From Only OpenAI to Die-Hard Anthropic: The Downfall of OpenAI in Enterprise

Legora is the platform where legal work happens. I think that’s a better pitch than the one that I had last time. And what started to happen more and more is AI is doing more and more parts of legal work, and this has to happen on a centralized platform. And what we started out with was simple assistant based use cases. But this has grown tremendously, and it’s solving different types of tasks for different types of lawyers. So if you are a transactional lawyer and as part of a due diligence process, you need to review the data room, and then you need to find the red flags in that data, Legora can do it.

If you are a litigator and you are preparing a brief and you are drafting that in word, Legora can help you do it. More and more of these tasks are being bundled into the platform, and what we’re seeing is that a bigger and bigger part of a lawyer’s day is being spent on Legora, which is amazing. That’s my favorite data point. Is that the number one metric you use in terms of product metric? Yes. Time spent on the platform and number of messages slash number of queries slash number of actions taken, I think, is the best sort of KPI.

that, why is 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 often happens, right, is the firms will throw many vendors into a bake off because they’re in this kind of luxury position. I mean, basically, they’re playing VC. They get to bring in all these different vendors, and they say, we’re gonna do bake off. And in the bake off, it’s up to the vendor to display why you are their partner of choice. And I say partner of choice because I don’t think that these law firms or big in house legal teams are buying just a solution.

They are buying an outcome today, but they’re also buying, like, an outcome tomorrow, and they’re buying into a vision of what an AI enabled legal team can look like. And so when they look across the board and they see all these different companies, they make qualified bets. More and more and more, seeing those firms make that bet on Legora. I mean, this year alone actually, I went into our HR system before I came in here. We went from 30 to 300 in twelve months exactly in headcount.

This time last year, we were working with roughly 50 clients. Now we’re with seven and fifty. And so, you know, a name might be associated with a category. I’m pretty sure Google was not the name that you thought of back when AltaVista was the biggest web browser, but now it is synonymous to searching on the web.

Have a very big team of legal engineers who are ex practicing lawyers from the top tier best firms, but they’re not fully seconded. They’re forward deployed in the sense that their main job is to make you successful. An example would be a big firm that just went with Legora, White and Case. White and Case now has the challenge of adopting AI across their entire firm. It’s a big firm. Such an enormous change management undertaking to equip all the lawyers, across all the different practice areas, across all the offices, and across all the skill levels from associate, senior associate to partner with AI proficiency.

And we need to make them successful. Because if they are not successful on Legora, a year from now or two years from now, it’s going to be a really sad conversation. So we invest a ton of upfront manual labor, time and effort in doing the implementation and activation right. So I do think that’s necessary for enterprises where you’re changing the way they work. If you just think about a process, right, like let’s say you’re working in if we’re just staying in legal, if you’re working with AI contracting, you basically have a contract life cycle management system, you just send a document somewhere, generate some red lines, and then you put it back.

That’s pretty easy. You don’t need a forward deployed engineering or legal engineering model for that. You just deploy the stuff and then you’re done. But in our case, I actually like to think of it synonymous to the way that accountants had to learn Excel or architects having to learn CAD. Right? Like before, would actually go out to the site, you would draw the building, and then you would go back to your office, you would do all the math. But now you just get a picture of the site, you throw it up in CAD, you put in the blueprints for the building that you want, and the system AI generates it or generates it.

Then you look at the math behind it, and then you bring taste and you bring design. When architects were learning CAD, I think it was an enormous change management. Right? And all the old architects would go, Harry, we’re gonna use that computer system to do the hard work for you. And you would go, yeah, I’m super savvy, and I’m gonna get to spend more time doing the design or have creative ideas about how to solve my clients’ architectural problems. Right? And I think that’s kind of synonymous to what’s happening today.

Some of the things that we observed were spending a lot of effort on fine tuning models. That always seemed to me, at least back in 2023, like a waste of time because the general models were improving at such a fast rate. It felt like we should be building boats, and then when the tide rises, all of our products just get better. And frankly, my initial team, we were three people. We were three engineers. So The thesis plays into the team structure. Right. And we had €50,000 in angel funding.

And so it wasn’t really on the question of let’s spend $3,000,000 fine tuning a model, but it happened to be right as well. And we always believed that the majority of the value in our category would come from the application layer. So you think work being done to fine tune models does not give you an inherent advantage? It didn’t do that back in 2023 as a starting strategy. I doubt that that’s going to be the difference maker today. Do you think models are plateauing in performance today?

