Max Junestrand, Legora: ‘We’re Setting the Precedent’

‘We’re setting the precedent for what new things should exist in this product category,’ Max Junestrand, the CEO of Legora, tells Artificial Lawyer in this in-depth interview that covers everything from their new Portal ‘multi-player’ system, to how they only plan one Quarter ahead because AI is moving so fast, to how they got started, to their huge growth ambitions, to the future shape of the legal tech market, and more.

You can watch / listen to the interview with the CEO and cofounder of one of the market’s most fast-growing legal AI productivity platforms here: please press Play, or go to the Artificial Lawyer TV Channel (see here) to watch 200 other interviews and product walk throughs.

Some of the key aspects include:

• The incredible speed at which things are developing at Legora and in the wider legal AI world. As Max says: ‘At Legora, we don’t do yearly planning. We plan for about one Quarter ahead. We have long-term roadmap initiatives, but we plan for a Quarter because AI is moving [so] fast.’
• How they really only opened up to the wider market in late 2024, so in just over a year they have seen incredible growth with now 100s of clients globally.
• That the engineering team will remain in Stockholm and they will not ever ‘outsource engineering’.
• We explored Portal and other new aspects, and especially the point that Legora – and other legal AI platforms – are bringing a lot to the table, that there is so much engineering going on, so much planning and development, so much intentional design, so much working hand in hand with clients, constantly building out the product into a huge ‘suite’ of tools and capabilities, and maintaining that.
• In short, in AL’s view, when people say: ‘Oh, I can make this myself with Gemini’, they are overlooking the reality of providing an ever-growing, ever-evolving platform across the world, and all that comes with a very human-led, but constantly updating approach, where things are moving on a monthly basis.
• And that connects to several key points that Max makes:
• ‘I think it’s important to note that the product is one thing, but there’s an enormous amount of service around the product when you implement Legora.’
• ‘It’s our job to take the value of those models and the value of the frameworks and interpret them for the legal sector. So how can we squeeze the most value out of this for our clients?’
• ‘We build all our functionality like boats so that they sort of improve when the tide rises (in reference to how LLMs are constantly improving).’
• And on the question of the future market shape, AL asked if we will end up with a Big Five, i.e. LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Legora, Harvey, and Clio that dominate the broader legal tech market? Max replied: ‘Well, if it was up to a top five, we’d love to be number one. Right? There’s no question about it. Like we’re here because we are really passionate about what we do. We want to deliver the best product. We want to deliver the best value and we want to build the greatest company. And we want to do that globally.’
• We also cover ownership of Legora and who controls the direction. And much more. Enjoy!

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AI Transcript

Richard Tromans (00:05.243)
Hey everybody, Richard Tromans here again, Artificial Lawyer TV. Today we have a special guest, Max, the founder, co-founder, CEO, at any rate, of Legora, someone I’ve met a couple of times, but never really done a proper interview with. Hi, Max, great to have you on the show.

Max Junestrand (00:22.22)
Hey Richard, really great to be on. I’m a frequent reader, so it’s fantastic to be on the pod.

Richard Tromans (00:28.079)
Fantastic. Well, yeah. And I just thought for once we’d, you know, have a proper detailed chat with you about a whole bunch of different things. So this isn’t a short blast. This is more of a long form interview. So if you’re watching this, get a cup of tea and a biscuit and sit down because we’re going to, we’re really going to explore Legora in detail. So let’s start at the beginning. So you’re from Sweden originally.

How did Legora start? woke up one morning and just went, I know, legal tech, brilliant, let’s do it. I mean, how did it come about? Cause you’re not a lawyer, are you by background?

Max Junestrand (01:05.006)
I’m not a lawyer, I’m an engineer. And it’s going to sound like the start of a great joke. So back in 2020, there was a lawyer, a physicist, and then my two co-founders, August and Sige, who sort of ran into the early versions of the BERT model and the GPT-1, GPT-2. And the lawyer had a summer job.

in the courts where he was tasked with summarizing court cases and finding similar court cases to the one that he had sort of gotten. And that was extremely manual. It took a lot of time and the results weren’t very promising. And so they started exploring, how can we work with AI to solve these types of tasks? And it was really sort of in the very early days, pre-LLMs.

And what turned out was it was really hard to solve those challenges, especially in Swedish or sort non-English languages. And so the project sort of got put on ice. And then fast forward to 2023, GPT 3.5 comes out, we build a prototype for this thing, and it just works flawlessly. Like it’s amazing.

the lawyer and the physicist then decide to go off and work in a court and to go and work on quantum computing. And so there’s like a third spot that opens up and they call me and they go, Hey, Max, we really want you to be involved in this. So I joined and about one month later, since we decided to work full time, we win sort of the first, you know, big client engagement. started working with the biggest law firm in the Nordics, Mannheimer Swartling. And after that, we were sort of off to the races.

