[upbeat music] This is a much warmer welcome than what we had coming into Y Combinator the first time.

Legora's YC journey started with a rejection, but more on that story later.

In YC, they teach you something, and it's called the two-sentence description.

It is describe your company in two sentences.

Legora is the agentic operating system for lawyers, and it handles complex legal work from start to finish, so lawyers can achieve more than ever before.

And over 3% of all the world's lawyers are now active users of Legora.

Yeah.

Like, working this hard, if you don't believe in your own story, uh, is really hard.

How is the Europe vibe right now?

Well, I think the vibe in Europe overall versus companies like Legora is quite different.

So I think the general vibe is there's a fear that some of the best frontier models get locked up in the States.

There's a lot of discussion around how do you continue winning in manufacturing and these types of markets that are important.

And then you have really fast growing software companies like Legora, where we are adopted a global mindset from day one.

And so we don't really view ourselves as only European.

I think we view ourselves as very global.

How are you dealing with the token situation?

Mm

... is about 40 billion.

So it means there's 4% software, 96% service, which is bananas.

The software piece should be much bigger than that.

And so the software piece naturally will grow into, um, the service revenue.

But also, legal is a very supply-constrained market.

The demand for legal services is much larger than what there are lawyers or legal services available.

Mm.

How do you do that? How do you build for the customer where they are today, but also knowing where things are going from here?

Well, I think...

One thing that I've been very positively surprised by is that I actually think many of our clients are much further ahead than what you may give them credit for.

Further ahead? I actually think so.

And I think it's... because the light bulb moment has happened for enough influential companies and partners, frankly, where it's like, wow, okay, it's here, it's transformational, we need to get going.

And part of our job is to help them get as far ahead as possible, right? I like to say that every firm that's on Agora, every company that's on Agora should be in the top quartile of AI users, adopters, and sort of...

um appliers in the way that they change their processes and what we try to do is we of course talk to all the labs we drill that down into what will this mean for legora and what will this mean for uh for the legal industry and then we package that and we give that to to our firms and and to our companies so um you know i run a lot of roadmap sessions where uh truthfully I have no idea what the world looks like 18 months from now.

you think that clients will use law firms in a self-serve kind of way? Because aren't these clients also buying products like Legora?

... how you talk about that.

Sure.

I mean, it was the same week that we went out to the market that, uh, Claude dropped their legal plugin, and I actually think it was a fantastic showcase of, you know, here's some of the capabilities that the models can actually do.

But in the same way that just taking the model and throwing it at a problem sort of doesn't work if you're gonna run a ten million dollar M&A process, there's a lot of scaffolding, there's a lot of enterprise software, there's permissionings, there's sort of ethical walls that you need to respect, there's the way that you work with the firm's internal data, with external legislation and with case law.

Like, there's just so much more that you need to do around the models to put them in a context where they can be useful.

I think with the latest developments, we are actually needing to build less of the guardrails, like the harnesses that we can put the models in are improving.

Okay

... one of, one of our last, uh, developments is something we call the Legora Portal, and the portal is basically like, you know, Figma for, uh, for lawyers.

When you think about that, why is that?

that?...

I don't necessarily think that's the case anymore, and the reason I say that is, I just saw this report.

I was on Bloomberg a couple of weeks back, and they had a big infographic that said that the most deployed generative AI tool in the top 200 law firms in the UK, outside of Microsoft Copilot, is Legora.

Number two was Harvey.

We are moving, and the category is moving at such a rapid pace, that it doesn't really matter who was first, it matters who's best, and it matters who the clients actually are coming back to and want to do, do more work with.

So what oft- often happens, right, is the firms will throw many vendors into a bake off, 'cause they're in this kind of luxury position.

... and are you seeing that?

Mm-hmm.

... uh, with sort of good RAG, good citations, you know, solved its compliancy and, and data, uh, issues.

But now, I, I think your friend is right.

The products have moved from being a conversa- conversational, simple AI into something that solves much more sophisticated tasks.

And it looks very differently across transactional work or in litigation or in in-house work.

If you take due diligence as an example, I mean, it's effectively the exercise of looking through a large number of documents and understanding what is within those documents.

Mm-hmm.

Because they've never had tech and sort of real scalability as a weapon.

(laughs)

Tough audience.

And, and this was back when the early promise of AI started to come into law and everybody completely burnt themselves 'cause the expectations and the marketing was up here, but the delivery was down here.

And you effectively had to sit and train the system yourself, which nobody had time for.

So we get in, and I think the essence of the conversation is something like, "Dude, I don't know law, you don't know AI, but this is gonna be a thing, and we're gonna need each other." And they had an innovation lab, so they had actually put in a structure to welcome companies like this into their space.

It wasn't that well structured, but the idea was there.

And we got accepted in.

I can take lots of-