Ep 82: Behind Legora's $550M Raise, Model Competition, Doubling Revenue Every Quarter, & US Expansion

Max Jungestål, CEO of Legora, joins Jacob Effron and Logan Bartlett to discuss the company's $550M Series D and share a candid account of what building an AI-native company at speed actually looks like from the inside. Max argues that the AI application layer requires a fundamentally different operating model than traditional SaaS, one built on low ego, constant reinvention, and a willingness to watch nine months of work get washed away by a model update. He walks through how step-function improvements in the underlying models, particularly Opus 4.5 and 4.6, have repeatedly forced Legora to rebuild core product features from scratch, and why he sees that as a feature, not a bug. On the legal industry, Max offers a ground-level view of how AI is actually diffusing through law firms, less through top-down mandates and more through competitive pressure between firms and, increasingly, from enterprise clients demanding efficiency from their outside counsel. He pushes back on the viability of AI-native law firms, dismisses outcome-based pricing as harder than it looks, and makes the case for why foundation model competition creates tailwinds rather than threats for a company with Legora's depth. The episode closes with a detailed look at the US expansion strategy, including the deliberate cultural decisions, like flying all New York hires to Stockholm for onboarding, that Max believes are the real source of Legora's compounding advantage.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Legora has been one of the fastest growing companies in AI these past years. Since we partnered with them since the Series A, it's just been absolutely insane to watch the pace this team moves at, the product improvements, the growth, really just such an impressive company. And today on Unsupervised Learning, we had Max Unistron, the CEO of Legora, on to share some exciting news. Their $550 million Series D, led by Excel, at an over $5.5 billion valuation. And my colleague Logan and I had a lot of fun sitting down with Max and talking about a bunch of things. We hit on competition from the foundation models and how he thinks about what Anthropic will and won't do. We talked about some of these AI-enabled services, like an AI-enabled law firm, and what he thinks about those business models. We talked about what it's like building an AI company and how that's different from traditional SaaS companies.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  And we talked about how he gets his team AI-first and some of the changes they've made there. Max has just blown me away these past years with how fast this company has moved and how impressive he is. And I think folks will really see that in this episode. And so I really encourage you to listen. Without further ado, here's Max. So Max, I think it's been, what, 10 months since your last podcast appearance here?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that, and a new couch.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, we had a new setup here. And I know 10 months is like an infinite number of years in Legora time.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  I think you've had some pretty big news since then and some big news to share today.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  We have. We just signed a Series D. I booked my flights home from San Francisco at 12:00 PM on the Friday. And I told David, our CFO, that I'm going to sign the term sheet before I get on this plane. And I got it. Thursday, 2:00 AM, checked by Legora, checked by the lawyers, signed it, and got on the flight.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Get us up to speed on the round, where the business is today.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, look, the last 10 months have been anything, nothing short of astronomical. Basically, since October in 2024, we've doubled the business every single quarter. And we launched in the US in March of last year. Actually, this week is New York Legal Week, and that was the first week for some of our reps. And that was like really getting thrown into the deep end. Here's the laptop. I went to the local Best Buy, got them a laptop, go demo on the floor, right? And then they got this big, nice picture in front of Nasdaq, good engagement on LinkedIn, and then like straight into the business. And that team has now grown to a hundred.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  We've moved into the super nice base down at Union Square. And with the Series D, we've raised 550 million, which I actually think is the biggest round ever in legal tech. But the thing is, raising a lot of money does not equate building the best product on the market. And when I did the internal announcement this Friday for the entire team, I told them, like, you know, this got us to this point. The funding is great validation, but it doesn't help our customers at all. Yes, we're going to be in business for a really long time, no matter what happens. But everything that we've done can get washed away and all we need to do is in front of us.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  And so I think the ability to like reinject that energy and keep the team powered up for what's next is very important in AI. Because literally the things that we were building back in 2023 and 2024 and 2025 doesn't really exist in the product anymore. It's all moving so fast.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Maybe philosophically speak to that point, both at a literal level, like 12 months ago, what wasn't possible that is today, but then also how you think about being willing to build things that might be temporal or ephemeral in some ways.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Yes, I think you need to recognize that if we know that we want to be here in 12 months or 24 months or 36 months, we cannot start by building that. Because people aren't ready to go and meet us at that level yet. So we need to sort of build this staircase of features and of products and frankly, like teach people like how to use the products and how to rethink their businesses because of them and to take them on the journey. So I think in some way, we're in the business of selling, you know, the transformation that these organizations and the teams that we work with have to go through. And I think a very concrete example is we actually built this feature back in 2024 that would like automatically flag risks.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  And we built up this extensive taxonomy, like we went out to find all these risks and categorize them and build this like. Very custom tuned L L M flow that would like assign a risk to everything. And then you just throw like one of the, you know, latest models like Opus four point five or four point six on the problem and it solves it magically. But that was a really good product back in twenty twenty four and it helped us get to where we are today. So I think from a talent perspective and and internal comms, you need to have such a low ego. You need to be willing to work on stuff that is very important for nine months. And then it all gets washed away and we get to build a new thing.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  And I think increasingly with the sort of agentic pivot that is happening, we're all now being challenged in the way that we do even our own work. Like, am I now doing a task that should be be done by an agent? Or is this actually work that should be done by a human? Because I think, and I'm of the opinion that if A I can do a piece of task, it will do that piece of task. It has sort of been conquered. It's in the realm of, I saw this spider chart, like flow on on LinkedIn.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  From Anthropic?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. And it's kind of like, well, if it's in that, I think it was red or blue. Like, if it's in that realm, it's like done. Nobody now has to spend their time doing that. But the reality is only one percent of users have actually gotten to automating that particular task. So there's a big job in also bringing in the other ninety nine percent up to speed.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  I guess one question on the model side, has has the experience for the end customers been a linear journey in terms of what they experience from Legora or has there been a step function with the tasks?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I actually think it's a real step function and and it's almost like you get to a point where something can be done. And then it's conquered. I'll give you a very concrete example. Back in twenty twenty four, we were working with this very large firm on automating limited partnership agreement, key term review reports. Very particular task.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, very sexy.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Very sexy. I was like, damn, I'm so happy I went into legal.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  And in the summer of 2024, we were like 60% accurate on that task. By the end of the summer, we were 100% accurate. And that firm completely transitioned their business model on that task. They moved from taking an associate three days and a billable hour model to being a five-hour turnaround because they would still do the manual checking and a fixed fee.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Obviously, people always talk about, you know, what's the future of the billable hour and some of these changes in the industry. What have you kind of seen around some of these new models so far?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  So we started working with a lot of the law firms because the law firms have an interesting predicament, which is if we're both offering a venture financing at $250,000, or maybe it's cheaper, $100,000, and the firm down the road now offers it at $75,000 and twice the turnaround speed because they leverage AI, you and I are both screwed. Like, the equilibrium and the low level of differentiation that exists in a lot of the work like breaks the equilibrium. So if they announce that, hey, we procured Agora and we're being so effective with it internally, we both have to go do the same.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  So I think initially in the market, the law firms were sort of faced with the, well, if my competitor has it, I need to have it. And if they're doing a good job driving AI literacy and empowering their people, I'm going to have to do a good job with that. The interesting thing now is the enterprises has woken up and the big banks and the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies and the guys who are spending a lot of money on legal services, they are now realizing, huh, we are starting to see what these tools can do. We are going to start to demand that our law firms and panel firms are leveraging that technology to serve us in the most effective way possible.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  So if the law firms had it their way, nothing would change. You know, we increased the billable hour 10% every year. We continue making more money, but the clients are now starting to put real pressure and expectations on them. And I think that's driving the changed behavior. So, yes, I'm seeing different firms in different practice areas lean in.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  To sort of different degrees. And I think it's frankly more partner dependent than like firm dependent. Because every law firm is basically like, you know, 300 CEOs. And they all run their own book of business. And so consolidating ways of working is actually quite hard.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, and what have you noticed kind of in the in the firms that are maybe most forward leaning on this? How, you know, obviously you have individual pockets, but at a firm level, like what are folks doing to actually diffuse this?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think we had an amazing announcement today with DABBO Voice and their release of the Star Portal on Legora. That their clients can now collaborate with them on. And they had this built in another system before. And now they're sort of bringing all of that over to Legora. And the partners there are thinking about how do I get scale in my business? Because I only have, you know, 14 hours, 16 hours a day of work in me. And I have so many clients that I could theoretically serve with these insights and with this advice. And so Legora gives them scale.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Well, it feels like there's like a Jevons paradox type thing here where, you know, there are some, you know, if you're Blackstone or something, you get the A plus legal service that exists today. But it's hard to scale the provision of that, you know, across more and more folks. And I think if you're able to encode some of your IP and knowledge into these tools.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  It really, you know, provides a powerful way to do that.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I am convinced that you will have a firm AI, right? That's being able, that can leverage your precedent and your organizational memory and context of how you do things. And I think we've seen now this this new paradigm of skills, right? Which is sort of more in the matrix when you want to ride the motorbike, like you just download that skill and the model is able to do it. And so the models are going to be tapping into all kinds of things to like do work on our behalf. And I think as a practitioner, you are not going to be limited by by.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Systems that can do work, you will be limited by the own human factor of how many agents can I effectively guide? Like if you've tried coding with five of Claude code at the same time, it's like a lot of mental load. It's a bit like playing StarCraft, right? Like, it's like, how many units can you actually control towards like a singular mission?

