Legora

“And I mean, just to give you an example, like, yeah, since we did the round, like, a month and a half ago, we've doubled revenue. More than doubled revenue. And I think last month, like, we added more than a million of ARR a week.”

“And then Yuri Sagalov, who's now the, I think, head of early stage at GC, he did a 500 K safe on us in February or January, the same day I landed in SF.”

“No. I mean, out of the 35 that we raised, I think we had only spent five or six.”

“I mean, the short answer is yes, because we did it for a while, and we did it with large team buy-in”

“And so by being in YC, we raised money from Benchmark, who we would have not been introduced to if we weren't in YC.”

“No, but the other thing is happening. It's the other way around.”

“We now have tens of thousands of lawyers logging into the platform every single day”

“I have a couple of stats from a pilot we just ran with a AM law, 200 firm, and they have some examples of tasks where they reduce the time required to deliver the work from 10 hours to 15 minutes.”

“So we went from 200 K MRR to almost a million of ARR.”

“And that meant that instead of waiting the three months to kind of flip our Swedish company into a Delaware, I just went out and I raised a loan against the investment that was going to come in from Y Combinator. So we raised a loan against the collateral that…”

“He's scaled the firm with one-sixth of the capital of his closest competitor, Harvey, who've raised a reported eight hundred million dollars, while Legora has raised just a hundred and twenty million.”

“When I came in, I sort of said, let's just delete all of it, and let's build on GPT, and let's, like, build a version of it that, at the end of the day, lawyers are benefiting from.”

“If you want to add a fourth product to that bucket or to that list, I think it has to be able to do a lot of things because you're not going to go and learn 20 different tools.”

“And I frankly think that so far, none of the products are super sticky. They're quite easy to interchange, which has been very effective for us because we've done a lot of rip and replace.”

“Max turned down a multi-million dollar career in gaming to build Legora.”

“Like 15, I think.”

“I turned to Redpoint and to Benchmark, and I said, we're not going to sell for the next four months, because if we sell and we start onboarding all these great attorneys, they're not going to have the best experience. And they're going to think that the produc…”

“Where the products are today, I don't think we've utilized 10, 20% of what the models can do. We have a huge sort of gap and way to go. And I think we could, just given more time, With the models we have today, given no incremental improvement in them, still h…”

“We raised eighty million on six 75.”

“Now I'm building Lagora in a way where even if Harvey's free, a firm will choose to work with us because that's how much better I want to be in terms of our product and our service offering and where we take our clients and the work we do for them.”

“I think they made a lot of fundamental errors around, for instance, fine tuning and spending time on the wrong things.”

“I think you need to build a cultish culture when you're scaling this fast.”

“Don't think that owning the entire service layer and software layer is a winning strategy. Basically building an AI native law firm.”

“You can do that, of course which we do to some extent, but it's also, I don't think we're in the model or margin optimization time yet.”

“In a single day in 2025, we added seven million of ARR in 24 hours.”

“An example would be a big firm that just went with Legora Widencase.”

“Because I think if we had continued to push, we would have just churned everything.”

“We have okay margins. . Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's not sauce margins. And I think it will take time to get there.”

“One of the themes that I've noticed is that partners at these firms that we work with are starting to think that the technology is so good that as they give a task to their team member, they will simultaneously give that task to Lagora.”

“The round, there was another firm that wanted to preempt us for the A round, and they gave a very competitive term sheet for this series, for the series seed. Much higher price than Benchmark. Benchmark was, I think, the lowest price out of any seed fund.”

“And we always believed that the majority of the value in our category would come from the application layer.”

“It's totally a winner takes all. I mean, you know this. Number one will grab 90%, and number two to number 10 will share the remaining 10%.”

“It didn't do that back in 2023 as a starting strategy. I doubt that that's going to be the difference maker today.”

“And so if a, if Gemini is better, we will switch immediately. Or if OpenAI is better, we will switch immediately. Or if a new model comes out that's better, we will switch immediately. You know, proving that the evals is better.”

“I had this heuristic, which was if we can sign and serve two of the AM law, 200 law firms from Europe we are ready to open in the US.”

“The first version of the Lagora product back in summer of twenty-twenty-three, that was completely the wrong direction. We built it centered around a couple of core use cases, and we did not have an agent Or a chat that could operate over those tasks. It was l…”

“We went from 30 to 300 in 12 months exactly in headcount. And this time last year, we were working with roughly 50 clients. Now we're with 750.”

“We're opening up our new office on Manhattan this week. It's gonna be a 150 people. We've got three more offices in the U.S. Opening this year.”

