How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience)

**Max Junestrand** (0:00)
AI is continuously developing super, super quickly, and that means we need to do the same. We're finding that as we go deeper and deeper and deeper in the entire legal software stack, we're also seeing that the line between software and service is blurring. I think that's been one of our strengths as a company, to say, we don't know exactly where the future is going, but neither do you. So let's work together to make sure that we're both winners in whatever happens.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (0:34)
Today, I'm joined by Max Junestrand. He's the CEO and co-founder of Legora. Legora was in Winter 24 and they are the leading AI workspace helping lawyers and legal professionals do their work. Welcome, Max.

**Max Junestrand** (0:45)
Hey, thanks Gustaf.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (0:46)
It's been 13 months since you did the batch. It's been a really busy year for you.

**Max Junestrand** (0:50)
It has. It feels like it was a really long time ago. I feel like I've aged five years in the last one.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (0:55)
For those who don't know, tell us about Legora. What are you guys building?

**Max Junestrand** (0:58)
At Legora, we're building the AI-powered workspace for lawyers. We're essentially transforming the way that they complete their work. Everything from reviewing, drafting, researching. Essentially, within legal, you've had this incredibly fragmented software space where there was a lot of point solutions, and AI was never good enough to actually work with unstructured text, precedent, legal documents. And when GPT 3.5 got out, that just completely changed the game. So, we were quick to build a POC, and then now we've scaled that all the way to an enterprise-grade system serving tens of thousands of lawyers daily.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (1:33)
And those point solutions were basically workflow tools, or what were they before? Because it's been a history of a legal technology industry that existed before. This is not a story right now.

**Max Junestrand** (1:43)
No, I mean, legal tech has been a category for a long time, but it was really unsexy for a long time, I think. And you'd essentially have a broad range of point solutions, everything from templating tools where you would sort of codify a contract to special translation tools or redline tools or research tools. And all of them work with text somehow. And generative AI came into the game and just kind of threw up everything off the table. And then when it landed, you very clearly saw how you could solve a lot for a lot of these use cases with the same underlying tech.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (2:15)
So ChatTP came maybe eight months prior to you guys starting this company. Describe that moment. Was that an important moment for the company's founding?

**Max Junestrand** (2:22)
We were playing around in AI and Legal way before ChatTP, and we were using these early models from BERT coming from Google. They were decent in English, but they were just horrendously bad in Swedish. And the first observation that kind of sparked the founding of the company was one of the co-founders' friend who was a lawyer, spent four months during a summer just summarizing court cases for a big law firm. We basically saw that GPT 3.5 was released to developers, started building. I think the first thing that we built was a stock option reader that would explain how a stock option contract worked.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (2:56)
Useful?

**Max Junestrand** (2:56)
Right. You know, as startup founders with no legal background, that seemed reasonable. And then very quickly, the sort of focus changed to how do we build this more wall to wall or end to end system that every legal professional wants to work with on a daily basis. And the first product was really quite simple, especially building for Europe. You got to go through a lot of hassle to kind of conform with all the data processing requirements. So, you know, all data hosted within Europe, nothing for training, no retention, exemption from human review when you look at the way Azure and AWS is structured. And we kind of jumped through all those hoops and just built a system that was compliant for law firms to work with. And then very quickly, as the general sort of AI platforms continued to develop with ChatGBT, with Cloud, with Gemini, the requirements for what we had to build to be much, much better, you know, continuously increased.

**Gustaf Alströmer** (3:49)
In some industries, some categories like coding or law, for example, it seems like the models are just magical. Like they do things that the people that were in those industries before could not even imagine be possible. Could you describe sort of like the first time you used Legora to do something that was magical for a customer and how they experienced it?