No. I think OPUS 4.5 is awesome. It’s so good, and it continues getting better. I mean, honestly How much better is it? Well, it depends on the task. Encoding, I mean, I think it’s it’s gotten to the point now where I think you should just coin it AGI and focus on optimising the cost, pretty much, basically. What makes you say that? I’m sorry. I’m naive. Because it’s understanding of my intent and its ability to execute on my intent given the tools that it has available today is so good.

Like, you don’t need to sit, like, with GPT 3.5, and you feel like you’re talking to, you know, like a lobotomized system, pretty much. Like, you go back, it’s crazy bad. And this was, you know, two years ago. Right? And you would have to give it so many instructions over and over and over again. It felt like managing an employee who wasn’t very intelligent, whereas Opus four point five feels like a VP. You give it, here’s the thing I want, go execute, and it just does it.

It’s amazing.

good question. We’re in both. You are? We have both. Yeah. I’m actually not sure what the full team split is, but I know that we’re using both very much. But we are pretty diehard Anthropic right now at the company in terms of the models that we deploy in our system. So initially, we were only OpenAI. So 2023, most of 2024, only OpenAI. And now we’re majority using Anthropy.

No. Not 4.5. This was prior to that. I think it was maybe SONET three or Wow. Or 3.5 that we made the switch. What also happened was you had to start prompting the models quite differently. And then there’s a question of, like, where do we actually wanna put our effort? Just to pick a good a good model and double down on it and build all the application around it. Because I feel like our job, frankly, if you think about the pyramid of value is you sort of have the underlying models and the and the frameworks, then Legora’s responsibility is to build the legal interpretation of those models.

So how do we make them the most useful in a legal setting? And a lot of that comes from the models, but 80% comes from building normal software. Right? Like enterprise grade software around the models. So all the scaffolding, all the ways that the users can actually interact with the system. And then at the very, very top of that pyramid, we need to enable our partners, our clients, to do differentiated things. So our clients and the law firms and the legal teams we work with are very ambitious.

They’re vibe coding tools internally. They are developing MCP servers, and they they’ve understood that if you compete as a law firm, you used to compete on expertise, on the marketing, on your ability to recruit, on, you know, your hourly rates. But increasingly, you’re competing on tech. Like, tech is the main lever for our clients to differentiate from their competition. And so they will use a platform like Legora to get everybody up to, you know, spend so much time in The US now, second base. And then they will, you know, develop things internally to try and get a little bit of a head start against some of their peers.

We will be very promiscuous. And that’s a clip.

the intro right there. Right. There. But but but but Well, I think it’s our responsibility to be that because our clients have entrusted us to be their AI partner and to deliver them the outcomes that they need based on everything that you can do with AI. And we need to deliver them the best possible thing at the best possible price using all the tools available to us. And so if Gemini is better, we will switch immediately. Or if OpenAI is better, we will switch immediately. Or if a new model comes up that’s better, we will switch immediately.

You know, proven that the eval is better. But then in specific workflows, you could also let the users pick. So let’s say they have a very deterministic thing that they wanna run, and they always wanna run it on this specific model to not break the system, then you could also allow that.

I’ll bet based on what I’ve seen in the last sort of three, six months. For our type of work, it will either be Cloud or Gemini, that is the top model. It will be dependent on if context window is a very important factor or not. So far it is not because we’ve built so much architecture around handling lack of context window that we still prefer the cloud models or the Anthropic models. And it seems to me like OpenAI is going down the, you know, let users fine tune models, like that type of journey a bit more, which so far, don’t have a lot of reason to believe in.

I think so.

We’re not gonna throw Grok in there at all.

We I also think there’s a difference between solving enterprise needs and solving B2C needs. And to me, there’s this perceived split, at least from my vantage point, which is that Anthropic is going more enterprise and OpenAI is going more B2C.

And we’re an enterprise class type of system, thus we should benefit more from their models.

Yep.

So basically that you sort of are you’re continuously running tasks all times or for everything. Exactly.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that we’re there yet when we have tasks that take that much time to run. We don’t have any task in Legora that would take twelve hours to run yet. But when you can put the models in loops and it gets better and better and better the more loops it takes, then you can for sure allow that. I do think that we’re gonna move into a world where we start a lot of things as we go to bed, and we wake up in the morning and it’s done, for sure.