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Your business is writing commercial software and leveraging AI in a meaningful way. You sell into an industry that has been one of the early adopters or the ones that have had to reckon with AI in a meaningful way. I guess I'm curious, like, you gave the advice for what the law firms are doing that have been successful. But for people in general, I think this is going to impact every industry under the sun. Like, if you were future-proofing yourself in another industry, what are some of the tactics that those best firms have done that you would internalize?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  So I think both firms, but also what we're doing internally, right? And I am really pushing both leaders and ICs on, given where the models are today and where we think they're going to be a quarter from now, like, which pieces of your work now falls under this, you know, spider diagram of it's like the models can do it? And how do we set ourselves up in a way so that we can have a real velocity? Like, we're going to scale from 400 to 900 this year. But I'm not sure how big Legora has to be in order to be like a billion ARR company.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I actually don't think it's that big if we can truly lean into all of this. And I think it's different at an organizational level where you have 6,000 legal professionals you sort of need to bring up to speed versus if you have a deep super user. And I think the super users are going to be even more valuable. Like, they will get exponentially more valuable, even internally at Legora. We did this leaderboard of who's been using Claude code and cursor the most. And I was surprised that nobody was spending more than that. But still, it was a real power graph. Right? And then the question is, okay, well, how effective and how much work can you get done if you lean in with these systems?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  And maybe engineering has come the furthest, but it's not only happening in law, it's happening in marketing and in finance and in HR and in in every single vertical. And I think it requires like system thinkers, I think it requires, again, low ego to be able to say, this is something I built my career around doing, and that is no longer a meaningful thing to do. Maybe you can do it for the art of it, but it's like, you know, we have tractors get mining, you know, like going on the fields and like going out and doing it by hand would just seem crazy to people.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  One of the things that people talk a lot about in, in, I guess, AI native software is the pricing models. And we talked a little bit about the pricing models for law firms themselves, but I'm curious, we still largely sell seats today. I think the only market we've really seen outcome based pricing, quote unquote, Jacob, correct me if I'm wrong, but customer support seems like the, the one that that's been the clearest value prop and, you know, for, for a bunch of different reasons. I guess as you think about where your business is today and where it's going over time, do