So it was really summer 2023. And I think when LLMs came out, we sort of saw three really strong application areas. was coding, customer support, and legal work. And since we had this background, you know, having tried and failed a couple of times, we really wanted to go solve the problems in legal that nobody had solved before. I think the legal sector had also sort of maybe skipped a few previous generations of digitalization. So the amount of work that needed to be done and still needs to be done. Like I like to say that we’ve done zero to one and now remains one to 10 and then 10 to 100. And that’s that, that’s that, that’s what’s fun about it.

Richard Tromans (03:28.749)
Interesting. So just to pick up on that, so you were a friend of these, the other co-founders. So effectively, might say the ancestor of Legora already existed and then you joined effectively as a third sort of founder.

Max Junestrand (03:36.462)
That’s right.

Max Junestrand (03:44.386)
Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that the seed was there. But then, you know, I came in and we sort of, I think, refocused is a good way of putting it. August and Sige had, they had built a lot of different things. And it was sort of a Frankenstein-ish hobby project. And then we wanted to professionalize it. And also we wanted to

Richard Tromans (04:07.739)
They’re still with you, they’re still part of it.

Max Junestrand (04:11.47)
So Sige is full time with the company and then August and Legora split in November of last year.

Richard Tromans (04:20.539)
Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. So, okay, so you get up and running, first of all, you’re called Leya then you become legora. With Leya, of, just thought people are gonna think this is princess Leia we should probably change them.

Max Junestrand (04:32.034)
No, actually, I got to credit the name to August. If I’m not mistaken, it means loyal to the law in Latin. Ley is law in Spanish. And so there was sort of some Latin wordplay there. And also we liked a name where you could refer to Leya, where Leya would give a response and then you could refer to it by name. And then with the name change, I mean, look, we really started making a move from Europe, also sort of the SMB to the enterprise market. And we wanted a name to sort of one reflect the more enterprise in as of our product. And we also wanted to take the opportunity earlier this year to sort of, you know, rebrand the company. Like we had been very European focused. had raised our series A, but then very closely after the Legora change, we launched in the US, launched our series B, and sort of things started to sort of.

Richard Tromans (05:30.447)
Gotcha, gotcha. So let’s talk about today. So it’s hard to believe that Legora has only existed for such a short time because you and another company we’ll come to later that begins with a H, dominate the airwaves, at least in the legal tech space. I mean, where are you now? Where are you on funding? Where are you in terms of numbers of people, offices?

Max Junestrand (05:52.749)
Yeah, well, I’m calling in from our London office. And I think to date, we’ve raised $265 million, which sounds like a really big number. It is a really big number.

Richard Tromans (06:07.949)
In legal tech, in legal tech, that is a lot until very recently, and for the company that’s only been around for three years, that would be an enormous amount.

Max Junestrand (06:14.828)
Yeah. Yeah. And look, I think Richard, it’s important to note, we only launched in sort of general availability in October, 2024. So we only really launched like a year ago, sort of, you know, one year and two months. And so in that very short period of time, we’ve scaled from a couple of customers to over 550. And we’ve opened offices in Denver, New York, London.

Richard Tromans (06:24.507)
Wow.

Max Junestrand (06:43.31)
Stockholm, of course, India, Sydney, with many more hubs incoming. And we’ve decided to keep product and engineering in Stockholm. the reason why we’ve launched so widely and why I think this year has been so incredibly successful is that the demand for great products and teams that really care about the success of the firm is enormous.

And so, as we’ll maybe get to like, yes, like Legora was not the first player in this space, but we have executed with an enormous amount of focus and emphasis on product. So when the LLMs arrived, I think there were many different approaches to how to build products on top of them. Some were fine tuning models, some were sort of jumping straight into the application area. We decided very clearly that like….the models are going to keep improving and the products that you can build on top of this is going to expand very quickly. I mean, the first version of Legora was really like a chat GPT-esque interface. And now it’s so much more. It’s an entire suite. There is a mobile app coming, there’s the Portal, there’s the tabular review, there’s the word ad-in, the outlook ad-in. There’s so many things sort of getting bundled together.

What’s exciting for me is that this product roadmap is being created sort of as we go together with our clients because AI is new to everyone. And yes, we’re sort of super nerdy about it. And, you know, we get to get to work with open AI. We get to work with Anthropic. We get to work with Google to see what’s coming sort of, you know, around the corner.

It’s our job to take the value of those models and the value of the frameworks and interpret them for the legal sector. So how can we squeeze the most value out of this for our clients.