“We only have one shot with these lawyers because they are very impatient. If it doesn't work, they're not going to come back.”

“When we started the year, we were zero boots on the ground in the US. Now we are 50 people.”

“And that was more than what we did in 2023 and 20 24 combined.”

“And the U.S. Has, by revenue, become our biggest market.”

“Basically Langchain was too bad at the time, so we built our own agent architecture, and that, we did that very early, which I'm very proud of, and that was like the right direction to continue on.”

“I actually don't think it's the right pricing model. I think it should be consumption based. Because you can have individual users racking up such big LLM costs that it basically becomes unsustainable on a per user basis.”

“The more we were working with Cloud Code and Cursor in our engineering team, the more we just thought, hey, let's apply the same principles to the way that Legora works, right? Basically having The Legora agent access all the other tools available in our ecosy…”

“I don't think that there will be a ton of margin slash profit in the low complexity work, because I think as soon as AI can do a task, it will do that task.”

“Yeah, I think we're not the size of Revolut or Deal, right? And so it probably doesn't make sense for us to do that. And Langchain and a lot of their surrounding tools have gotten a lot better. And so I think we're in the job of, and our engineering team is in…”

“There's even another product where they ripped our name and it's our tabular review. It's just called tabular review in their product, which is totally fine.”

“We are pretty diehard Anthropic right now at the company in terms of the models that we deploy in our system. So initially we were only open AI. So so most of only open AI. And now we're a majority using Anthropic.”

“I was on Bloomberg a couple of weeks back and they had a big infographic that said that the most deployed generative AI tool in the top 200 law firms in the UK outside of Microsoft Copilot is Legora. Number two was Harvey.”

“We've doubled in size every quarter.”

“So for both those numbers, yes.”

“We're 10% YC founders in our engineering product and design team.”

“Definitely. Definitively.”

“Not only do I think it will get there, but I think your ability to price versus traditional sauce products will be insanely high.”

“A lot of that comes from the models, but 80% comes from building normal software, right? Like enterprise grade software around the models. So all the scaffolding, all the ways that the users can actually interact with the system.”

“The biggest challenge that We have right now is growing from 30 to 300 and then doubling again in the next two quarters from 300 to 600 and maintaining the ambition, integrity, teamwork, and just like raw grit that got us here when you double the team.”

“Even our enterprise folks, when they come in, they're going to be, you know, buried in deals within 60 days. Like our best people are closing deals typically within 90 days, even on an enterprise team.”

“So if you look at call quality scoring plus opportunity development from a pipeline perspective, you can see pretty quickly who's tracking We know what good looks like, and we know what good doesn't look like, and you can see pretty quickly within about 45 day…”

“We're pushing our teams to use AI in every aspect of the deal as much as possible. And thankfully for us, like, budget isn't a huge concern at the moment, so we're really focused on automating”

“You can't really do that. And we have bands and we have to have like parody and fairness for a reason. And that's like, that's one way to create, you know, sort of a toxic culture is if people figure that stuff out, then, you know, that leads to sort of bad th…”

“Well, we have one coming up with Aaron Judge.”

“So for example, we just did a big brand campaign with Jude Law.”

“At the beginning of the year, you know, I only gave guidance to the board Based on a six month, rolling six month basis.”

“And so we still find that these sort of thought leadership AI thought leadership dinners are super effective and they cost a lot of money and you have to, you know, get some talent in the room from a thought leader point of view and to have them do like a fire…”

“When we get into a deal, when we get into a pilot, we convert pilots, 78% of the time, into a close one opportunity.”

“With Legora, because There's so much chatter in the market about AI and the firms and corporates both want to understand what others are doing. We actually get access to power pretty easily and people want to learn”

“When we move on from sales folks, we do it typically within the first quarter.”

“We score demo quality using AI.”

“Now, every two weeks, we have a new hire class. And at this point, it's between 40 and 50 people joining every, every two weeks. We send everyone to Stockholm, do an immersive five days.”

“I mean, we have legal engineers, for example, who have, will have a product idea around something that we should build in Lagora. Maybe for a specific industry, like we have a funds attorney who works with us, who's excellent named Felix. And, you know, he had…”

“At Braze, we never ran pilots in Lagora. We just, we run pilots all the time as an example.”

“We hit 25 in Q-three, and then we went nuts in Q-four and like blew through every, you know, we ended the year at 70. And then obviously crossed a hundred earlier this year.”

“If a company's not spending any money on a product, does it matter? Then they're not going to put the resources and attention into it that they need to.”