• 14:46Speaker 02

  you think, hey, the cognitive load of selling seats versus outcomes, like it's just there's a lot less friction doing it this way and so we'll be doing this way for a long time? Or do you think like we're nearing selling?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  So I think outcomes is really difficult and I'll explain why. Doing a M and A deal in Canada is different to doing an M and A deal in the US or doing it in India or doing it in Australia. And there will be local pricing power sort of packaged into that service that gets delivered. And you can have a very

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Sort of wide range of outcomes in terms of like, what is an M and A deal? Like you have the paramount, you know, mega deals. And then you have the small aqua hire tuck ins. And the work is like very, very different. And so pricing that I think is extraordinarily difficult. Maybe you could say per document reviewed or something like that. Maybe you can find a model. But I think the firms and the enterprises both have kind of a hard time internalizing that. And so one of the things I've optimized for is a speed to market. Or like, how quick can you get up and running? And if you're used to buying seats, then that seems like a good way to buy them today.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Now, with a lot of these new agentic launches we have, you will see that the models are performing a lot more work on your behalf. And they're using up a lot more tokens. There's a lot more tokens that are going into these sort of under the hood, right? Where it's questioning itself, it's double checking, it's planning, it's executing, it's reflecting, it's updating its memory, like it's doing so many things behind the scenes. But that's when you start to need to rethink maybe the way that those tokens get transacted in the platform. Sort of a bit of a T B D.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  I'm sure there's lots of folks listening that are scared their firm or company is a little behind here. Like, what would you tell them around what does and doesn't work in the in the agent world today?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Well, so first off, I think everybody's feeling like they're behind. Right? And so maybe it's like.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  You guys are feeling that way.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, what hopes us mere mortals have.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  We are, I think, the most AI native company I know. And we're feeling behind. Because the the problem is it's so hard to disrupt your own way of working whilst doing the work. And so you'd almost want to have like a digital twin of everybody at Legora, who like could continue doing the work for a bit. And then you just, you're in charge of like automating away yourself in a way. Like, if you could get there, that would be fabulous. Because then I think there's so many other problems we could go solve with that capacity, right? My advice. Is really just like start, experiment and like maybe don't go too big too quickly. I think if you find something that you find a lot of value in, I'll give you an example.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Like we've automated our security questionnaires. We spend a lot of time with law firms, banks, insurance companies, like very regulated entities. And so we go through a lot of security questionnaires and we've automated the filling in of those and in RFPs. And that's amazing. Like that's a task that nobody likes doing at Legora. Obviously, a lot of our own legal work, our sales reps actually leverage Legora's own playbook functionality to mark up NDAs. They are not allowed to go to the legal team. You need to mark them up yourself together with Legora. And I think all of that stuff sparks the creativity and gets you going. And that can sort of hopefully get you on on the journey of automated more.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, one thing I'd be fascinated with your thoughts on is it seems like these days everyone is asking questions around competition, you know, from foundation models, vibe coding solutions, you know, where all this stuff fits in. You know, I think over the last month, you know, Anthropic launched the skills for, you know, legal product. And the same day, Thompson Alexis stocks were down and, you know, everyone's questioning whether there's any future beyond the models. We've seen this pattern now repeat in cyber and other industries. Like, what did you make of all that? Does it make any sense?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  So it was really funny. We were just about to start the fundraiser when that came out. And you had this like very fun reaction in the market, which is we don't want the public sauce stock. But demand for Legora private stock was through the roof, right? We raised over half a billion dollars and we had over 1.5 billion dollars in demand for the round, which is incredible. So what I think happened was.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  There was a market correction, which is that traditional SaaS companies who don't have the velocity, the talent, the rigor and the drive and ambition to like go and claim this new greenfield that's up for grabs, they should be less valued. Because when you're paying, you know, and evaluating these big software companies, they still have the capacity to grow a lot. And now you see companies like Legora who sort of 10x-ing every year and we're playing against them. So where do you want to bet? I think the second part is the