Richard Tromans (08:49.125)
Well, let’s just come back to that in a second, but just on the spread of staff, it’s interesting that you’re keeping your core engineering team in Stockholm, because obviously that’s not a cheap location, the engineers there, or probably not charging the same kind of salary rates that they are in Palo Alto. I don’t know, but maybe they are these days. Why is that? that because you just wanted to keep that kind of cohesion? You didn’t want to outsource it to the Philippines or whatever? You wanted to keep it.

Max Junestrand (09:16.814)
So we will never outsource engineering. We are an engineering led company. I’m an engineer. My two co-founders were engineers as well. the value that we build over time lives in the product and what people can achieve with the product. Sweden and Stockholm in particular, I think really sort of hits above his weight when it comes to building big tech companies.

Skype, Spotify, with Klarna. There’s so much. Like I used to work with Anton actually. He hired me at his previous company. So there’s a lot of tech talent in the market and there’s, you know, maybe there’s a path where we’ll open additional engineering hubs in different countries, but I think now we’re sort of, you know, everybody’s in the same room. Everybody’s coming to work in person.

Richard Tromans (09:47.405)
And Lovable.


Max Junestrand (10:11.129)
….build new features and we think about what can we build today that has the most value and what will we do in the next month because that’s really how quick the iteration cycles are.

Richard Tromans (10:21.379)
Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense to be together. And so India, just to clarify, because I think some people sometimes get confused when a legal tech company opens an office in India, they say, okay, so that’s like a secondary engineering hub, you know, is that because this is a proper office to the GTM.

Max Junestrand (10:33.475)
Yeah, so we work with some of the biggest Indian law firms like CAM, and we want to be able to support them on site with legal engineers, with customer success, with support. I mean, India is a very fast growing market, and we want to make sure that we’re there to help them scale their use of

Richard Tromans (10:57.167)
Yeah, I mean, just as an aside, my fastest growing readership group, I mean, for a long, time, Artificial Lawyer’s main audience has been the US followed by the UK. One of my fastest growing readership groups is India, which has overtaken many other European countries now, which is…

Max Junestrand (11:11.055)
Oh, wow. I love that. And, you know, our office in Sydney and I think the Australian market has been extremely quick to adopt, right? Because Australia is very interesting market. It’s very competitive locally. And everybody’s looking at how can we gain an advantage over, you know, over the next firm? And of course, you know, we start to look to tech as one of those.

Richard Tromans (11:34.489)
And is it on the global bit? how, I mean, your investors, Y Combinator and others, you know, some of which we met at Legal Innovators California over the summer. Actually, I was talking to one of your earliest investors from Sweden this week. I’ll tell you about that off camera later. Yeah, but anyway, the global aspect….is that absolutely central? Because okay, the US, UK, obviously very large markets for US, even bigger than everybody else by a substantial degree. But do you have to be global to fulfill your destiny? If you want to get all Star Wars on it, right? know?

Max Junestrand (12:19.583)
I obviously think so, given that we scaled this way. And I think what’s important is that the change that AI brings in ways of working, how to structure your business is profound. And it requires local…expertise and local assistance with that entire transformation that needs to happen. And so, you know, why are we in the US? Well, of course, it’s a big market, but also we have huge clients there and we want to be on site with them sort of in the trenches and say, how is your firm going to succeed in a sort of, you know, existing AI world and in a post AI world? Like, how do you bring success?

I think it’s important to note that the product is one thing, but there’s an enormous amount of service around the product when you implement Legora at, say, Linklaters. It’s a massive firm. They have offices all over the world, and we want to make sure that we meet them everywhere.

Max Junestrand (13:30.383)
I think you could say that, yes, you could build a B2C product from Sweden or from wherever and scale it. But if you want to be a B2B enterprise, I think it’s kind of a different motion.

Richard Tromans (13:44.281)
Yeah, yeah. Now, I mean, a lot of the early legal AI companies just wanted to sell software and they very, very, very soon realized that you couldn’t just sell software to the legal market. Not yet anyway, maybe at some point in the future, but yeah. Well, and just one last point on that, on the investment target and so forth. mean, the clearly your backers want you to be global, not just because it helps to serve global firms like link leaders, et cetera, but because the goal is to build a category leader, or at least a one of two or three or four dominant, you know, what I call, you know, productivity platforms. So broad multipurpose platforms. That presumably is the goal. I mean, if you, you’re not, you’re not looking to hit, you know, X revenue and then stop. This is, looking like, right, you know, we’re going, we’re going global on revenue.