I think I already started doing that with deep research when that came out for the first time, and it would take twenty five, thirty minutes to run. It was so cool, but you so quickly get used to our new shiny toys.

So one of the things that’s very impressive with Cloud Code and do they call the new thing coworker? Yeah. Cowork. Cowork. It’s maybe not so much about that tool itself, but about the paradigm that it has shown is useful and the right thing to go directionally. And the more we were working with Cloud Code and Cursor in our engineering team, the more we just thought, hey. Let’s apply the same principles to the way that Legora works. Basically, the Legora agent access all the other tools available in our ecosystem as well as any MCP servers that the client brings, and then basically kind of letting it roam.

And you just give it this, again, overarching task. It gives you back its plan, and then you say, that looks awesome. Go execute. And it’s pretty much the way that a partner would work with a senior associate, and a senior associate would work with an associate. And I think this is like adding another layer in that hierarchy, basically, with AI in the bottom. But then that’s available to everyone twenty four seven. So one of the themes that I’ve noticed is that the partners at these firms that we work with are starting to think that the technology is so good that as they give a task to their team member, they will simultaneously give that task to Legora.

And then very often, the quality that they get back is pretty good. And that has real implications.

I think one of those statements are true. One part of that statement is true.

Well, that’s not true. And when we started the year, we were zero boots on the ground in The US. Now we are 50 people. We’re opening up our new office on Manhattan this week. Gonna be 150 people. We’ve got three more offices in The US opening this year. The US has, by revenue, become our biggest market.

the biggest country by revenue.

In total? No. We have so much in The Nordics, actually, because we basically work with all the big firms. But it will be, I think, by the end of Q1, yeah.

Yeah. And the cool thing, right, is that if you look at the AMLOT 200 and by the way, many of these clients that we’re working with in The US, it’s not the mom and pop shops, right? We work enterprise. And so when we came to The US, we had a strategy, which was there’s so many Nordic or European companies that have launched in The US and failed. Very close to home, Klarna tried to launch in The US like a couple of times before it really worked.

And so I had this heuristic, which was if we can sign and serve two of the AM Law 200 law firms from Europe, we are ready to open in The US. So Cleary Gottlieb, you know, White Shoe, Wall Street firm, Goodwin and Proctor, one of the best VC firms in in the world. And I think both are in the top 20 law firms in The US. We were able to work with both of them and give them confidence that we could support them better than anybody else.

That gave me the confidence to go to The US and hire a team. And the awesome thing about building a team in The US is it takes two weeks for people to leave. We can talk about some of the differences between US, Europe, but I think the the termination period in The US versus in, let’s say, Sweden is actually one of the structural benefits of having a big office in The US.

on like, everybody has three months.

We’ve doubled in size every quarter. And the minute I know that I need somebody, if they wait a quarter, we’re a different company. Right? It’s wild. So you just need to well, for one, I need to try and predict our headcount plan much more diligently in Europe than I do in The US because there it’s like but really awesome people can just turn up in two weeks.

Yes. For sure. Well, I think we we could, so why can’t you? And we’re very enterprise, so that might be different. We did not need to invest a ton in marketing or, like, b to c content in The US. I could just get on demos and get on a few flights, demo the product, run a few pilots, you know, always competitive pilots. And then, again, on the partnership level, show that we were willing to work with these firms on their ambition level because it’s very high.

The firms that we work with are not treating AI as a check the box exercise. It’s not, oh, let’s buy, you know, this thing, let’s roll it out, and we’re done. It’s we wanna be the firm that dominates our market because we understand AI and technology better than any other firm.

No. Did I tell you that I took a decision to not sell the product for six months? No. So our first board meeting so to give you some context, we were at YC, we raised $10,000,000 from Benchmark, a month later we raised another 25,000,000 from Redpoint, and we had our first board meeting, and we were like 12 people at the time. First board meeting, it’s Benchmark, Redpoint, and three founders. And we sit down, and I tell them that we are not going to sell at all for the next six months.

Redpoint sort of looked at me, and they were, I think, a little nervous that they had met me for basically an hour and forty five minutes and given me Paid a walk walk off off price. And I was showing up, and I said, we’re not gonna sell.