• 20:09Speaker 01

  models becoming more generally useful and the spotlight starting to show that, ha, they're actually not only good at writing code, they can do lots of different things. It's very helpful for us. I think the whole cloud for legal like helped Legora get even more attention because even if the models are doing the sort of can do 80% of the work out of the box, it's the last 20% that takes 99% of the time and it's really hard and where you need taste and you need maintainability and you're actually not buying an existing

• 20:48Speaker 01

  solution to a problem you have today only. You're also buying the, you know, team and the vision of like everything else that's to come. Because you are really busy running your firm and Logan, you're really busy running your legal team. So you actually want somebody else to come in and build for you. And whenever the models get new capabilities, we factor that in, right? You basically have a team that is non-stop thinking about the applicability of these models to your space. Yeah. To your point, it changes so much every, you know, three, four months. It's more than a full-time job, like, like just keeping up with the models and the latest developments of them. And so I think every organization should be working

• 21:29Speaker 01

  with the, with applying AI across the, across the field. And I think what's really exciting about legal in particular is that it's been so underserved with great software. Like finance and all these other industries have had lots of good things come and go because numbers are easy to work with. Language is really hard. And now with GPT 3.5, it like flipped.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Do you think that we're going to see Claude Code as an example? They're obviously now in a, you know, a head to head battle from pushing up with Cursor in some ways and other vendors in the space. Do you think that legal will be, we'll see the Claude Code equivalent, maybe Claude Legal ends up being like a substantive competitor that some people end up using? Or do you think that there's such a need for this abstraction layer that's independent of models and finishing the last percentage of the work that needs to be done?

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Bring it on.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's good. Seriously, though, what would you say?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter what I think. I am determined, together with the team, to be the global ubiquitous category leader. And that's why we're here in the States. That's why we are investing in capabilities beyond what the models naturally will ever work on. Like, I think it's kind of this question of, if you were a database company and AWS decided, hey, we're going to, you know, offer a similar database on AWS. If that was the only thing you were offering, you were toast. You went out of business. But there were lots of things that AWS didn't naturally want to build.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  And I think Anthropic and OpenAI and Gemini and Google, like, it will be the same thing.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  And there'll just be a whole set of things that, you know, they don't want to necessarily focus on as much. But I think what's fascinating is just having this, like you said, almost the low ego to, you know, okay, Claude Skills comes out for contracts, like, great, that was, you know, maybe a core part of the product 12, 18 months ago, but we're in a completely different place.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  And it helped us get to where we are, right? And I think the interesting thing is, we've always wanted to work on the most complex legal work. And the reality is that...

• 23:57Speaker 01

  The more we move up market, the more or the less standard things are, right?

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  And so we work with this amazing pharmaceutical company. They do a ton of M and A. And the way that they do that is very unstructured. It's very different every single time. And you know, all of the data is super unstructured. Like, there's so many things you just need to go and do, which I think is our opportunity.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  You know, I guess in another flavor of this, I feel like VCs are increasingly excited about these like AI-enabled services plays. And so there's been a bunch of these like, oh, we can build a law firm from scratch and make it AI first. It's like another way to, you know, potentially capture value here or play this trend. Like, what do you make of some of those approaches?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Obviously, we haven't decided to do that. And we've always been very clear in our strategy that we're a software provider. We are not the service provider. I think the thing that I would find difficult building one of those companies is, you know, why shouldn't a firm like Kirkland just offer something like that? That's empowered by AI under the hood and they leverage Legora? Or, you know, Goodwin or one of the other, you know, great firms in Europe, right? Like, the idea that you could build a completely AI-native service law firm from the ground up

• 25:21Speaker 01

  and like beat the big guys that have all the distribution? Well, maybe, but I'm a betting man and I haven't betted anything on that.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  I also want to switch over to like Legora, the company. And obviously you're running now a massive business, you know, insane scale, growing quickly. One thing I think is so interesting is just the extent to which these AI companies are similar and different from the software companies that have come before. And I'm sure you've talked to many CEOs of, you know, kind of more classic SaaS businesses. And I wonder like, what parts feel different?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  I.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Definitely challenge the executives at Legora who have had amazing like rocket ship journeys before, but then you realize that, you know, even if those companies did tremendously well, they scaled a lot slower than Legora. You know, like people show up from Klarna or Vanta or Braze and like these are really good companies and they scaled really quickly, but what they did in a year, we now have to do in a quarter. And I do think it requires a different way of operating, which is you also need to lead from the front on this AI