Max Junestrand (14:33.909)

Yes, you could look at what the investors thinks, but at the end of the day, like, you know, we’re the ones running the company and we’ve only gotten started. And as I said, you know, it feels like we’ve done this year to one, like a lot of the work we’ve done has been the foundational work to now continue building the next interesting thing. And I think that there’s….

Richard Tromans (15:01.031)
Absolutely, absolutely. mean, once you get to a point where, and also I think as the base models improve as well, that’s just going to carry you. It’s almost like that’s like the wind carrying the ship along.

Max Junestrand (15:10.189)
It is, completely. Yeah, we like to call it the rising tide. And we build all our functionality like boats so that they sort of improve when the tide rises.

Richard Tromans (15:20.687)
Well, let’s talk about the product. So the biggest thing that you’ve come out with recently is the Portal. That ties in with a lot of different people commenting similar, sometimes a little bit different, but all interrelated points around knowledge management, knowledge sharing. Law firms have this knowledge, the clients have this knowledge. There’s a gap between them. It’s inefficient. How can we tie the two together?

Max Junestrand (15:46.381)
And also just working, I think it’s important to note, we’re not just thinking about collaboration or sort of how multiplayer would look like. We built it. we are, I think we have now gotten to a state as a company where we’re setting the precedent, which also happens to be the name of our event in New York. We’re setting the precedent of what are the new things that should exist in this product category. We are innovating.

Richard Tromans (15:56.847)
Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.

Max Junestrand (16:16.303)
If you take the portal as an example, it was also born out of a real personal pain. When we’ve collaborated with our law firms on our fundraisers, we’ve worked in a 300 long email chain that’s so long that it doesn’t load on Gmail. And the attachments are really hard to find. And how can that experience be as fluent, as smooth as something like Figma?
Where the designer and the reviewer or client can come onto the same platform and really collaborate in real time. It’s awesome. And that has never happened in the legal world. And that’s what we want to bring.

Richard Tromans (16:56.985)
And why did you choose that particular setup? So as far as I understand, it’s the clients who sign on to the law firms portal. Why did you choose to go that way rather than the other way?

Max Junestrand (17:05.743)
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So the most…

Well, it actually works both ways. But we’re very much focused and sort of initially focused on the law firms. And the reason is we’re getting a lot of inbound from in-house teams. We’re saying, hey, we heard our law firm is using X. We also want it. Or we want to think, how should we think about deploying AI in our business? And I think that’s a real opportunity for the law firms to offer a white-labeled

firm specific product to those clients and then go, that’s awesome that you also want to start using AI. By the way, we already have created these workflows, these templates, these playbooks that you can self serve on. And the reasoning Richard is sort of like, if AI can complete a task, it will complete that task. the law firms, are sometimes scared of innovating because it might hinder their existing business model that’s based on the amount of hours that you work. And so we want to build the software, the vessel, the solution to that problem so that they can retain that client relationship and deliver that work in a 2025 way. And that has never been done before.

Richard Tromans (18:31.891)
Well, I mean, I don’t know, I mean, I suppose HighQ and others might disagree a little bit.

Max Junestrand (18:35.757)
Yes, but if you talk about HighQ, my mind, high queue is more like static file sharing than it is here’s a piece of, here’s a process, here’s workflow, here’s like a work product that you can leverage and self-serve on. And I think, if you look generally in the legal tech industry, what I think has happened pre-LLMs is

A lot of the really exciting solutions were being built and then they got acquired. And there was like a little bit of a lid that sort of, I wouldn’t say hindered innovation, but kind of did.

Richard Tromans (19:19.099)
Yeah, mean, no, it makes sense. mean, people could only operate within the bounds of their technological environment and that prevented some very good ideas going back as far as the mid 2010s. Yeah.

Max Junestrand (19:27.459)
Right. It’s sort of being fully developed, right? But I think now we have the pleasure and the privilege of showing up and saying, we’re going to be the most ambitious and we’re going to be sort of laser focused. I think it’s the best time in history to be a lawyer because never has this many sort of talented people been working on building delightful products that is going to make their lives much more fun.

Richard Tromans (19:57.861)
Well, let’s just dig into this one briefly because got you here. So let’s talk about it. I mean, you it is the elephant in the room, particularly for the law firm. So the in-house teams, it’s slightly different, although most of them obviously have come from big law. So there’s a sort of cultural sort of imprint, you know, that has been sort of like engraved, tattooed into the back of their brains. So it’s not a slam dunk that in-house lawyers will be radical disruptors. But on the law firm side, they’ve

Max Junestrand (20:14.627)
Yeah.