Yeah. But you you couldn’t know that you didn’t need the money. And if I remember correctly, one of our competitors did another round quite quickly after. So I think it was good to solidify that there’s interest in Legora stock. And now I just get, like you know, at this point, I’m just archiving emails because because I’m getting too much inbound. But back Which is why I send WhatsApps. Yeah. But back then that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing. Back then, they were you know, I I turned around and said, hey, we’re not gonna sell.

We need to get to the point because we only have one shot. We only have one shot with these lawyers because they are very impatient. If it doesn’t work, they’re not gonna come back. And that’s why activation and getting that, like, the time to value is so important in the product. But to go back, we took six months, calculate the time, and said we’re not going to sell. We have to solve our infrastructure, our reliability, the scalability of the product, and we need to rebuild and refactor a lot of it because it had just been quickly put together.

And what we told all the clients were we were lucky, you know, it was summer because we could say, oh, it’s, you know, summer in Europe, so we’re not working. And we’re gonna wait to onboard you after summer. And there’s so much demand that we’re gonna have to do it in October because September is, like, completely full. We can’t onboard more clients. But 10/01/2024, we were ready to onboard a thousand lawyers a day comfortably on the product. And we got to that point, and then we started to do a rip.

And I’m very proud that I had the guts to tell the investors that that was the right plan. Because I think if we had continued to push, we would have just churned everything.

Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t think we conceded a lot of ground, and we are winning back a lot of ground, if you put it that way.

No. I think everybody is still treating this as an extended pilot and an option on AI. It’s like a call option. They’re not doing five year contracts. They’re doing one to three year contracts. And in law firm time, that’s just, you know, that’s a blink. Many of these firms have been around for two hundred years. So two years might be half of our lifetime, but for them, it’s it’s a short time.

So for both those numbers, yes. But on NRR, I don’t think that’s a fair number for me to comment on because so much of our growth is not about renewing contracts from 2024. In a single day in 2025 in December, we added 7,000,000 of ARR one day in twenty four hours. And that was more than what we did in 2023 and 2024 combined. And so NRR and logo retention, you know, it’s up to 2026 to determine where those, you know, real numbers will be. And I think for for what it’s worth, the ability of these products to go quite broad will be very interesting because, you know, to some extent, there’s initial use cases that you can solve with AI that we target.

And then the more time we spend with our clients, the more problems and opportunities we see. And so what’s happening to the product is they’re growing quite a lot. And so what I think will happen is that this will be like a suite, like a platform kind of play that just becomes more and more of the central system where they do their work.

I think that’s optimal for the buyer. I don’t think that’s optimal for us.

And so I’ll

It is. I actually don’t think it’s the right pricing Yeah. I think it should be consumption based. Yeah. Because you can have individual users racking up such big LLM costs that it it basically becomes unsustainable on on a per user basis. The reason why we have that is you need to make it easy for the buyer. If they don’t know how to manage a consumption based pricing model, you can’t have it. And I think that will pivot. And I’m unsure exactly what the timing is. I think the timing is more around when the clients are ready versus when we are ready.

Right. No. It actually costs more. Yeah. I mean, so it’s a bad thing the more they use the product. Do you have good margins? We have okay margins. I respect the honesty of that answer. Yeah. Right? It’s it’s SaaS margins, And I think it will take time to get there. Will it get there, you think? Or is it Yes. I think it will get there. Not only do I think it will get there, but I think your ability to price versus traditional SaaS products will be insanely high.

Because you used to use a lot of these products to do very narrow parts of the work, and they were all disconnected. To give you an insight into the life of a lawyer, it’s like you have this product over here that you use to compare two contracts. You have this product over here that you use to extract relevant data from contracts. You have this other product over here where you go and look up legislation. You have this other product over here where you go and look up case law.

Right? All these all these different things. So you as the human had to sit there, comb through all these different systems, like, aggregate the stuff yourself. But now, similar to OPUS 4.5, you’re just gonna send the task to Legora, and it can be pretty arbitrary, then you let it figure it out. And it just goes and does all the work, or at least a big portion of the work, in a much, much, much, much shorter time at a very high quality level. And when you do that, you are not being priced against the other SaaS products.

You’re being priced against, you know, what would I pay a lawyer to go out and actually do this work.