• 26:35Speaker 01

  stuff, right? You cannot expect everybody in the team to lean in on optimizing their own workflows if you're not doing that as a leader. And I coach people on that a lot. I think I challenge them.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  I think you have a bias to action. You joke about it. We just do. It's an understatement. Yeah, but like, I guess philosophically, I think this is a little bit of a mindset thing that exists in early-stage businesses for sure is like, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, like keep moving. And I think you've been able to maintain that culture at scale and just keep moving forward. And like, even when we were renaming the business, you're like, hey, listen, if you have any objections, let me know. Otherwise, we're doing this in the next 24 hours or something. And it was like, we're just going to be decisive and keep going forward. How have you been able to maintain that culture at scale? And

• 27:30Speaker 02

  how do you think about decisions? Like there's Jeff Bezos, one-way, two-way doors, like decisions that you want to go through?

• 27:36Speaker 01

  So coming off the back of this fundraiser, we worked really hard to bring together the best group of investors I could ever imagine, but now I feel done with it. I want to like go back to building. And so I actually plan on going back to Stockholm after the week here and just like planting myself in the middle of the work and like lead from the front on all of this stuff. Because I do think that if I'm not, and if other leaders are not doing that all the time, the problem we have is half the people have a tenure of like less than three months. Right, and so they have zero context on the two, three years that got us here.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  And so you need all the culture carriers and the people who were here for the two first years to like be very vocal and very visible and like show that moving fast is okay. But now we also have much bigger customers, like, yeah, it was really easy to move fast when we were serving a bunch of, you know, half-sized clients, but now we serve like a double-digit number of the top 50 law firms in the world. And we serve some of the top 10 banking institutions in the world. And they also expect another type of enterprise software cadence.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  So I think it's balancing that. But I frankly also think that the CIOs and CTOs in some of these organizations that we're selling into, they are optimizing for safe, right? Like they are optimizing for their own comfort, where the reality is they should be optimizing for their speed and our speed. Like it's actually good that we deprecate some stuff because we're building the next generation of tooling that's going to help them win. And if I could do a shout out or a, or an ask, it would actually be to, to all of our clients to be a bit more,

• 29:41Speaker 01

  you know, willing to like,

• 29:45Speaker 01

  drop the thing that worked for the thing that's going to get them to the next stage, which we are also incentivized to build for them, right? I think the thing is, we only win if our clients win. And so there's like no part of us that doesn't want them to succeed and do really well. And Some of them have been amazing to work with and they really get that. And then some are really strangling to the sort of old idea of doing things.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that's been interesting from the start is I feel, you know, we were talking earlier about how kind of a classic software company comes in with like their 12, 18 month product roadmap. And they sit down with the CIO and go through that and, you know, you guys are so good at just constantly experimenting and throwing things and seeing what works and seeing what doesn't. I think a lot of companies right now are trying to figure out like, how do we get the right to go do that almost with our customers? What have you learned about that, you know, over the course of the business?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  So that's a good question. I'm very honest.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Like I, I was on this great call last week with a very big firm in Texas. And it was the partner and the executive team and the partner is like 75. And he's like, Max, wow, you know, implementing this AI stuff sounds like a lot of work. Do you honestly think like, if I'm 75, like, should I, should I like lean in and do this or should I just retire? And like, should I, should I just do something else? And I'm like, well,

• 31:11Speaker 01

  like, I showed him like, like some use cases and I was like, does this excite you? And he's like, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. And I was like, well, that's the energy you need to bring to the entire fucking firm. Let's go. And I think you need to just like move with a pedigree, which is you show up and you say, hey, we don't have all the answers, but this is our only job. And we've done 800 of these deployments. We've learned a thing or two. This stuff works, this doesn't work. And we think the world is headed here. And because we think the world is headed here, we're going to make these decisions. If you subscribe to that worldview, we want you on our team. And we want you in the Laguardia tent.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  And it's a great tent, like the music is good. We've got great beer. We've got really smart engineers and we're going to make sure that everybody in the tent has a really great time. And that everybody gets home by the end of the night. But if you don't want to be part of that tent, that's also fine. I'm sure there's another, you know, okay, party down the street. But like, when you're invited into the tent, we are going to be very honest. And we're going to say, this is working, this is not working. This is what we want to go do. This is what we want to get your permission to go do.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  I think that many of the buyers in our industry has never met a more ambitious team. And they're like, wow, we've never met somebody who's so energized about selling legal technology. I'm like, yes, but it's not about selling legal technology. It's about transitioning your entire teams to being completely AI native. And it's going to be the most exciting, you know, work transformation that's happened since the web. And I was not even born in time for the internet. So I get to experience this for the first time.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  How does that inform who you you hire? You talked about the tent on the customer side as well. But like, what are the key characteristics that you look for for people to bring on to Legora?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  We want people who are really collaborative and competitive. Because I want our team to fight for our clients. And, you know, if they lose a deal because they didn't pitch like a good enough AI story for a particular case, then like frankly falls on us. Like, because if they make another five million bucks, like some of that is going to trickle down to us someday. And we want to really be their partner in the long term. But then we also need people who are going to lean in and say, okay, well, you aren't there yet. I'm going to help you get there. So we were early to really pioneer this group of legal engineers. The legal engineers are the glue in Legora.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  They're not only the glue, but they're also like the, they're the buddies. So when you get into the tent, somebody comes like, hey, amazing that you're here. Do you want a beer? And they like, they like keep an eye on you during the night. And they they are ex-practitioners. So they've practiced laws, law, and they have felt the pain like firsthand. And now this exciting technology shows up and they can reinvent the work together with the firms they used to work with and new firms. And they also get to get elevated in their careers.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  How do you think about like what areas of the business to? Think about from a first principles standpoint versus what areas of the business to just accept, hey, this is the way businesses are run and.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  I give a lot of leeway to execs to like run the different parts of the company as they want to run them. But then when everybody gets into the executive, you know, weekly meeting, we're