Richard Tromans (20:27.705)
It’s very interesting, like illegal innovators in London, three days, every single person on stage was really, really using this technology now. They weren’t talking about it in a theoretical way. They weren’t talking about, yeah, I redrafted an email using or Harvey, whatever. They were just like, no, it’s really part of our work now. And that was fantastic. It was really great. it was for me, like I said in the piece I wrote afterwards, it was kind of like a big moment because after talking about this for a decade almost, now it’s happened.

Max Junestrand (20:35.204)
Yeah.

Richard Tromans (20:56.699)
Now we move on to the next bit, which is, okay, so part one over, wonderful. Part two, how do we actually transform the legal business model? Right? And you’ve alluded to it a couple of times yourself, right? So we’re going to bump into this business model. So you’ll even have people inside law firms who are desperately wanting to really use AI as much as they can. They don’t see it as a threat. They see it as a force multiplier, improves their products, the clients love it, et cetera.

But the business model that they’re framed within is just like, we’re not built this way. We’re not built. So how do you, as someone who is one of the two most well-known new legal AI companies, you must be butting into this every single day. How do you negotiate this?

Max Junestrand (21:47.363)
We are committed to helping law firms and legal service providers get over this hump. And I don’t think it touches everything. I think that’s important. AI is not a silver bullet for every task and for everything yet. And I like to think of it as almost, it like on one axis, you can have sort of complexity.

And on the other axis, you have sort of time. And, you know, if we start today, we can solve, like you said, like we can summarize something and we can do more complex stuff than that, but it’s going to keep growing. And over time, we’ll sort of solve more and more complex tasks. And if AI can solve something, it will solve it. And so the law firms will be, and the legal service provider will be faced with the decision of, do we want to keep this work?

And if we want to keep that work, we likely need to find an alternative fee arrangement to be able to deliver it in a smart way and in a competitive way. I think firms who lead with this proactively versus reactively when they get pushed by their clients, I think we’ll have much more success in the market.

Richard Tromans (23:00.859)
Are you having this discussion with firms? Because fundamentally AI, it’s an economic issue, right?

Max Junestrand (23:06.799)
Absolutely. Of course. You know, like in some of the pilots that we run when, they, you know, stack up different products, they have findings like we used to spend six hours on this thing and now it takes 20 minutes. And that’s a real impact. However, is the value that they’re providing any less? No. Right.

And the client was willing to pay something much bigger than 20 minutes times the hourly rate. So I think there’s a value discussion to be had. think pricing will be one of the really hard challenges and interesting problems to work on, frankly. And I think some firms will do this transition really well. Some will do it less well. And I think they’ll be winners and losers. And I think this is a time and a place where rankings can shift or will shift.

There will be consolidation in the legal market. Law firms will be buying law firms because there’ll be new types of sort of scale benefits when it comes to how you can deliver this in effective ways, how you can proactively have the conversations with the clients, how you can use your data, how you can turn your work into AI processes. All of this is happening all at once. And it’s probably my most common type of discussion that I have with legal service leaders.

Richard Tromans (24:36.087)
What, what do you, what do you think about the new model army? You know, the, that I, you know, sort of wrote about on Monday and has been growing, you know, like covenant Crosby, whole bunch of them, UDR. Some are developing their own stuff off the back of public LLMs and developing their own things. Others are actually using your tool. There’s one company that mentioned it sort of name checked you. mean, yeah. I mean, do is, is, is that a sort of parallel path that you’d like to get involved more in?

Max Junestrand (25:05.999)
Well, look, think the partnership model sort of suits itself well to some work. The corporate model, you know, sort of scale up model fits some work well too. Increasingly, I’ve also heard firms considering in the UK especially

Can we have a subsidiary that’s a corporate that’s kind of owned by the partnership that can do some of this other work that will sort of be more AI-esque in nature, right? And I think there’s many different models. I think the question the law firms and the legal service providers have to ask themselves is, where do we want to play? And how aggressive do we want to be in sort of capturing as much of the value chain as possible?

I think Richard, you’re completely right in the observation that AI is an unlock for really talented people with sort of deep and narrow expertise to maybe start their own firms, which hasn’t been, it hasn’t been possible before because you’re going to get the leverage and you know, the leverage on a law firm was like you, you, you, you build a lot of associate hours. Like that’s how you make money. But I also think generally like……Like when you need the partner for something that AI absolutely cannot do and for something that, you know, nobody else in the firm really knows, it’s worth a lot more than that sort of number they put on it. And today they discount that by charging for a lot of associate hours. But if that starts to get reshaped, I think you need to start re- know, rethinking how you bill out the

Richard Tromans (26:26.499)
Yeah, totally.

Max Junestrand (26:52.598)
really sort top, top, top expertise.

