfectly with our core capabilities and strategic focus. &