Max Junestrand (Legora): Raising the bar in legal AI

Eléonore Crespo (0:01)

Welcome to Perspectives. I am your host, Eléonore Crespo. AI has opened a new chapter for businesses. In this series, I sit down with leaders who are turning ambition into action, using AI to fundamentally change how their organizations operate and make decisions. Together, we explore what it really takes to deliver impact at scale, how they think about value, manage risk, and adapt their approach to leadership in the era of AI.

Hi, Max, thank you so much for being with us today.

Max Junestrand (0:42)

Thank you, Eléonore, I'm so excited to be here.

Eléonore Crespo (0:44)

Look, it's gonna be one of my favorite show, I know that already, for many reasons. First of all, because you're a friend, I love what you're doing. And second of all, because I think you are one of the generational leader that is going to completely revolutionize the world with AI. When I met you for the first time, I remember, I really thought you were gonna be the next Steve Jobs, and I remember someone, I'm not gonna tell who that person is, that told me he's the next Elon Musk. You need to meet that person.

Max Junestrand (1:13)

But I haven't bought the Polo yet, so let's see how we do about that.

Eléonore Crespo (1:17)

I'm sure we'll see how you stay involved over the years, but you have an incredible potential and you've proven it already with the results that you've been publishing on Legora. Your growth is tremendous. You come from this incredible background. You were an e-sport player before doing Legora. You started the company not that long ago, but you've grown extremely fast. You are now serving more than 40 markets. You've raised one of the largest rounds in the world of AI today. So I'm so excited to have you today. Thank you.

So maybe we'll start with that. We'll start with your background. I don't know what you think, but I would love to understand why law, because you don't come from a law background. So if you could explain to me how you can get a firm to even start to work with you on that.

Max Junestrand (2:02)

I think people have asked me, did I pick law or did law pick me? And I think law picked me more than I picked it. And so my two co-founders, August and Sige, they started experimenting within the intersection between AI and law already in 2020

I like to say before AI was cool, but it was already kind of cool back then.

And they were working with the early BERT models from Google and especially one of the Swedish tuned versions of it. So it was called Swibert. But the problem with that model was, first off, it was not very smart. And secondly, it was trained on Swedish Reddit. So not only was it not very smart, it was also pretty racist. What happened then was we got access to GPT 3.5 in 2023 and the world changed. And they reached out to me because they wanted to apply to a local business accelerator. And so you needed somebody who went to business school. So I was the token business school guy on the PowerPoint. And that's why they reached out to me. And since then, we've never looked back. And I think we started working in the industry quite open-minded in terms of which problem we were going to solve.

And I think what's been so interesting with Legal is that it's so much green field. There are so many solutions that will be rebuilt. There are so many new things that you can now go and solve, which were impossible with the technology pre-LLMs. And so it's really been a large space to run into.

Eléonore Crespo (3:34)

I love it. But maybe if you start with your very first customer, then I listened to some of your podcasts where you explained that you paid some people to even have lunch with you. How did you convince your very first customer to work with you? Your product obviously was like, you were one of the first to use this new technology. You had no track record in the space. How do you do that?

Max Junestrand (3:56)

So the first customer was, the first paying customer was a friend's mom, who I met her at the party. And she said, my mom uses Chachi Petit all the time. And I said, well, she has to try Lea back then. And so she actually became our first client and she was paying us $100 a month. And she's still with us. So we have 100% covert retention from July in 2023 But the real first client became Mann Himmers Hortling, which was the biggest law firm in the Nordics. And they actually had an innovation incubator. And so I managed to break into the Managing Partners calendar, which somebody told me would be harder than breaking into the Fort Knox. But I managed to do it. I got the meeting, 30 minutes, and I approached it very much from the perspective of, you don't know AI, I don't know law, AI is going to be incredibly important for your company, and so we should be collaborating. And we couldn't afford an office space at the time because we had only raised an angel round of 50,000 euros. So we actually got invited to work from within the firm.