• 35:02Speaker 01

  their team Legora, like you never show up and represent marketing. You never show up and represent engineering. You're optimizing globally for the company. And I think right now we have a very good mix of been there, done that, seen scale, knows how to operate a big company and organize a hundred people to get shit done. And then AI native, like high IQ, you know, doesn't respect authority people. Like I think I see T O is like a great example, Jake. And, you know, like, I think the combination really works because then you can sort of,

• 35:44Speaker 01

  if you just like question somebody enough, like they start to question, like they start to realize themselves why something doesn't make sense. And then if you create a room and a group of high trust, then, you know, things are easy.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  You mentioned this kind of like, you know, the planning two quarters ahead. I'm curious, like, as you reflect back on the product that you built over the last year, how much of that feels, you know, there's a North Star that you kind of a year ago, you would have been like, yeah, it's kind of where I would have expected the Legora product to be. Or how much of it is kind of almost opportunistic insofar as like, oh, the models can now do X or we're seeing Y from our customers?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  So I think it was a big shift actually in December of last year. When we all went on Christmas break and we played around with Opus 4.5 and 4.6, like that was a big unlock.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Was there like a moment for you?

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I, I, you know, when you tell the agent to do something and then you're like, oh, fuck, I forgot to add the context and like now it's not going to figure out. And then it goes, ah, yeah, but you need to, you forgot to give me this file. So like, I can't do it. And you're like, ah, you're right. I did forget that. And you're like, give it in and you run and it works. And, and if you look into the internal thinking, it also like goes, huh, Max did not give me a file here. Hmm. Why didn't he do that? Maybe he's trying to see if I can figure it out anyways, or maybe I'll just ask him for it. And it goes like, can you please give it? And you give it and it works. I think that, like,

• 37:18Speaker 01

  it feels like a more human interaction in a way. And it feels like there's less friction being added between like me getting a lot of value and the system knowing what to do. And it's decreasing at like a, you know, exponential pace. And I think the tough thing is, once you've had one of those experiences, how do you then think about bringing that into your domain and your realm? So one of the other reasons why I think we need to be AI native across the entire stack of the company is we're going to draw great inspiration from what's possible in engineering or marketing to what we can bring to legal. I think the biggest challenge now is

• 38:02Speaker 01

  in software engineering, it's very easy to have an agent go out and do some work and then give you a pull request where he wants to submit some code to the main repo. In professional services, like the UX of collaborating with agents on particular projects or matters in our world is less unclear. So there's like more of the stack and the system around the agents that needs to be built.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  So you come back from December break, you're like, okay, Open45, 46, like, these are incredible models. How do you actually then tack, like, do you just completely change the course of like what the team is working on? Or how do you kind of balance this continuity versus like whipsaw feeling of craziness in AI?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think that's a good question and, and probably something that we're balancing a bit.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  I don't think that has a binary answer. But but I almost go back to this fact of you need a team that's reliant and low ego, who's willing to say, okay, that's now that that's now the world. And we will operate under those, um, you know, boundaries. And we're gonna run at an intensity that is, you know, practically unheard of. And we hope that will take us right. Yeah, like, I think you're you're like, you can you can build come, you can build stuff like the Google model where like, okay, all the different teams are like super empowered and and there's no top down at all.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  And then you just like, hope that people figure out cool stuff and like, go do them. And that kind of works there because you have infinite distribution in a way. But in our world, we need to be very crisp. I like, this is what we're building. This is the expectations our clients have, and this is what we're going to deliver by when. And then you need to get the entire company to hit the oars at the same time.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  One question, the the product development lifecycle and interactions with customers historically was, you know, one of the old things was you would sit down and see how people did their work, and then you'd figure out where there's potential workflow or tools that could be built alongside that. Today, obviously, the customer in the same way doesn't know what's possible. And so you're living on the edge of the models. And it's a little bit back to the like old Steve Jobs adage of like, the customer doesn't know what they want, I'm going to show them. I'm curious, like, as these models are improving, how do you balance maybe what the customers are asking for with what the capabilities exist and how you meet those together?