Richard Tromans (26:55.259)
Yeah, no, totally, Absolutely. It always struck me, remember one global law firm telling me, said, I asked: where’s the value being created here? And they said, well, it’s in the top partners, know, their experience, proprietary knowledge, you know, the knowledge of the clients themselves and so forth. And I said, okay, but that’s actually not what you bill, is it? You bill hours, the junior lawyers who don’t have any experience with the clients who don’t have huge proprietary knowledge themselves. And they said, well, yeah, but it doesn’t really matter because it all kind of works out.

Max Junestrand (27:22.959)
It all works out right, but…

Richard Tromans (27:23.963)
But if you apply technology to this, then you’re eating those hours and you’re effectively billing less than you’re actually owed. It’s a mad system, mad system. It’s got to go. All right, moving on. Let’s talk about you and Harvey, right? Because again, it’s another elephant in the room. I don’t think I’ve seen a situation, not since Lexis and Thomson Reuters were sort of trying to carve out the market between them and

Max Junestrand (27:28.109)
Yeah.

Richard Tromans (27:51.291)
you know, obviously they’ve settled down to some degree into a steady state. You two are like new wild kids on the block. It’s just like, you know, fighting it out globally. Right. I mean, how’d you feel about that? Does it help you? I mean, in some ways you could argue that every time Harvey does some marketing indirectly, they’re helping you. And likewise, you’re helping them because you’re opening up doors, you’re starting discussions.

Max Junestrand (28:18.607)
So look, I think when we founded Legora, the month that we decided to work full time on this business was the same month that CaseText was acquired by Thomson Reuters. And I think Harvey announced their seed round. And people thought that we were delusional to start a legal tech company in Stockholm and be this ambitious.

Max Junestrand (28:48.099)
But I think what’s happened over the past two or three years is that product lead and product taste really compounds. And it will never be about who has the biggest sales team or who has the biggest, you know, sort of who can bang their chest the loudest. It’s about, you know, how do you deliver the most value to your customers and delight.

So how do, how can we be a great partner? Like that’s what I wake up and focus on every single day. And how do we scale a team that’s culturally aligned with our mission, which is how do we empower lawyers with AI and how do we fundamentally like change the way they work because of this very exciting technology?

We’ve now scaled this year alone from 40 people. So we’ve scaled this year alone from 40 to well over 220. And next year we’re set to more than double that. it’s a busy market, it’s noisy. But if we bring talented, passionate, and just like no assholes into the business and we focus all and channel all that energy into these like, you know, it’s not that many talented people working on these problems actually. If you compare, you know, the legal sector to like the coding sector, it’s much, much fewer companies in our world. And so we all channel that energy into solving these problems. And we do that in a smart way. I’m certain that, you know,

Max Junestrand (30:40.011)
Legora will be successful in the metrics that we care about. I got asked this question actually, like, you know, what would success at Legora mean to me personally? And it’s gotten to the point where, you know, like financial numbers and valuations is fun. Like that’s great. And, you know, we can high five all around the company when we do it. But if

Max Junestrand (31:06.603)
everybody that’s involved in this journey in one shape or another looks back with pride and they say we’ve sold really cool things and we built a massive company and we’ve had a lot of fun doing it and customers can do that, investors can do that, most importantly like employees can do that. If all those things are true then I will look back with pride and I will say we’ve been successful.

Richard Tromans (31:30.555)
Yeah, no, I’m sure, I’m sure. Actually, can I just ask you just to give us a hint? How much of the company do you still own personally?

Max Junestrand (31:37.059)
That’s not a question that I’m going to be answering on the podcast.

Richard Tromans (31:39.719)
I had to ask you.

Max Junestrand (31:43.427)
Let’s just say an amount that allows me to keep control of the decisions that we take as a company. And I think that’s very important, right? From a governance perspective and on a board.

Richard Tromans (31:56.335)
Well, because you are a figurehead. I mean, not all legal tech companies have figureheads. Some have like a board. It’s quite diffuse.

Max Junestrand (32:03.181)
Yeah, like we have a board, it’s founder led the board still. So me and my co-founder, we have three seats and the investors have two seats in the current setup. And I think that’s very important because we are not pressured to, you know, like hit certain targets in a quarter and like jeopardize the business or jeopardize the mission. We’re going to do this for a really long time.

Max Junestrand (32:32.679)
And I want to do it with people who share that enthusiasm for where we want to go. And I think the investors that we have have been very understanding of, let’s give them capital, let’s give them a great platform, but then let’s let them run. They’re doing a great job.

Richard Tromans (32:51.355)
Well, that’s good to know. And also the clients will be very happy to hear that too, because you know, they’re, ….. some of them may only have one or two year, you know, long contracts with you, but for many of the people involved, they want to grow with you.