“We have one big competitor, and they come up on every, it's a, you know, death match on every deal. It's super competitive. We have a ton of respect for them.”

“I don't know how it's going to shake out, but I know we did a survey of all the other sort of hyperscaling AI companies and most of them are using Salesforce.”

“When we drop GTMs into their book, they're into pilots. You know, they're into typically something like five pilots within their first quarter.”

“A hundred percent. I mean, with our, the cool thing about the space that we're occupying is because the VCs themselves, like if you think about Iconic, General Catalyst, Bessemer, they have huge legal networks themselves. They're big spenders on legal services…”

“We don't give Legora away for free. So we try and have price integrity.”

“If you're selling to a corporate, they're going to ask all their law firm panel, what tools are they using? If you're selling to a law firm, they're going to ask their big corporate clients and the tools they're using.”

“That's a hard one. And I don't want to give, I don't know if I want to, you know, give an inch at all, but I mean, certainly the strength of their brand is something that, that is, is hard to deny. They've done a great job. They were the first entrant and they…”

“Ours right now, it depends on the mark, it depends on the segment in the region, but ours right now are between sort of eight and 12 x.”

“Well, our average attainment last year was 280%.”

“I would say APAC is probably the most complex, and certainly each region has its own nuance with respect to like data hosting requirements, processing requirements, like you can't process stuff In Europe or the US, you have to process certain things in region.”

“You know, we've had some firms who, you know, say, oh, we have this really onerous InfoSec process. So we want to do a pilot, but we don't want to go through InfoSec. So we're just going to do it on like test documents, like, you know, or like publicly availab…”

“We have both forward deploy engineers, but we also have forward deploy legal engineers who are typically, you know, big law attorneys who understand how individual practice areas work within a law firm, as well as how corporate legal departments work within th…”

“When I started, we were at 40 people. Today, we're over 500.”

“We can afford to take, you know, to take this sort of human, this very human-centric approach right now, but we do it for, you know, pretty much anything in, in, in six figures and above.”

“I mean, they know who we work with. We know who they work with. We're both trying to get in. We, we're very aware that, you know, they know who our customers are. We know who theirs are. We're both going aggressively after it and also scaling up quickly to go …”

“We announced today a big project we've done with McKinsey, you know, focusing on European public sector work.”

“You know, working with the firms that we work with, you know, having, you know, Devovoys and you know, Linklaters and other big firms, you know, advocating for us really goes a long way, and I think we have that stamp now, but that's been a journey that we've …”

“It's less about money and more about time. And the hardest thing that we have right now is taking the time to sort of pause and think about ways of working and like our operating model.”

“We're doing a lot of, you know, seven big, high seven figure deals. And a lot of legal tech companies were like more niche. And so the ACVs and ARRs were, you know, not what ours are.”

“Getting on site is super critical because people don't pay attention on Zoom.”

“I, it is, I mean, in my career, yes. But in terms of the Legora experience, no. Because again, these are such important decisions.”

“And I'd much rather have someone who is really strong and understanding sort of organizational dynamics and change management and was really confident in sending, you know, large proposals and like being able to work that sort of angle.”

“One of the companies I really admire and try to model after his ramp, like you said, and we talk a lot about them internally in terms of how they've built the execution layer from a go to market perspective.”

“And we've created playbooks for things like account planning, as an example, where we've created an agent that can do a one click account plan and help you do like meeting prep for use case development and things like that.”

“One of our vendors had a security incident just yesterday. We just rotated a lot. I mean, just, you know, to be clear, this was internally doesn't affect any of our clients or anything like that, but it's just, I think we're going to see more of them.”

“No, I don't buy that. I think It's, to me, it's a question of how quickly can I solve problems? Am I the person that can solve the problems that we have right now the fastest, or can someone else solve them faster than me?”

“It's Cloud Code, it's Cursor.”

“We have this notion internally that there's the speed of AI, there's the speed of our product, and then there's the speed of humans, you know, and they're like, they're not the same necessarily.”

“We, not 15, but yeah, maybe 10.”

“If you're running a 100,000 cells, you're probably okay waiting a bit. You can go grab a coffee and that's fine, but if you run 10 cells at the same time, those should be really fast.”

“We still use Figma, yes. I know where you're going with this. As soon as you start building a system that's larger than something very small, you want consistency, and you want to have a design language and all that kind of stuff, and so you need somewhere to …”

“Let's say you took away a model from LIGORA, people would still pick LIGORA. So they don't buy it based on the model.”

“We do AI code review today, and it's in its nascent phase.”

