
Jonathan Williams, who most recently was Head of Legal Ops at Calame, has joined pioneering genAI startup Leya. The move is part of a wider effort at the company to engage with inhouse legal teams. Read the in-depth AL Interview about the move here.
The move follows a period of rapid growth for Stockholm-based Leya, which also recently saw the hire of Cem Ucan from Baker McKenzie. The company has also been expanding its client roster and is engaged in a major PoC with Bird & Bird, among other firms.
Leya covers multiple areas of legal workflows, with product capabilities around contract search and source finding, drafting, redlining, translation and more.
As revealed by Artificial Lawyer, Calame only recently formed an alliance with Leya back in November. But, as the interview below explains, things have moved very quickly…
First, tell us about Calame.
Calame – The Legal Ops Company was founded by Emilie Calame in 2019. I was only supposed to be supporting the company briefly, but we ended up working together for five years! Calame serves legal teams of all sizes in France, Europe, the US and the Middle East. There’s a particular focus on those that are facing substantial strategic challenges, such as leadership change, digital transformation or post-acquisition consolidation. Technology in general and CLM implementation in particular have been a big part of the last five years for me personally. The last twelve months have been increasingly AI-focused, which is how the strategic partnership between Calame and Leya first began.
How did you and Leya meet? What have you done together?
We were looking for an AI solution to help solve a client’s problem. I had seen a variety of things, and even resorted to building my own solution on Microsoft architecture, but there was nothing with the right combination of usability and performance. I was a little dissatisfied, and grumbled to a friend over a virtual coffee. He had recently joined the Leya team, and showed me the product. It was my first look at Leya, and I was absolutely blown away. It did exactly what I’d had in my mind when hacking my own things together, but it was fast, robust, and very nicely put together. It was also enterprise-friendly! They got us moving very quickly on a contract data extraction exercise, and it’s been full steam ahead ever since.
Why have things moved so fast?
I’ve been a member of the Bar for almost twenty years, and in tech for the last ten. I’ve seen a variety of tools at a variety of stages, and I have never seen a team move as quickly as Leya. The pace of product development is just breath-taking, and there is a sense of urgency that I find intoxicating. From my point of view, the feature set finally ticked all of the boxes I had in mind, the product strategy was right, and their execution was impeccable. Beyond being blown away by the tool, I saw how what I was doing dovetailed neatly with what they were doing, and it just made sense to join forces. Really, the speed was just Leya’s standard operating speed, and me being in the right place at the right time!
Is this now a consulting group inside Leya, or something else? How will it be structured?
No, Leya will remain laser-focused on software! Calame will continue to focus on providing top-notch strategic legal ops advisory work and we will no doubt continue to collaborate closely in the French market. I am joining the team at Leya as an employee. I’m lucky enough to be at a stage of my career where my experience practising both English and French law, combined with expertise in strategic transformation projects, means I can pursue some pretty interesting opportunities!
How much is inhouse a focus now for Leya?
Whether you’re in private practice or in-house, AI is going to have a huge impact! While law firms currently represent a substantial proportion of the Leya client base, I anticipate that this balance will shift over the course of 2025 as demand from in-house legal teams grows. The engineering team is also prioritising typical in-house use cases. The demand is clearly huge, and in-house teams are already doing incredible work on the platform.
They’re handling one-click playbook redlines, instant clause remediations across vast volumes of contracts, M&A work, IP work, and much more besides. I’ve seen commercial teams reducing lead times by a factor of ten year-on-year, and I’ve seen a team close an M&A deal in 48 hours when they would have needed two or three weeks previously. A major financial institution cancelled a planned twelve-month lawyer secondment because fifty thousand contracts no longer need analysing for DORA compliance (among other things). A year of manual work done in a week. Leya isn’t a model or even a “tool”, it’s a legal work platform and adopting it will be high-impact regardless of where you are currently practising law.
Thanks Jonathan and congrats on the move to Leya!