Legal AI productivity platform Legora has launched ‘Portal’, the company’s big step into collaboration, allowing law firms and their clients to work through a ‘secure, unified workspace’ and leverage institutional knowledge. Clients can use the Portal without having to purchase a Legora licence. (See AL Interview for more context.)
The Stockholm-based company, which is locked in a fierce platform war with Harvey, said that the goal is to help users ‘access firm-specific expertise…and seamlessly integrate their external counsel into their day-to-day operations’. In short, to bridge the genAI gap between the two sides of the firm/client relationship, helping specialist knowledge and matter-specific workflows to be shared – all still powered by Legora.
They noted that even now, email remains the dominant medium for client collaboration, ‘resulting in buried documents, countless versions, endless searching…Legora Portal eliminates these inefficiencies with a white-labelled, permission-driven user experience that centralizes all matter-related work in one secure, platform’, they stated.
Max Junestrand, CEO and co-founder at Legora, commented: ‘Our philosophy has always been simple: if our clients win, we win. Law firms have knowledge and specialized expertise that businesses rely upon, but until now, there has been no effective way of collaborating with clients in the age of AI.
‘Legora Portal changes that equation entirely, allowing firms to leverage their institutional knowledge as a competitive differentiator while creating scalable, effective service delivery models. Furthermore, it significantly speeds up communication and the sharing of materials – similar to what tools like Figma did for designers.’
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All well and good. AL asked the company to expand on this. Here is what they said:
Why do this now? What has driven the move to support more collaboration at this stage in your development?
We’re hearing a few key things from the market that led us to prioritize this. Our law firm customers are telling us that while they’re making major investments in AI and have the knowledge and expertise to back it up, they don’t have good ways of offering this directly to their clients. Even though Legora helps them do better work for their clients, the delivery mechanism is still just sending documents by email.
At the same time, in-house teams are increasingly looking for ways to improve efficiency and deliver better outcomes for their internal stakeholders. For them, the ability to work collaboratively with their law firms and even self-serve with firm-curated workflows is a major unlock.
Why choose this specific collaboration approach? Does it work this way because it fits how lawyers and clients normally work together?
In developing the Portal, we’ve been working with a number of our most important strategic design partners – forward-thinking firms who are excited to co-build the future of legal services. The approach we’ve landed on is a direct result of their vision.
Will this help drive more use of Legora on the law firm and corporate side? I.e. this helps drive use and adoption?
Over time, we expect this to be a major driver of value in our overall platform.
On the client side, the ability for clients to use the Portal without having to purchase a Legora license is a step change improvement that will make legal AI accessible to many more in-house departments.
And finally, on a different point, given how rapidly genAI is evolving, aside from collaboration, what do you see as the key emerging opportunities for legal AI?
Our goal is to make Legora the operating system for legal work. To make that vision a reality, a few things need to be true:
- Legora needs to work everywhere that lawyers work – whether in their email, in Microsoft Word, on mobile, in their document management system, and more.
- Legora needs to be able to connect to all the other apps and systems that lawyers use to do work. The Legora Assistant is becoming increasingly agentic and can serve as an amazing ‘front door’ for the various tools that firms have access to.
- Legora needs to deliver an amazing experience across all the different tasks that lawyers work on, across every practice area.
Our entire product roadmap is oriented towards delivering on this vision in collaboration with our customers.’
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So, there you go. As you can see, Legora believes Portal will be fundamental to its success. It’s also worked closely with clients to develop it. Some of the firms it currently works with include Cleary Gottlieb and Linklaters, among others.
Now for some more technical aspects. Here is what they plan to provide by Q1 2026:
- ‘Enterprise-Grade Security and Control – Built on the industry-leading security of the Legora platform, the portal is SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, and GDPR compliant. The platform features robust encryption, role-based access controls, and zero AI training or data retention.
- Firms maintain complete control over what information is shared with clients, with customizable permissions for every matter, file, and workflow
- Firm-Powered AI Workflows: Law firms can build and share custom AI workflows with clients, allowing them to benefit from specialized legal and AI expertise. Examples include contract review based on firm playbooks, due diligence, drafting workflows, and automated research based on web and legal sources – all powered by the firm’s accumulated knowledge and document libraries.
- Q&A on Large Document Sets: Firms can expose large document sets directly to their clients, who can submit questions directly through Legora Portal or via email. Legora’s AI search then analyzes thousands of documents simultaneously, compiling concise responses with source references that firm lawyers can validate and refine.
- Live Collaboration: Teams can work together in real-time on tabular reviews and documents using Legora’s built-in editor. Comments, task assignments, and notifications ensure nothing slips through the cracks, even on complex matters involving multiple law firms.
- Streamlined File Sharing and Organization: Legora Portal eliminates the inefficiencies of traditional email-based collaboration. It enables bulk document uploads, advanced search across hundreds of files, version tracking, and granular permission management at both matter and document levels.’
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Is this a big deal? Yes. In terms of how the legal world works it helps to shift attention to improving the way that institutional knowledge is tapped; turning KM into not just a scattered resource throughout a law firm, but leveraging it in a highly productive and connected way to help the clients ….who, as mentioned before in AL (see interview with Omar Haroun at Eudia), have been training the law firms they use on their legal needs.
It’s also a huge deal for Legora from a business growth perspective. Why? Because if clients can become very familiar and comfortable with working via Legora’s Portal it inevitably influences their relationship with the law firm that deploys it.
I.e. the clients could start to say we want to work with X law firm because we like using Y portal. That in turn could mean that a business starts to get picky about which law firms they choose based on which legal AI collaboration system is used. That provides a significant network effect.
Also, as Legora grows and builds out its offering, and clients become more interconnected to certain firms via knowledge sharing and specialised workflows, they could ‘crowd out’ other tools that overlap in that workspace. I.e. the bonds between law firm and client just get so tight that it almost feels like an imposition to bring additional tools into the mix – unless they’re really needed.
And, as Harvey set out on Monday, they also see collaboration as the future of AI – see Law Punx video here.
On the flip-side to all of this collaboration is the security risk, and it’s quite intentional that Legora has underlined the security guarantees of the Portal. That said, law firms such as Linklaters and Cleary, would not be going down this road unless they felt comfortable.
Last word goes to customer Greg Baker, Senior Lawyer, AI – Global M&A at Linklaters, who commented: ‘Collaborating with Legora during the design phase of the Portal, including testing concepts in common deal scenarios with our leading M&A and Structured Finance practices, gives us every confidence that it will deliver the best possible experience for our people and our clients. We look forward to continuing to work with Legora through the Alpha and Beta phases, and on to launch.’
It will be very interesting to see how this rolls out and what impact it has on uptake of Legora as the platform war continues.
More about Legora here.
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Legal Innovators New York Conference – Nov 19 + 20
Legora, Harvey and many other leading legal AI companies will be taking part in Legal Innovators New York in just over a week’s time on November 19 and 20.
If you’d like to stay ahead of the legal AI curve then come along to Legal Innovators New York, Nov 19 + 20, where the brightest minds will be sharing their insights on where we are now and where we are heading.
Both events, as always, are organised by the Cosmonauts team!
Please get in contact with them if you’d like to take part.
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