Graham Norton on a horse (Revolut). Gordon Ramsay swearing on the phone (PolyAI). Jude Law smoldering in an ironic kind of way (Legora). AI may be a new technology, but gaining brand recognition in a crowded market still relies on that most old-fashioned of techniques—star-pulling power.
Three-year-old Legora is one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI businesses. It works in the famously conservative legal sector (think whiskery judges partial to a glass of claret at lunchtime). Growth is stellar in a sector ripe for disruption. Backers include NVentures, Nvidia’s corporate VC fund, and leading legal firm, Bird & Bird, which specializes in the tech sector. Its most recent $550 million Series D fundraise valued the business at $5.6 billion. Not bad for a bunch of self-confessed “engineers and hackers” from Sweden.
Outside the world of lawyers, few would have heard of Legora until one of the cheesiest marketing ideas in history (“We’re a legal business, how about getting Jude Law to talk about us?”) became an advertising sensation. For weeks across the U.S. and Europe, Jude Law in a crisp white shirt and sharp grey suit was appearing on social media feeds and staring down from digital billboards from New York to London. Name recognition soared.
“Somebody internally said, given that we’re building AI-powered law, what if we just got Jude Law to be AI powered?” Max Junestrand, the CEO and co-founder of Legora told me. “And maybe one or two bottles of wine later, we ended up committing to the idea.”
Months of to-ing and fro-ing with his agent later (Law was concerned that Legora might be a here-today-gone-tomorrow type of business) and the project was agreed. “Nagging is an underappreciated form of negotiation,” Junestrand said of Legora’s efforts to engage a film star more used to playing Vladimir Putin and Albus Dumbledore.
“It was clear to us that AI—and the intersection between AI and law—was an interesting space, but the technology was not mature enough to solve real problems”
Max Junestrand, CEO and co-founder of Legora
“We had to prove to him that we were quite sophisticated and serious about it—he really liked the concept,” Junestrand said. “He insisted on bringing his own cinematographer and scriptwriter, so we got the cinematographer from Oppenheimer and a Saturday Night Live scriptwriter, and together they came up with this magically funny concept [Law walks around a lavish house demanding the camera stays on his face while he purrs ‘collaborate seamlessly’ and ‘draft precisely’]. The results speak for themselves.”
This year, Legora crossed the $100 million annual recurring revenue threshold and now says it serves 1,000 law firms and in-house legal teams across 50 markets. Alongside Bird & Bird, Linklaters and Cleary Gottlieb are also clients.
Junestrand grew up in a remote part of Sweden where there were few ways to, as he describes it, “compete in the education system”. So, he became a video gaming expert and coded in his spare time (a common origin story for many tech entrepreneurs).
“It was clear to us that AI—and the intersection between AI and law—was an interesting space, but the technology was not mature enough to solve real problems,” he said.
That was until the release of ChatGPT and Legora was granted access to the GPT 3.5 model on the API (application programming interface).
“That felt like my generation’s internet moment,” Junestrand said. “It was a clear line in the sand. There was a pre-API world, and then we got the API, and the number of greenfield opportunities and problems you could solve just exploded before us.
“When we started out, we were adventurous engineers and hackers who thought about what this technology could do, and now we’re at a point where we’re one of the fastest-growing startups in Europe. We have an enormous obligation to make sure that this technology continues to serve this [legal] industry in a good way. I feel like we have built 1% of all the software that we are going to build over the history of this company.”
London-based Bird & Bird, and its CEO, Christian Bartsch, have been a central part of Legora’s expansion and this was the first international firm to partner with the company. It continues to advise Legora on product development.
“They are passionate about what they’re doing, they’re collaborative and trusted and [if they do] a few quirky things along the way, I say the best of luck to them,” Bartsch said of the Jude Law advertising campaign. “And hey, it’s made law interesting at the dinner parties that I go to, so I’m not complaining too much.”
Like many sectors, legal is gingerly feeling its way in the new technological world. Traditionally conservative for good reason—AI has been known to invent non-existent case law—leading practitioners also know that much exists in the dusty drawers of the profession that needs modernizing.
“They should have been disrupted years ago,” Bartsch said of the profession’s workflows, many of which are still labor-intensive. “You see fragmented systems held together by middleware and a lot of manual processes in law firms. You see really high-value strategic work underpinned by a lot of repetitive workflows. So, it’s ideal for AI.”
“If you look at what AI is going to do, it’s not going to replace law firms, but law firms that use AI well are going to replace those that don’t. This next generation of lawyers is going to be augmented. Hybrid lawyers are going to have that human intelligence, but they’re going to be backed up by machine capability. A lawyer like that is going to out-compete the marketplace.”
“It’s a metaphor,” Graham Norton shouts as his horse walks off in the Revolut advert. In a crowded market, anything that cuts through is worth paying for. If nothing else, Jude Law has made Legora famous.
