In a field known for precedent and polish, Legora is betting on something far more radical: reinvention.
From a modest beginning in a Nordic law firm’s basement to powering workflows at over 250 legal teams worldwide, Legora has quietly built a platform that both complements and transforms legal work. And in doing so, it has become a go-to solution for firms navigating the pressure to deliver faster, more cost-effective, and more strategic legal advice in a post-AI world.
You may have noticed the recent buzz surrounding Legora’s $ 80 million Series B funding raise. Today we’re back to find out how Legora became the legal AI everyone’s talking about, and what’s next.
What Happens When AI is Built With Lawyers, Not Just for Them?
Many legal tech startups promise innovation. Few deliver it in ways that are embraced by the range of legal professionals out there, including partners, associates, in-house counsel and legal ops alike. Legora has managed that rare trifecta.
Its success lies not in flashy interfaces or buzzword-laden marketing, but in something more fundamental: proximity to the people it serves. Legora’s tools were co-developed with practicing lawyers, and not through abstract advisory panels or superficial surveys, but in real-world workflows. In fact, the platform was incubated in the basement of a major Nordic firm, where its founders embedded directly into the problems lawyers were struggling with day to day.
That close collaboration continues today, not just as a development philosophy, but as a competitive advantage. Every product update is grounded in live use cases, and every design choice reflects hard-earned experience from inside the all-too-familiar ‘legal trenches’.
We recently caught up with Max Junestrand, Founder and CEO of Legora, who shared some valuable insights regarding the legal tech environment then and now.
TLW: Let’s go back to the start. You founded Legora in the basement of a major Nordic law firm. What did you see inside that environment that convinced you a new kind of legal AI was necessary, how did this fit into the legal tech you were seeing at that time, and what were the first problems you tried to solve?
Max: “We knew when we started Legora that it would be critical to work side-by-side with legal professionals in the first iterations of the platform and in the shaping of the product. A collaborative approach to development and integration is something we have continued with all of our clients, which has underpinned much of our success to date.
When we first arrived in the legal software space, the software stack was very fragmented. So there were a lot of different solutions, solving lots of different problems. It made sense to us that you should be able to have one platform solving all of these problems, which became possible to develop with generative AI.
The initial problem we had to solve was the willingness to adopt AI-based services at the simplest level, and from there we’ve been able to drive upwards the level of sophistication of use cases.”
Turning Legal AI from a Siloed Tool to Collaborative Partner
What distinguishes Legora from its competitors isn’t just technical sophistication (though it has plenty of that). It’s the way the platform treats AI not as a black box but as a co-counsel. The idea is simple: lawyers should be able to reason with their tools, not just use them as limited sources of information or assistance.
Legora’s assistant, for example, handles everything from multilingual documents to cited summaries of internal memos, all inside a secure, private environment. This isn’t ChatGPT with a legal skin; it’s a purpose-built assistant trained to understand the nuance and gravity of legal work. Lawyers can upload bundles of contracts, run team-curated prompts, and get back structured insights, not just AI guesses.
That experience is embedded across the platform. The Tabular Review function organizes thousands of agreements into a grid, with documents as rows and custom prompts as columns. The result: high-volume reviews that once took days now take hours. The Word Add-In integrates AI support directly into contract drafting, so lawyers don’t need to leave their familiar workspace to access mark-up assistance, precedent checks, or workflow prompts.
And the Research feature is built to surface answers that go deeper than citations, combining internal knowledge bases, case law, and public resources in ways that mimic how real legal researchers think.
We wanted to find out more about this function, which so many tools promise, but many seem to miss the mark on.
TLW: You’ve said before that AI should be something lawyers “reason with.” Can you unpack what that means in practice? How does Legora enable collaboration between human judgment and machine intelligence?
Max: “Lawyers will continue to be the ones using their judgement for the substance of the advice they give to clients, AI doesn’t change that. What AI, through Legora, helps lawyers do is give that advice based on, for example, research methods that can deeply and accurately review thousands of documents at incredible speed, giving lawyers greater clarity to base their judgement upon in hours rather than days or weeks. And it’s the same premise with drafting and reviewing documents at speed and scale with accuracy. AI needs the overlay of lawyers’ judgement, but it gives them a much better way to get to the best outcome for their clients.”
Why Law Firms Are Betting Their Future on Legora
In just under two years, Legora has gone from an early prototype to a category-defining platform trusted by major firms around the world. Its rapid rise hasn’t gone unnoticed: a recent $ 80 million Series B raise, led by ICONIQ and General Catalyst, validated what many legal professionals already knew: Legora isn’t a tool, it’s infrastructure.
For partners at top global firms, Legora provides leverage. For in-house teams, it reduces risk and write-offs. And for mid-market firms, it’s a game-changer that gives them access to workflow acceleration once reserved for firms with entire innovation departments.
Clients report shaving days off timelines for document review, drastically improving their responsiveness to clients, and reducing the burden of repeatable tasks that previously fell on junior staff. What that translates to is more time for advisory work, better quality output, and, critically, fewer non-billable hours.
Having accomplished a great deal since the inception of Legora, we wondered what Max has found to be key to client satisfaction.
