From coding to courtrooms — Danae Shell’s mission to empower workers with Valla

Peter Ranscombe goes behind the scenes at Valla to learn how the lawtech start-up is helping employees to represent themselves in employment tribunals.

Computer geeks like me have a million and one reasons to learn to code, from wanting to write our own games through to tweaking the really annoying colour scheme in a favourite program. For Danae Shell, the motivation was far simpler – to stop her brother from reading her diary.

“It’s such a tween reason,” laughs Danae. “The first program I wrote was that journal. I’m from Tennessee and taught myself to code on a computer that my memaw got at a garage sale. It was an Apple IIe – I just fell in love with technology, and it’s become my whole career.”

Danae studied political science and computer science at Furman University in South Carolina. One way or another, that combination of comp sci and poli sci has shaped her career.

She moved to Scotland for an internship at what was then Edinburgh Napier University’s International Teledemocracy Centre. “The fact it was still called ‘tele-democracy’ and ‘e-democracy’ shows how long ago it was now,” Danae smiles. “These were some of the earliest experiments in governments interacting with their citizens online, and for me it included working on the Scottish Parliament’s first e-petitions system.”

From governance and public policy, Danae moved into financial technology – “Back before it was called ‘fintech’, when everything was just ‘digi-tech’” – where she helped build tools for financial advisers on a wealth management platform. After working at online accountancy software firm FreeAgent and in a series of senior roles at other tech start-ups, Danae wanted to put everything she’d learned into practice with her own company. “I seem to have this consistent trend of working in different professional services and digitising them,” she observes.

The rise of self-representation

“Having been a woman in tech for so long, I saw a lot of problems at work, and a lot of people came to me for support, especially the more senior I got,” she explains. “It just really shocked me that nobody really knew what to do, especially as an American – we’re obsessed with our rights.”

After spotting the need to help employees navigate their employment rights, Danae began raising money in 2020 to develop Valla as an online tool to help people who couldn’t afford legal advice to assess whether they had a case to take before an employment tribunal.

“The first hypothesis of Valla was, ‘If you can file a tax return from your phone, surely we could make the employment law process easier for people’,” she says. “By that point, we were seeing a rise in self-representation. At the time it previously peaked, one in three people were representing themselves at tribunals – and now we know it’s closer to one in two – but they had no tools, Citizens Advice were overwhelmed, and so it was basically just the individual and Google.”

Valla launched in 2022 and underwent a step-change in 2025 after Danae raised £2 million through an investment round led by Ada Ventures and including Active Partners, Portfolio Ventures and Techstart Ventures, which led Valla’s pre-seed funding round in 2020. The cash injection allowed her to incorporate generative artificial intelligence (AI) into Valla.

Combining AI with human expertise

“At its core, Valla helps people identify and manage an employment issue,” Danae explains. “The platform is free to use if you want to track your evidence and keep a timeline of what’s happened, because contemporaneous notes are so valuable and people don’t often realise that. We’ve always offered templates on the website, but what we couldn’t figure out was how to scale the system to help someone identify whether they have a case or not – that’s what generative AI has helped us to crack.”

Incorporating generative AI has allowed Valla to create its case assessment tool. “You pay £149 and you get an hour with a legal professional,” says Danae. “You upload your documents beforehand, and the AI works behind the scenes and basically briefs the lawyer who comes onto the call. The AI picks out the legally relevant points from the timeline, prepares a summary of the key documents and suggests where the lawyer should begin the conversation.

“During the conversation with the potential claimant, the lawyer digs into the details about the incident, and all the time the AI is producing a transcript. After the call, the AI takes the transcript with the lawyer’s conclusions and all the other material and prepares a final report, which the lawyer checks over.

“Basically, half an hour after hanging up from that call with the lawyer, the potential claimant receives a report that explains whether or not the lawyer thinks they have a case. If they want to take the case forward and represent themselves then we have coaching available from solicitors and other experts, such as experienced human resources (HR) professionals and people who are accredited through the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives.”

Working with solicitors and HR experts

“I’m not a lawyer,” Danae is quick to point out, but she clearly takes the regulatory side of her work very seriously. Valla is authorised by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to conduct those assessments of potential employment claims, under the supervision of qualified SRA solicitors. Its coaching services, document checks and templates then fall under the umbrella of ‘unreserved legal services’.

Those solicitors work remotely from throughout the UK, with some making 30 hours available each week, while others contribute three or four hours in between their other work. “If solicitors don’t want to leave the market but have caring responsibilities then it helps them to keep practising,” Danae adds.

Introducing its case assessment tool has also allowed Valla to begin working with trade unions. “They have the same problem that everybody else has – they can only afford so much legal support, but their demand is outstripping their supply,” she notes.

Danae has immersed herself in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, from winning a Disruptive Innovator Award from AccelerateHER and a Women in Innovation Award from Innovate UK through to giving back to her community by speaking at 2024’s Women Backing Women Investment Summit Scotland, organised by Mint Ventures.

She’s also taking inspiration from other lawtech businesses, including Ross McNairn’s Wordsmith AI. “What sets businesses like Valla and Wordsmith AI apart is that we’re examining the whole process to see where AI can help with individual steps – so many other products out there are clearly just wrappers over the top of a ChatGPT chatbot,” Danae adds. “Although we’re a technology company, our real innovation is the delivery model.”