Legal AI innovation is scaling parallel queries, not prompt engineering
Max Junestrand · How This 25-Year-Old Built A $675M Legal AI Startup (With No Legal Experience) · Y Combinator · Aug 26, 2025 · at 7:50
Max Junestrand is the co-founder and CEO of legal AI platform Legora. He explains the engineering challenges behind Legora's tabular review grid feature.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And the big innovation there does not really come from, you know, how do you prompt and work with the model, but it's how do you make this run at scale? You know, how do you run a 100,000 queries in parallel at the same time and make sure nothing breaks.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Max Junestrand
Legal due diligence commoditized as clients refuse paying for manual review
“And now it's becoming almost a commodity where you're expected to do it, but clients are also not really that excited to pay for Very simple contract review when they know that AI can do, you know, 99% of it.”
Junestrand: Undifferentiated work and price pressure force law firms into AI adoption
“A lot of legal work is low differentiation. You know, if you're doing a DD from, you know, law firm X or law firm Y, kind of getting the same deal. And so when you have this perfect Equilibrium of services and somebody disrupts that by taking a new approach. C…”
Junestrand: Legal AI will not cause a pricing race to the bottom
“And it, and it's also not a race to the bottom in terms of pricing. Because if you pull down, let's say the cost of a due diligence, you free up more time to spend with a board on advising them on, you know, a really complex merger or a really complex acquisit…”
Spanish law partner used Legora in court to fact-check opposing counsel
“There was this amazing situation that one of the Spanish partners at a firm called Pere Theorca had, where he went into court, he had put all the evidence and all the documents from the opposing party in Legora, and he was actively querying it During the heari…”
Legora's 30 engineers outship legacy legal tech incumbents with thousands of developers
“So our ability to out ship or, you know out deliver these teams of thousands of engineers with just 30 is insane. And so we have instead managed to build a company with, I think at the time of recording, it's about a hundred where like our velocity It's way hi…”
Bottom-up PLG is impossible in legal software due to strict procurement
“It's impossible to do a bottom up motion in our industry because you don't procure software individually. You take it through procurement and you take it through IT. And there's a lot of security checks. There's a lot of data privacy checks that you need to go…”