TLW: Legora now supports over 250 firms globally. What are your clients telling you about how Legora changes the way their teams operate, particularly when it comes to client responsiveness and business development?
Max: “AI has quickly grown from being this thing on the side, to something that the majority of our clients are relying on day-to-day to get their job done effectively.
One thing that is quite clear is that if you’re a lawyer at a huge global firm you work very differently from a lawyer at a 100-person law firm – it’s almost like two completely different roles. And within those roles, across different sizes and different departments or practices the exact use cases stretches between due diligence, between chronology creation, between, redlining contracts, and what Legora is helping lawyers do is also complete more of these things from a single entry point.”
Not a Disruption, but a Redefinition
Legal AI is often framed as a threat: automation replacing human work. Legora seems to flip that narrative, with its platform designed to elevate legal expertise, not replace it.
By freeing up lawyers from low-value, high-volume work like data room reviews, redlining, or first-pass research, Legora helps legal professionals focus on judgment, strategy, and relationship-building. In effect, it compresses the path between a lawyer’s intent and their output. That has profound implications for both client service and talent development.
Junior lawyers can now engage in higher-order thinking earlier in their careers. In-house teams can scale more efficiently without ballooning headcount. And small firms can finally compete on speed and quality with Big Law counterparts.
Of course, with his background in traditional legal, we couldn’t help but ask Max about the “inevitable wipe out of the junior lawyer”.
TLW: You’ve spoken about how Legora empowers junior lawyers and rebalances the legal pyramid. How do you see AI accelerating lawyer development, and how are firms leveraging that shift?
Max: “Across the industry, we’re seeing that AI increases the bar of what’s expected from a junior lawyer, similar to what it does for a junior engineer. And also increases opportunity. In terms of how firms are leveraging this, some are not filling in vacancies as quickly or hiring less on the bottom side of the pyramid, whereas another is seeing this as an opportunity to expand their presence and therefore are recruiting junior lawyers aggressively – so there are many different strategies for different firms.”
A Legal Tech Company With Velocity and Vision
Few platforms move at the pace Legora does. The company has grown to nearly 100 employees across Stockholm, London, and New York, attracting alumni from elite firms and top tech companies alike. That speed hasn’t come at the expense of quality. Instead, it’s become a hallmark of the company’s identity.
The platform’s evolution is guided by its users. That includes prompt libraries crafted by legal experts, feedback loops that inform every design sprint, and a roadmap that evolves in partnership with clients. Investors have taken notice, not just because of the product, but because of the operating tempo and company philosophy.
TLW: You’ve gone from concept to global adoption to Series B funding in under two years. What has surprised you most about Legora’s journey so far, and what’s been the biggest challenge in scaling quickly while staying close to your users?
Max: “This company that we started as just a few people has turned into a real global force. The thing that surprises me every day or that I get reminded of every day is all the incredible people who are coming here to build this company together with us. We have been in a very fortunate position that as we’re scaling and growing Legora, some of the brightest and best people in law and in the use of AI are reaching out to us, leaning in and wanting to be part of this, rather than us having to put out ads desperately trying to find new people. Which also gives us an incredibly strong and stable culture.
We have always placed a lot of importance on staying close to our users, so every feature that we develop, we have clear design partners that we’re working hand-in-hand with. One of the bigger challenges is always that there are so many high-value things we want to do and we just don’t have time for it all, so ruthless prioritization is key as the opportunities keep expanding, to ensure we stay focused.”
Where Legal AI Goes From Here
AI is no longer the future of law, it’s already here. What remains to be decided is who leads its next chapter. Legora is making a compelling case to be a strong voice in that narrative.
With elite firms, regulatory bodies, and legal institutions all navigating the implications of AI on their workflows, platforms like Legora are moving beyond utility; they’re becoming strategic assets. The company’s next phase, according to insiders, will double down on product development, regulatory readiness, and integrations that embed AI deeper into legal infrastructure.
But even as the industry speculates about what’s next for legal AI, Legora remains focused on something far more pragmatic: building tools that lawyers trust.
With various tools on the horizon, and innovation around every corner, we were eager to find out what’s next.
TLW: How do you see the broader legal industry evolving over the next three years with AI adoption? And what role does Legora aim to play as firms face both technological opportunity and regulatory scrutiny?
Max: “The rapid adoption and increase in sophistication clearly points to the fact that AI will not only be a cornerstone of how legal work gets delivered, but will play an incredibly pivotal role in how both law firms and in-house legal teams are constructed. Things are moving so fast, in the last two years we’ve gone from zero to Series B and global force, and so three years from now there will be a substantial increase in what we see for AI usage.
Legora exists to facilitate this transition, together with lawyers that want to lead the way, developing the technology that creates an abundance of value for all stakeholders.
Legal teams can become more proactive and less reactive because they will be able to be more easily informed and get to the heart of an issue faster, for instance, quickly understanding how to interpret a change in regulation. Legora will help them anticipate and avoid regulatory issues that previously they had to react to.
Ultimately, we aim to supercharge lawyers with technology, which is becoming essential for firms looking to stay ahead in a fast-evolving market.”