• 40:46Speaker 01

  So it's a really good question, and and you can almost add one other piece of nuance into it, which is, are you buying for the or are you building for the CIO? Or the partner who's the buyer? Or are you building for the end user? And I think historically, at least in twenty twenty four and twenty, you know, maybe early twenty twenty five, it was a lot about. Building the stuff that would sort of get us into the door. Um, because we showed up, I mean, similar to Ramp. And you know, you already had Brex here and you had to show up and be better. And we took the time to really refine a lot of the foundational billing blocks, which I'm happy that we did. And you don't want to get stuck in incrementalism.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  But I do think you want to have a lot of iterations. So the iterating, iterating and having incremental improvements are like different things. So I think I'm optimizing for like iteration cycles. And then you need to be able to insert like bold ideas. And go, okay, now we've silently crossed some threshold, which will allow us to rethink X. How do we make ourselves get the time to explore that? So we have an R and D function, which is super. But also I think all of the engineers are continuously pushing that. Cause they're like doing some work on getting this feature over the line. But at the same time, they have like a crazy idea and they get to go explore that.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Have you internalized like enough of the customers or potential customers' pain points? That you're able to see what the technology is able to do. And then you can translate that to what the customer would want. Or do you have a small group of people and you're like, hey, this is now possible with Opus four point six. Like, what do you think of this? Like, how does that cycle kind of work?

• 42:34Speaker 01

  So I think we've always been really good at knowing, or no, at finding out what the new models unlock. And we do that partly through just like a lot of evals. And then hiring a lot of amazing lawyers who get to work with our product team and our engineering team. And so we have this, you know, group of seventy to a hundred legal engineers who.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Are like the most savvy users of our product. We took this very hard task in capital markets, for instance. And we just looked at, okay, well, what if we put one of our engineers and one of our lawyers together for a week? Can they get something? It's like, yeah, it was amazing, so good. It costs like 500 bucks to run, because there are just so many cycles on it. But it's amazing, like the results that it produces. And then you need to figure out, okay, can we generalize that into something that can work for more use cases? Because we serve capital markets and finance and, you know, M and A and litigation and in-house.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  And so you need to get more, we're not like a capital market solution. But yes, I would say we have people internally with a lot of taste and knowledge about what we would like to solve next if we could get there. And then you just take the new model and throw out the problem and see if it works.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  So I mean, obviously, a big focus of this round is, you know, you guys are tripling, quadrupling down on the US.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  What does that look like over the next few years?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  It is all in. We opened in New York last March, and we've also opened in Denver, and we have an amazing team there. And we've just opened in Chicago, and we've opened in Houston, and we have lots more hubs coming this year. And what we are doing is we're saying the legal market happens globally, but there are a few central hubs where most of the work happens and, you know, it's in the US. And the product has always been able to sort of internationalize between all jurisdictions because we started in Sweden. And I think the entire legal, you know, Swedish legal market is smaller than Kirkland and Ellis.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  And so you sort of had to flex that muscle very, very early on. And now, what we're really starting to see is that we're driving value on both sides of the equation, so both on the in-house side and the law firm side. And so now that we've sort of fully landed in the States, we're starting to work with the big law firms, but also the big private equity firms and the big pharmaceutical companies and the banks. And this is starting to create a real network flywheel for us, where we are really starting to become ubiquitous. You know, legal work is synonymous to working on Legora, just as doing design work is synonymous to, well, you're going to open Figma.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  And that feeling is very enchanting and very exciting. And it makes us feel the blood smock, to quote the Swedish article that translated what I said in Swedish to English, and then it sounded like we're all vampires. It's an internal, internal.

• 45:55Speaker 00

  What happened there?

• 45:57Speaker 01

  So I did this article or interview in Swedish, and there's a saying in Swedish that you can wake up with blood smock. And blood smock is like, well, you're so excited that you can like taste the blood. You're so excited you can taste the blood. And she, the reporter, translated the article from Swedish to English before she published it. And the headline was, "The Legora Founder Wakes Up With A Metallic Taste Of Blood In His Mouth." And it was like a big picture of me, and everybody sent that around internally. And then it became this, this slang, blood smock. And the Americans in the team, they love it. They're like, "I'm waking up early for this big deal, and I'm going to fly to SF at 6

• 46:42Speaker 01

  a.m. #Bloodsmock."

• 46:44Speaker 02

  What do you think on the US expansion? I mean, it's crazy to think 15 months ago, we sort of had the discussion, it was in December of 24, about like how hard to push in the US. And your answer was...

