‘We Want To Be the Biggest Law Firm in the World’

Y Combinator-backed NewMod, Moritz, formerly Arcline, has raised $9m – including investment from founders from Reddit, Dropbox, HuggingFace, and many more senior tech industry figures. Co-founder and experienced tech lawyer, Pamir Ehsas, told Artificial Lawyer: ‘We want to be the biggest law firm in the world.’

(There will be a special AL interview with Pamir tomorrow.)

When asked what he meant, Ehsas said the goal is to be the law firm that handles the largest total value of deals in the world.

Moritz is based in the US and they’ve only just started. But they have already ‘helped 100+ companies close deals worth more than $2.3 billion in aggregate contract value, with an average turnaround of just four hours’.

They started off as Arcline, selling AI to law firms, but decided to change direction when they realised that traditional law firms were just not really changing in any meaningful way and incentive structures were tilted against really making use of the technology at scale.

So, a better path was simply to create a new kind of law firm from the ground up, in this case a NewMod – one of dozens now using the MSO structure.

As with other NewMods, they focus on contract work and offer fixed fees, although in this case, the documents they handle are quite broad in range – and often of very high value.

Ehsas added: ‘I was advising companies building the most important technology of our generation, and I still couldn’t believe how slow and expensive the legal experience was. If it’s broken there, it’s broken everywhere.’

Fellow co-founder Stefan Mandaric, a MIT-Fulbright scholar, added: ‘Your lawyers shouldn’t be your bottleneck. They say time kills deals. We’re here to make sure that never happens again.’

They noted that in one recent engagement, Moritz drafted a $290m-value MSA for a US financial services firm in 24 hours. But…the counter party’s traditional firm took four weeks to review it. The contract was signed with two non-material edits, they added.

Ehsas said: ‘That’s the power of Moritz.’

Over the past three months, the company has recruited more than 40 elite lawyers as ‘co-counselors’ from around the world from Big Law firms that include: Fenwick, Cooley, and Goodwin, trained at Harvard and Oxford, they said. See interview tomorrow for more on how that works.

As with other NewMods ‘AI does 80% of the work, [their] lawyers handle the rest’. So, with this many lawyers helping out, they can get a lot done.

Ehsas concluded: ‘Customers get full attorney liability, same-day turnaround, and a flat fee they can actually budget. The strategy is deliberate: own commercial legal then expand into every category where speed, price, and quality have been broken for decades.’

Is this a big deal?

Well, it joins a growing number of NewMods, many of which are in the US. What is most striking here is the number of senior tech people who have got behind this. That suggests that many of the fastest-growing companies – including some very large ones – are not happy with the status quo.

It could also mean that they see a huge opportunity to turn their investment into a major profit. And that feeds back to the point above.

That suggests a real sea change is starting to happen.

And it’s a change where AI is fundamental to the shift. If people do all the work it’s hard to operate with a fixed fee. If people do all the work it’s hard to go fast and still get quality. If people do all the work it’s hard to scale.

AI changes all of this.

This is the shape of things to come.

More about Mortiz here – and look out for the AL interview tomorrow.

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A Legal Tech Conference For All of Europe – Legal Innovators Europe – Paris – June 24 and 25.

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