Max Junestrand (33:07.183)
Of course, and for me, it’s very important that we have investors with a very long time horizon. They’re not investors that are pushing us to sell or go public to sell their stocks. They can hold for a very long time and we can make sure that the value that we’re building accrues primarily with our customers.


Richard Tromans (33:31.193)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I would have thought with the growth, with the sort of organic growth that you’re getting and with the investment growth that you’re getting, you, really, I mean, talk of an IPO is ridiculously premature and talk of sales. Well, who would you sell to anyway? Really? mean, I know, certain people have mentioned on the grapevine. They would like to buy you at least over the summer. did. I imagine all such, all such ideas are completely pointless. Yeah.

Max Junestrand (33:57.443)
completely pointless.

Richard Tromans (33:59.483)
Yeah, no, makes sense.

Max Junestrand (34:01.229)
I mean, get more investor inbound than I can manage.

Richard Tromans (34:08.037)
Yeah. So when’s when’s the next round? mean, it’s I mean, you know, looking at certain other companies who seem to be raising almost every three months rather than every three years. I mean, it’s

Max Junestrand (34:17.347)
Well, being quite candid with you, Richard, the last two runs of fundraise that we’ve done was not because we needed the money. It’s to make sure that the market knows that we’re doing really well. You’ve to get the message out there. And we’re not in sort of a rush to do any other round of financing, to be very honest with you.

Richard Tromans (34:40.219)
Okay. And in terms of the shape of the market and you when you’re talking of, you know, funding rounds and, know, presentation decks and all of that, mean, presumably it must be an obvious question that they’re going to ask you. So where does this, where do you get to in five years? What does the market, what does the macro market picture look like?

Max Junestrand (34:56.367)
So I’ll tell you Richard, the last three rounds of financing that we’ve done, I’ve not had an investor deck. They’ve been completed in the span of one week and I’m sure I could meet everybody in person in Sweden or New York where I spend most of my time these days. when I think about investing, like

Yes, we could go and raise a very nice round and it would be a great, you know, story or a great sort of poster ad. But at the end of the day, like I want the product to speak for itself and I want our customers to speak for our behalf. And at some point, just raising another round of financing is just noisy. Like, why are you burning that much capital? You know what I mean? I think there’s ways to build really sound businesses.

Richard Tromans (35:34.512)
Yeah.

Max Junestrand (35:52.077)
with cultures that are phenomenal that, you want to come in person, you want to pour your heart in and you want to sit up till 2 a.m. to fix that, you know, last feature before it goes to release. We actually had the entire team from Stockholm and the rest of the world watch our New York event, Precedent, that we had a couple of weeks ago. And it was really fun because they were watching and they had made, somebody had vibe coded a betting platform.

So they were betting on, you know, what’s going to be happening during Max’s presentation. And somebody had made a big bet that there’s going to be an error on the screen and lo and behold, no errors. And they lost some fake money on that platform.

Richard Tromans (36:36.187)
Well, we’re talking to predictions. Let’s go back to this point because I mean, you’re in the market. You must have a view. I’d be amazed if you didn’t. How are things going to pan out? So there’ll be you, Harvey, Lexis and Thomson Reuters aren’t going anywhere. How they build out their sort of LLM based tools around that core data mine we shall see. You’ve got Clio with VLex. They’ve got a ton of money. They’re trying to build out this sort of broader productivity platform as well. I mean, do see a big five and then a bunch of very, very sort of narrow niche products. There’s also probably going to be some bankruptcies and so forth.

Max Junestrand (37:13.123)
Well, I’ll be honest Richard, so at Legora, we don’t do yearly planning. We plan for about one quarter ahead. We have long-term roadmap initiatives, but we plan for a quarter because AI is moving faster than, I mean, any metric in sort of traditional sorts. And so I think it’s really hard to say what the ecosystem is going to look like in five years. I mean, you, you might….


Richard Tromans (37:39.867)
You must have a desire. If it was a top five, you’d want to be part of it.

Max Junestrand (37:48.707)
Well, if it was up to a top five, we’d love to be number one. Right? There’s no question about it. Like we’re here because we are really passionate about what we do. We want to deliver the best product. We want to deliver the best value and we want to build the greatest company. And we want to do that globally. Like, yes, we might have started in Europe, but our presence in the US …[ and ] UK, our fastest, know, two fastest growing markets by far.

Richard Tromans (38:16.207)
That’s going be massive.

Just the last couple of things. Another question, again, like you’re at the forefront of this and everyone, I get asked this question every other day. Are LLMs plateauing out? Is improvement plateauing out? I mean, I’ve got my own view on that. What do you think?