Absolutely not.

our clients are ready to buy on consumption.

respectfully? Because, you know, Cursor is consumption, a lot of other enterprise tools are for consumption. I just think legal takes a little bit more time. But within three years? Well, look, you’ve got to understand my vantage point. Three years is longer than I’ve been CEO at Legora for. So three years for me is is a very long time going forward.

You can do

But it’s also I don’t think we’re in the margin optimization time yet.

Yes. That’s the right way to phrase it.

Biggest challenge that we have right now is growing from 30 to 300, and then doubling again in the next two quarters from 300 to 600 and maintaining the ambition, integrity, teamwork, and just, like, raw grit that got us here when you double the team. I think we we just hired two two new people in The US, and they were really surprised by how late everybody was working. They were like, oh, at the at the other place I was at, which was a, you know, another another legal tech provider, everybody left at six.

We And have dinner in the office at eight. And so when your entire team globally operates at that level and at that pace with that, you know, goal in mind, that’s awesome. But I care a lot about maintaining that. There’s so many maintain that? Well, I still interview everyone. So I ask quite brutal questions about why take a hard job, you could go work somewhere else. I try to create missionaries, not mercenaries. And I think we’ve successfully done that. I also think that you you get pulled in.

Like, when you see everybody else doing it, you’re just like, okay. Of course, I’m gonna do it. And momentum breeds momentum. Like, we were signing deals on New Year’s Eve. We had a big Christmas dinner whilst we were having or what’s it called? Mule wine? Yeah. You have that in Sweden. We were having the wine before the before the dinner, and we had the big sales dashboard, like, at the wine thing. And everybody kept looking at it because, like, everybody wants momentum. Everybody wants to win.

And when you join a company and you feel like a winner, I think you get burned out doing work that you know, where where you don’t feel like you’re winning.

Oh, yes. I think I’m very good at it, actually. And competition can be played at a macro level, where you think us versus them, but you can also do it at a lower level, which is our marketing team wants to be that marketing team, or our engineers want to build a faster document upload time than that other team. So you compete on all these micro levels, and you celebrate them like crazy. What I’ve learned this year, I actually used to be quite bad at celebrating. I remember when I was in in business school, my my dream job was to go to McKinsey because I thought that that’s where that’s where all the amazing people went.

I found out maybe that that was not the case. But when I when I got the call and I got the job, I was in the in the grocery store, and I celebrated by buying a bag of peanuts. Wow. Yeah. That was a bit crazy. So I was really bad at celebrating, like really bad. Explains why you’re

thin, but but this year, we’ve learned to celebrate, and it’s amazing. You celebrate the wins really hard because then you also really feel the losses. Because I think it’s it’s easy to get to be blindsided if you have momentum and you have success. You need to see the world for what it is.

That’s funny. I am gonna ask you. Have they ripped your product? Well, I think we take a lot of pride in developing our product as fast and as well as we can. And I think there’s two main parts to to our product development. One of them is improving the parts that we have, and the other one is making new qualified bets. I think we have had a history of making bold and correct bets. I think there’s many legal tech products that on the surface looks pretty similar.

There’s even another product where they ripped our name and it’s it’s, you know, our Tabular Review. It’s just called Tabular Review in their product, which is totally fine. But what happens when you then go into these competitive pilots and the user starts to kind of rip them apart, that’s where you see that one product is a Rolls Royce and or maybe a Volvo, and the other product is maybe a cheaper version.

The first version of the Legora product back in summer of twenty twenty three, that was completely the wrong direction. We built it centered around a couple of core use cases, and we did not have an agent or a chat that could operate over those tasks. It was like a click and point use case, clearly the wrong direction. So after we got accepted into Y Combinator, we deleted all of that code. I think we made some good product decisions by very early adopting basically, LangChain was too bad at the time, so we built our own agent architecture.

And we did that very early, which I’m very proud of. And that was, like, the right direction to continue on. Now You

No. I I it’s been completely rebuilt many times. I last committed code in October 2020. But

Yeah. I think we’re not the size of Revolut or Deal, and so it probably doesn’t make sense for us to do that. And Langchain and a lot of their surrounding tools have gotten a lot better. And so I think we’re in picking the best third party things. Yeah. The other right product decision we made or wrong was that we were doing too many things. So in 2024, we were 12 engineers, and we were trying to build six or seven different things at the same time. And that was creating a lot of confusion because I was very involved in the product decisions at the time, and I was basically just out doing go to market.

