Meet the founders: Gavin and José on origins, values, and the vision behind Vizlegal

Gavin Sheridan and José Alberto Suárez López began developing Vizlegal in 2015 and launched commercially in 2019. And now serves many of the leading public sector, law firm and sole practitioners across Ireland and the UK, delivering enhanced functionality and workflow capabilities on many of the key research, operational and  strategic priorities of today’s lawyer.

Gavin came to legaltech through journalism. Trained in History and Politics at University College Cork, he built his career investigating how public institutions use and publish  information, eventually becoming Director of Innovation at Storyful, the world's first social media news agency. His involvement and passion on the topic of statutory interpretation gave him the idea: information that exists but is almost impossible to find, scattered across websites, locked in static PDFs, buried in inconsistent formats.

José arrived at the same conclusion from a different direction. A technologist obsessed with performance and efficiency, he had worked across companies of every size, building systems that perform. He too passed through Storyful's Dublin office, and that is where the two met.

From accelerators to product

The early days were shaped by two formative experiences at innovation hubs: El Cubo (Telefónica) at Seville Tech Park in Andalusia, and the NDRC accelerator in Dublin. Both pushed the founders to stress-test their assumptions and, above all, to listen. That habit has never left them, every feature on the platform exists because a practitioner identified a real problem.

Vizlegal has always operated as an agile team, with a core of experienced engineers and data specialists who have stayed and grown with the product. That continuity shows.

What they believe

Gavin and José share a clear view of what technology should and should not do in the legal profession. It should never replace the expertise of solicitors, barristers, or other legal professionals. What it can do is remove the friction: the hours spent manually checking listings, tracking case changes, and searching across multiple systems for information that should be in one place.

That belief is reflected in how Vizlegal is built: transparent pricing, interfaces designed for and in collaboration with the practitioner, and data that is not just available but actually usable. The BIALL Supplier of the Year Award in 2023 and the platform's continued adoption by both institutional and law practice is a recognition of that ethical approach.

The work continues. Legal information should be accessible. Finding it should take minutes, not hours.

See it for yourself. Book a free demo today and discover the platform that has been built, tested, and improved with practitioners at its heart.