Max Junestrand (38:58.605)
So here’s my view. I think the models are at sort of this capability. I’m sure we’re doing the video. Will people see this? Great. Okay. Great. So, you know, I think the models, the models are at sort of, you know, this capability. The products are at like this capability and then the people are at an even lower capability. And so I think there’s still a lot of work to do for us and others in just taking the raw power of the models and figuring out how to best tame them and interpret them into our product and into our vertical. So we’re not yet running into constraints because there’s so much left to build and there’s so many sort of scaffolding and techniques that you can use to get more juice out of the models. Of course it would be great like you just throw a prompt at GPT, like write me a share purchase agreement and you get the perfect output. But we’re not there. And it’s likely, you know, a very long time until we get there, which is good because that means we have a lot of, you know, running stuff to build around that task. then, well, I just wanted to bring that up. Like I think what sometimes gets overlooked and we’ve really sort of wanted to emphasize is the people aspect. So…

Just because the product can do amazing things, or just because the models can do amazing things, you need to get the people there. It’s like riding a bike. It’s like learning Excel. It’s like a new way of working. And there’s a tremendous amount of work and energy and time that needs to go in to how to empower your teams to get the most out of AI. And, you know, I’ve seen all kinds of different techniques being applied and sort of how to do this in a scalable way. And we’ve deployed a huge legal engineering team that only focus on this.

And these are excellent lawyers coming from firms like Kirkland, Cooley, Baker McKenzie, Bird & Bird. They come in with a mindset that’s like, I used to know how it was practicing in this practice area, and now with AI, we can totally reshape the way that work gets done. And we want to help figure that out.

Richard Tromans (41:16.495)
Yeah. Well, yeah, that kind of answered the, I mean, basically you kind of indirectly answered the question, which was [I was going to ask], particularly I’m seeing more and more online, people saying, ‘Hey, I just built this using Gemini. Hey, look, it looks just like this or that company.’ But as other people have said, and I fully endorse it, there’s so much more than just being able to just jump onto an LLM.

Max Junestrand (41:36.835)
Yes. And also, I mean, what I think sometimes can get overlooked is just the amount of enterprise features and product that’s required to scale these systems to, know, tens, multiple tens of thousands of users every day. And, you know, if everybody goes into tabular review and they throw in, you know,

100,000 documents or 10,000 documents and start to query. Like you start to run into scale. And one of the advantages we have is we’re very close with all the AI labs. So we also get to try the models, I mean, before they go public and things like that. So we can help them evaluate where it’s working, where it’s not working. I think that’s important for our clients to rely on us to do that.

Richard Tromans (42:20.219)

Yeah, no, no, totally, totally. And also it’s just, just, just the sheer issue of, of, you know, if a law firm effectively did everything sort of, you know, off a public LLM, obviously even through an enterprise license, the quantity of work they would have to put in and the product management investment across multiple, multiple practices and tools within this environment that they were building would be gigantic. They’d literally have to build a Legora themselves, which would be….

Max Junestrand (42:48.321)
Yeah. I mean, look, like, why do you buy software? Like one of the reasons you buy software is because you want an opinionated solution. You want a designer to have really thought about how to make usability and user experience the best for your type of users. And, and, and also combine things like, you know, what’s happening with Legora is we’re very quickly becoming this suite of….a lot of different functionality that we can bundle together that gets ecosystem benefits. So because we have tabular review connected with the assistant, we can achieve X problem. That wouldn’t be possible if you them as two separate systems. So it’s actually about bundling it all together and providing the lawyer with a single user interface that can do more and more things every single week.

Richard Tromans (43:41.987)
Yeah, I think the point about everything has a designer is a very, very good point. So you might think, ‘Hey, we’re just using these vanilla models. And I can get what I want’, but it won’t be that simple…

Max Junestrand (43:53.155)
Yeah. And, you know, I’m seeing, and I’m seeing, you know, every company in this industry start to copy some of things we do. And I think that’s great. Like, you know, we want to be pushing the boundary of what’s possible. What’s the next feature? What’s the way that, how should you solve the hourly business model as a law firm? Like, what are these things? Like, how should we build that out? And then the truth is when you’re innovating, know,  imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

At the end of the day, competition just creates better solutions and it creates more hardened and enduring cultures and companies. And I’ll just tell you, I think the team at Legora has never had more fun or more work than what we’ve had in this this fourth quarter of 2025.

Richard Tromans (44:50.395)
Fantastic, thanks Max. Let’s leave it there. It’s a really nice note to leave it on. Thank you very much and look forward to speaking to you in the future as I’m sure Legora will keep on growing and growing globally. Thank you.

Max Junestrand (45:00.527)
Thank you so much, Richard. This has been lovely.