And so we’d make a lot of product decisions without me in the loop, and then it kinda looked like a Frankenstein monster. There’s actually a pretty funny doc from October or November 2024 that was called the Leya product manifesto. Gosh. I remember. Yeah. We were Leya. In 2025, we were still called Leya. Yeah. I remember. And it basically outlined that we were gonna do three things, but we were gonna do those three things so well that our suite was the best basket money could buy. And it was our agent, our assistant, our Tabular Review, and our word add in.

And we were competing with local products for these different things. Right? Like the Word add in was competing with a bunch of other legal tech companies that were only focused on the Word add in. Our Tabular Review was competing with, at the time, Hebia, companies who were only focused on, like, Tabular Review as or the matrix, I think they call it. And then we had our our agent. But we said, if we have all of these three things and we combine them in a very user friendly way, that suite is gonna be better than buying all of these three things separately.

And that’s kind of the platform play or the suite play. That was totally the right move. So we removed five or six other things that we were building, just deleted the code, and then we hard committed on these things.

Azure? The reason why I don’t think it’s a Uber and Lyft is because in Uber and Lyft, there was no product differentiation. The products were pretty much the same. It was strategy differentiation very on global vertical. Yeah. But it was very hard to build something different. Uber, for what it’s worth, I mean, the product looks the same today, basically, with the addition of bells and whistles, but it’s the same fundamental thing. But the difference to our story is that the product differentiation really matters, and the amount of things that you can go and build is so vast.

It’s like this universe of legal technology that just has never been built. Because one of my theories is that maybe in legal tech before generative AI, there weren’t that many exciting things to build, and it was really hard to scale a good company. And as soon as you got to, like, single digit million revenue, you would get an acquisition offer, which would be life changing money for the founders, but no unicorn outcomes. So the product strategy will impact the trajectory of all of the businesses in our in our vertical tremendously.

I think it’s totally a winner takes all. All SaaS, I mean, you know this. Number one will grab 90%, and number two to number 10 will share the remaining 10%. And so I think what that means for us is gotta run like hell. You gotta win. There’s no number two. There is only being number one. There’s only winning. Everything else is losing. The type of people who think like that are the people who

at the core.

do you feel about those two? I don’t think that owning the entire service layer and software layer is a winning strategy, basically building an AI native law firm. The reason is I think there are so many talented lawyers that are very good at utilising software, and I would not want to compete for them. I think it’s easy to get into that space and try and solve lower complexity tasks. I mean, you’re starting out with kind of nondisclosure agreements, master service agreements. You can get there pretty quickly, but then that will be a very crowded space in and of itself.

I would much rather be the shovel seller to all the world’s amazingly talented lawyers who want to turn their firms into software powered entities. I don’t think that there will be a ton of margins slash profit in the low complexity work. Because I think as soon as AI can do a task, it will do that task. The only question is kinda where does it get transacted? And the big law firms, they already do NDAs for free for their clients because they got to win the expensive private equity work.

And so it’s like, are you gonna show up as Crosby or somebody else and go, hey, pay me $50 of NDA? I’m not sure. Okay. So we think that’s not a good strategy. What about the verticalization? Yeah. I think you can quicker get to a lot of value in verticalizing. I’m not sure what the TAM looks like within each of those verticals. If you look at patents, it’s a $485,000,000,000 market. Yeah. So it’s a huge market. So maybe you go win patents, and that’s amazing. Or patents becomes part of a broader thing.

Unclear. I think there will be many winners in different layers of the ecosystem. And I also think that there’s one part which is kind of the central hub that will you know, let’s say somebody goes to Legora and they wanna write a patent, then why don’t we just ping Solve Intelligence? Yeah. And say, hey, Solve Intelligence. Come write us this patent. Yeah. And then it comes back and does it. Or maybe that’s what Coat Pilot wants to do. Right? I think there’s there’s a lot of Venn diagrams and a lot of overlap.

Right now, I think it’s more down to execution than it is to, like, underlying market, being smart about the markets.

Nowhere, like, 50.

Okay.

I don’t think that’s fair. I think we were very good at seeding the Legora culture in The US, and a couple of our best people from Europe went to The US and have spent a lot of time there.