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, and Ferran, I don't think it was ever really a discussion from that.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  Well, it was kind of a discussion of the sequencing of it. It was like, hey, we should go now or not at all. And you were like, what do you mean? Like what what kind of question is that right? Uh, I guess in in coming to the US and doing it as well as you as you have. What elements have you brought from the culture that uh exists in Stockholm? That you think has served you so well? And like, what are the things that you feel like you guys have gotten right to be able to capture the market as well as you have?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  So first off, we made a rule, which was that we're not going to open and hire in the US until we can um serve and work with two of the best firms in the market. Like, we need to get two good customers from Sweden and London. So I'm I'm a I'm a real um um local at the uh SARS New York to Arlanda um airplane after after that semester. But that was our rule and both Cleary Gottlieb, which is an amazing Wall Street firm, and Goodwin and Procter started working with us. And we were able to serve them and they're sort of 2,000 plus lawyers each from Sweden with a lot of flights back and forth.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Uh, shout out to Jem, who did all those late flights. Um, and when we had that wind in our back, we said, okay, we're ready to open the office and we're gonna go hard. And the most important thing for me was to create one Legora feeling. If you walk into any Legora office at around the globe, it's like one feeling. So I implanted myself here. I sent Robin, who was our first lawyer, uh to New York, and he's been here, you know, more than Sweden probably. And over the summer, we all came here because Europe took a break. And so we like just rented a big Airbnb and like everybody came from Legora and we just like worked in the office and it was amazing. And now I think the

• 49:02Speaker 01

  The New York Legora culture is maybe even more like core Legora what we were, you know, a year ago.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Metallic blood.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, when we were like a hundred people, now we're two fifty in Stockholm. Like it was even more like that. And so I think people, getting people here for sure, but also we still do the onboarding in Stockholm. Everybody in New York has to come to Stockholm for the onboarding period. And so I do think we do a really good job of creating that unanimous culture and feeling. And, you know, we've been very upfront with the fact that we're five days in office. We have dinner together every day and it's like you subscribe to that. And our competition doesn't do that. And I think that that gives us a real advantage.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. I draw this analogy of, uh, once upon a time, like fifteen years ago, you guys wouldn't have been able to catch up and exceed a competitor because the infrastructure was kind of flat. Uh, and it was all within your own control. But now you have you building on top of something else that's building. And so the point of time you're moving towards is just an exponent. And so your, your, the client's expectation and what you're able to deliver just changes so materially every, every month, every quarter. And so the culture of being in the office and just like wanting it more, it feels like that manifests itself for the end customers.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And when they come over to our office, they feel that. And I think when you enter, like now with our, with our investment in the U S, um, more and more of the center of gravity from an executive point of view is also New York. Um, both with our CRO Patrick and our CFO David being here. And, you know, when you walk into any of the offices, I think that excitement like draws with you, right? And so many times I've asked people to show up on a Friday because I know the team is gonna do their demos where like everybody in engineering shows what they've built on the last two weeks.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  And people feel like they're stepping into a time machine, like to their all, you know, their existing companies when they were, uh, moving that fast. The thing is we're able to maintain that as we are four hundred people and not just forty anymore.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  We have some quick hitters here. I guess one that's a little bit of a segue into this, but recently Financial Times did an article that you guys were prominently featured in just about the Stockholm startup ecosystem.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, what's in the water over there?

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, what is it? Like, we talked about the culture bringing it over here, but what do you think is unique that you've been able to capture?

• 51:41Speaker 01

  So there's lots of great technical talent. Everybody gets like a laptop early and it's part of the school curriculum. I also think that we at least have a couple of good role models. Like we see Spotify, we see Skype and you know, Klarna to some extent. And it's like, okay, that seems really exciting. Like, why, how hard can it be? Type of mentality. And we are also very Americanized as a culture. You know, we only subscribe to American news shows. And I remember watching Silicon Valley and I was like, wow, that sounds really cool. And now I feel like, I'm in like one of those scenes like every day.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  This is really accurate.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  It is. Like, a lot of it is.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  I couldn't watch it. It hit a little too close to home.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  Just like a documentary.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. I work during the day. I don't need to watch it at night.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But like, I do think it's a, it's a maybe lack of respect for authority and like, how hard can it be? Kind of thing. And then also, we just like using the latest stuff ourselves, right? I think it's like a very pro-tech society.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. What's one thing you've like changed your mind on in the ad world in the last year?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  So I didn't think that the world of, like, I think Claude Bot or Malt Bot or whatever it's called these days.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Open Claw?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Open Claw. Yeah. I think that came sooner than I expected. And like, the model's ability to do work for a long period of time, and then being like, right on the money when it finishes. I think that surprised me. And I, it's, I've changed my mind as to how quickly we should move in into the world of just having agents to work on our behalf.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, Max, I'm sure a bunch of folks will want to pull on threads that we talked about in this conversation and learn more. So I want to leave the mic to you. Where can folks go to learn more about you, Legora?

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Legora.com.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Slash careers or slash book a demo?

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Well, Max, I am confident that, you know, in 10 months when we inevitably have you on again, it'll be an even crazier next thing, but I mean, just a huge congratulations and everything since.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  It'll be great. We also need a new sofa to like

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Keep care of the

• 54:01Speaker 00

  We'll keep, it'll be completely different.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  You keep performing and we can afford a nicer

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  That sounds good. Thank you very much.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  Thank you.