We just raised another $550 million to bring AI to the legal industry. I still believe there will be more work than lawyers

A letter from Max Junestrand, CEO and co-founder of Legora, which raised $550 million at an $8.8 billion valuation this week.

A large U.S. law firm wanted to switch to Legora but needed one specific task solved, and we couldn’t do it yet. One of our legal engineers, a former lawyer, flew from New York to Stockholm on a Saturday and spent a week and a half with our engineers until he built it. That is what we mean by partner.

When I started Legora with my co-founders, we made a rule: every new customer had to make the company stronger. It goes back to our partnership with Mannheimer Swartling, one of the largest firms in the Nordics, and our first big customer. We built the product alongside their lawyers, setting up Legora’s first office in one of their conference rooms, and we have built it with our customers ever since.

Three years on we have more than 2,400 customers, and the rule hasn’t changed. Each one made the product better and the economics healthier. That way of working is also why we raised a $550 million Series E, led by Atreides Management. I’ll make the full case at the end, but here is the short version of why I’m still optimistic: legal has always had more work than lawyers to do it, and AI hasn’t changed that.

The bet we made on models

We build on the best frontier models, and don’t train our own general legal model. That was a real debate when we started in 2023. The models were new, and plenty of people said the way to win in legal AI was to fine-tune........

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