Yeah. It’s a bit of bullshit. I think it’s a little bullshit. But for what it’s worth, the culture that we have in our US office now is I almost wanna spend more time in The US just to be there because it’s electric. It’s I mean, York is on fire. And I have a hard time spending a lot of time in New York and then coming back to Stockholm because New York is always up. It’s always awake. It’s my tempo. Whereas Stockholm is when you walk out on the street, when you’re in the office, it’s a little sleep.

Why are you not living in New York or living in The US? I’m de facto living on a plane. I had two hundred travel days last year in total. Last year, I spent a meaningful amount of time on product, and we have all engineering in Stockholm. We’re 10% YC founders in our engineering product and design team.

Which I think is a high number. Two of our batchmates have actually joined

company.

I think what’s cool about it is we’re we’re structured in a way where I think my management style is very it’s not it’s a lot of delegating. It’s not very micromanaging, and it’s very, here’s the thing, go wrong with it. I think founders do very well with that. I also think it basically gives all the different components of our platform, which is separated into pods. Like, we have one team working on this piece of the product, one team working on this piece of the product, and there’s like a YC founder running part of the product, and then they just run like hell on their thing.

And they’re competitive about their part being better than all the other parts, or rather their equivalents in other products. I also think YC has a way of attracting very ambitious people who wanna win.

Well, I’ll tell you a little bit later in the quarter. But in December, we added 7,000,000 in a day, and we’ve basically doubled every single quarter for the last six

Definitely. Otherwise, I’ll come back and What’s the stretch goal? You can you can shame me.

Well, I don’t view the number in isolation. I’ll be happy by the end of the year if we deliver on all the promises we made to clients, and and we don’t even need these competitive pilots. If you’re a lawyer and you do serious legal work, you’re on Legora. It’s like Figma. If you’re a designer that makes money, you’re on Figma. I want that to be the truth. And if we do that, I’m sure 300 is the number or even more. Right?

So I think law firms will go through a quite significant consolidation period because so far, there hasn’t been a lot of incentives to consolidate law firms. But now, actually private equity wants to get in on the action, want to fund different law firms who want to become AI powered. Again, coming back to the idea of do you want to own the whole stack or do you just want to work with the service layer? And so you’re saying a roll up play where you integrate ARR Absolutely.

Juice up the promotions Look. Don’t think there’s gonna be an AMLOT 200. Think it’s gonna be an AMLOT 20 or maybe AMLOT 12. I don’t think it’ll be a big four because of regulation, and it just takes time. But it will definitely consolidate. At the end of the day, Legora and I care about working with the winners of that space because the technology lever will be one of the, if not the most important lever, to utilise in competing against other firms. It it looks different for different practice areas and in different calibers, but let’s take a bread and butter m and a transaction.

In a bread and butter m and a transaction, the legal work that the law firms do is pretty much undifferentiated. You get pretty much the same thing depending on which firm you go to. If you just look at the, you know, DD and the work. It’s kind of an equilibrium where the price gets offered at. Let’s say it’s a $100,100,000 pounds. The minute that one of the firms that are playing in this game are able to offer that at a lower price, but same quality, or maybe higher speed, or something like that, some attractive aspect of running that deal.

Let’s say they’re offering at 80 k. You kind of break the equilibrium. Everybody has to move to that equilibrium. So it’s kind of a market share game. It’s like who can run the fastest on technology and all the others, the other aspects of what it takes to run a law firm, and who can win most of the market and then hold that market. Because then I think you’re able to deliver additional services that go outside of what the very, very, very competitive things are.

I actually think law firms will be bigger, right, because they will consolidate. But I don’t think that you will need the same number of lawyers running a transaction as you have today. Right? If you have a physical data room, that’s why it’s called a data room, you just have to send people there, and they would open up all the boxes, read everything, make all the commentary. Right? And then it became a virtual data room.

Yeah. So more transactions, probably fewer people running those transactions, but every person can run more transactions because of technology. More transactions because So of

I do think that there will probably be less junior lawyers and trainees, because I think that you just won’t need as many people to execute the work that the firm has.

But I’m already seeing patterns of this, where firms that we work with will have, you know, somebody leaving. They will not fill the vacancy, but they’re doing more revenue than they did last year. And so it’s a higher profit. I think it might also create an opportunity for big law will do really well, because they have a lot of moats and a lot of brand and a lot of data. Small law can do really well, because that’s still operating on a very, very personal basis. I think where it might get difficult is mid law, where it’s very competitive, you’re competing hard on price, you throw AI into the mix, and it will make it even more competitive.