“I give really strong feedback after two weeks. What does really strong feedback mean, Jay? Really strong means you're not gonna stay if you don't change this. And feedback is feedback.”

“So essentially I don't have any priors coming into how to build an engineering org.”

“I think they've been more aggressive with hiring, which I actually think I have not been aggressive enough with hiring because I've always tried to have a very, very small, very lean team, which I believed a lot in.”

“I think the other thing that engineers are doing more and more, which is an explicit role with us soon, which is like kind of the meta engineering of making agents really effective.”

“And I only, most of the people that we hire, we don't even talk about their title. We talk about the difficult problems that they're going to work on.”

“No. But they need to get the chance. And if they do, they stay.”

“It's surprisingly easy if you hire people with low ego. That's the thing. If you get five great engineers that don't care about their titles or where they sit in the org chart that just want to solve problems, it's surprisingly easy to integrate.”

“We currently do, yeah. But I think that's just, that's an education thing. In five years, maybe we don't at all, to be honest.”

“Ryan, who joined from Canada, we have a team of people joining from Canada, they're all moving to Sweden, and he vibe coded an app to help everyone migrate. So like very specifically, if you're Canadian, these are like all the laws and all the steps you take, …”

“They hit a hundred million in ARR in just 18 months.”

“Each engineer can produce much more than they could previously and that just has a ton of ripple on effects throughout the org, basically, and how you structure it”

“It will be the future. I don't know when, but it will be the future.”

“If it's a shallow app, and it requires a lot of customization from you, maybe you just build it. That's probably actually the right thing to do. If it's a very deep one, there's just too much stuff for you to build, and it's not viable for you to do.”

“We have our own background coding agent that they built. That allows each engineer to have, like, 10 different agents running concurrently with, like, all of our local development, a browser, all the iteration stuff.”

“I think senior management is extremely difficult to hire for. No yeah, or like engineering directors, engineering managers within, yeah, within product and engineering, yeah. Maybe that's always been difficult, but I think it's because we only have really tech…”

“The way that we have engineering teams is relatively small teams, let's say six people, a PM and an engineering manager. The engineering manager is super technical, you know, spends most of their time coding.”

“Well, we're very opinionated about who we are and who we aren't. We, if you're a great engineer and you want to be remote, then you probably also want to work on very isolated problems, and that's, that can be fine. We'll, we'll, we probably have those, and we…”

“Now, now I make sure everything we build will scale to 100 X the usage. I used to say 10 X, but then that was not enough, so now everything needs to scale to a hundred X.”

“Almost always performance. Performance is more important. Almost always. If you're a lawyer, you can wait two seconds more for the output if it's better. You can probably wait an hour more for the output if it's better.”

“Today we are about 80.”

“Actually, I took a look recently, and it's Claude and Cursor on the top, and there's like, I think it's like two percent between them. So they are really, really close. And then it's, you know, miles above the next engineer. So they're way above 50%.”

“If you have a PM and a designer and an engineer, and they just sit together, You can almost not even have the handover. You can just be like, run at this problem and do it together, the three of you know, next week, and then it's done. But if you have them sil…”

“We have a developer experience team. Relatively new. Again, a mistake I made. I should have staffed that earlier.”

“If I have to put my, I want to say the lower number let's say two 70.”

“I don't want to say infinite, but for me, it's a question of opportunity cost. We're in a competitive environment. There's so many things that we can do, and the cost of not doing it is extremely high. It almost outweighs any sort of token cost.”

“PEMs can prototype super, super fast. Which is really, really great because that means you can front load a lot of the work. So like a PM can start hyper long before once he or she has the, you know, smallest inkling of an idea that we might want to do this. T…”

“If you have an incident, now you just unleash an SRE agent, a sort of an incident agent, and it will just super quickly figure out what's going on, look at all the logs, look at all the metrics, metrics, sorry, Telemetry, and it's surprisingly good. It's reall…”

“If they'worked on adjacent things or think it's in a similar field or even, you know, unrelated but similar technology, we'll take all their learnings and we might rebuild it into Lagora. I think that's what happens in most cases, but they become, you know, fu…”

“The round that just happened, you know, about six months ago. It was like it was kind of sub-fifty, but in that range.”

“I mean, look, Max, I guess maybe he hasn't been as public about it, but absolutely that's part of the strategy. You know, when we got to know each other and we were thinking about the round and justifying not only the current round and hopefully, you know, par…”

“If coding is a half a trillion dollar market, and you have two companies like Harvey and Legora, I don't see why there's not a half trillion dollar market in law.”