But in engineering, let me like, let’s just take another example. We’re hiring more engineers, although they’re writing more code. Right? Because there’s, like, more stuff to do. So the thing for the law firms is they need to increase the size of the pie.

I think so, actually. Because I think that there’ll be you can just do more stuff. You’ll have more people writing code and doing things or starting new things and and projects and and things in two years than you have today.

Well, I think it’s within that time frame that AI gets pretty good at completing end to end tasks very deterministically within our vertical. So unless they can find something else to do than, you know, that thing within the firm or growing the pie, then, yeah. But here’s the cool thing. Right? Like, if you use technology to complete more of the work, then you need to think about how you win more work from the other firms. But, yeah, I mean, on a on a total, like, for but I’m talking for an individual firm.

If you’re talking on the total level, yeah, probably.

No. That’s not something that I worry about.

Yeah. It’s wild. Fucking wild. Adrian, who was our our VP of product, his YC company did AI timekeeping.

wild. Are billable hours over? No. I don’t think it is. I think billing will move much slower than both you and I would think, because often it’s actually demanded by the clients because they want to get a breakdown of everything that the the lawyers actually do. And it will start to be replaced by fixed fees in different practice areas and for different types of tasks, but you will still have a sort of ephemeral billable hour above that.

fundraising? The advice that I got in YC was build a good business, and it’s very easy to fundraise. That’s what I’ve lived by. I don’t think I’m a master fundraiser by any means, but I With

No. So so Redpoint was not the fund that first wanted to preempt us. There was another firm that wanted to preempt us for the a round, and they gave a very competitive term sheet for this series for this series seed. Much higher price than Benchmark. Benchmark was, I think, the lowest price out of any seed fund.

Yeah. I place value on Chatham. Chatham, not Benchmark? Yes. Interesting. I picked on Partner. You know, I heard Benchmark was good. You know, I can do that research. But I met within two weeks, probably 80 partners. Nobody knew my space better than him. I thought it was great. You know, it’s taken three companies public. That’s what I want to do, and I thought I’d be much better off working with with that guy.

No. I love YC. But all the other other investors are are on my board, so I would feel very rude seeing someone else. That’d be a fucking awkward board meeting. That would be very awkward. No. No. But, yeah, I I think because they’re not that well, I think that’s unfair. They’re extremely helpful still. YC rocks. I still speak with Gustav every quarter, but all the other are either board observers or board of directors. So that I I don’t I can’t comment on that. What’s your most unpopular belief about where AI is heading?

I really do believe in the platformization. I think there are way too many point solutions that will not survive a winter bubble, whatever you might call it, and they would deliver more value as being part of a broader ecosystem. What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of Leya? I wish I knew what the intensity of doing and thinking about nothing else would sort of impact your own psyche and and personality. For the last two and a half years, I’ve basically done nothing else than to think about Leya or Legora or the business.

And, you know, when you’re in college or prior to that, I was doing so many different things. It was nice to do many different things, and you got to have many different contexts, and you got to do many different types of activities. And when you got tired of one thing, you could go and do another thing. This is not that. It is like running a mega sprint as part of a marathon, and I love it. But I think, you know, could I go back and and also have that expectation going in?

I think I would I would have been better at handling other disappointments or, you know, parts of my life that that I couldn’t focus as much on.

No. No. Because you you can’t focus on doing that. You can’t make good decisions. Or or, right, you know, you can invest 10 k in a friend’s company because it’s nice, but you can’t do it seriously.

I’m pretty bad at having idols. I wish I was better at it. I was super nervous the first time I met Don Eliak from Spotify. I remember, like, I was super like, I thought that was the coolest thing ever in, like, 2024. He had reached out to us. I was like, hey. You know, love what you guys are doing. That sounds amazing. It’s amazing. When I grew up, looking at Nicholas and Daniel and Sebastian and seeing these Swedish tech companies succeed, that was phenomenal. That that was a huge inspiration.

And now having met Alex and Gustav who are taking over Daniel, like, they’re also fabulous. But I don’t go around on on a daily basis thinking, oh, I look up to this person. I I wanna be like them. I try to draw inspiration from where I see good, and then I run at it. Final one.

advice you’ve ever been given? The best advice I have ever been given was probably from YC and Joel at Sona Labs, which was to take the check with Benchmark over anyone else.