Legora, a Stockholm-founded startup from 2023, is building what its CEO and co-founder Max Junestrand calls an "agentic operating system for legal work." The platform uses OpenAI models and coding agents to automate routine legal tasks, accelerate workflows and free lawyers to focus on higher-value work. Legora applies the same AI tools both in its product and across its own teams.
Why Legora was created
The founding insight was that legal teams are often extremely time-constrained, leaving important work undone. Legora aims to provide on-demand services for high-volume, low-judgment tasks — for example, first-pass NDA reviews, large-scale contract analysis and M&A due diligence preparation — so lawyers can concentrate on tasks requiring human judgement.
Technology and engineering practices
OpenAI models have been central to Legora from early on: the release of GPT‑3.5 made many of the team’s legal use cases feasible, and OpenAI remains a key model provider. Legora incorporates new OpenAI capabilities as they become available and also uses ChatGPT Work, Codex and related tools internally.
CTO Jacob Lauritzen says coding agents have changed how fast engineering can explore ideas. Rather than investing engineering time in a single approach, teams can prototype many solutions in parallel — sometimes exploring twenty options and selecting the best within days. When incidents occur, agents can search millions of lines of logs and investigate multiple hypotheses at once, which in some cases has reduced turnaround from bug report to fix to around five minutes.
Impact on legal workflows
Legora’s own legal team experienced a dramatic reduction in time spent on low-value tasks. General Counsel Emma Kadri Bergström cites NDAs as an example: prior to the new workflow, reviewing these documents consumed roughly 20% of the legal team’s capacity; after implementation, that share fell to under 1% — a more than 95% reduction.
The timing matters because Legora itself is scaling rapidly. According to Kadri Bergström, over the past year the company grew from three offices to 18, completed three financing rounds and made five acquisitions, all of which required legal support.
AI has also enabled the team to take on work that might previously have been outsourced or limited by capacity. In M&A due diligence, agents can initially review contracts and surface relevant information across a deal set, with lawyers reviewing and interpreting the results.
Measured customer outcomes
Legora reports concrete results for customers. For one Fortune 100 client the platform helped to:
- save more than $20 million on external litigation and diligence,
- return 9.5 hours per lawyer each week for higher-value work,
- achieve 90% faster contract turnaround.
Through the Legora plugin for ChatGPT, legal teams can also invoke Legora capabilities within ChatGPT conversations.
Other headline metrics cited by Legora include over 95% reduction in internal NDA review time (from ~20% of team capacity to under 1%) and a 90% faster contract turnaround for the Fortune 100 client.
Adoption lessons and operating principles
Legora highlights several practical principles for internal and customer adoption:
- Lead by using: when more than 75% of leaders actively use the system, median organisational usage is three times higher.
- Start with the problem: define what people need to accomplish, then determine where AI improves the workflow.
- Build a network of champions to convert experimentation into sustained adoption.
- Be ready to rebuild as model improvements can quickly make previous product assumptions outdated.
- Design for trust: embed evaluation, testing and transparency into the experience from the start.
What’s next
Legora sees two parallel advances shaping the next phase. First, agents will take on longer-running, higher-context tasks — for example, overnight due diligence across millions of pages with analysis ready for lawyers the next morning. Second, faster models will enable more real-time collaboration where lawyer and AI iterate back and forth on a contract, analysis or advice rather than using AI as a one-shot task runner.
Jacob Lauritzen summarises the approach: blending human and AI yields the best outcomes. Emma Kadri Bergström adds that AI can change how legal teams are perceived within organisations — from bottlenecks to business partners. Max Junestrand’s assessment is succinct: "It’s the best time in history to be a lawyer."
Legora’s stated aim is not only to make current workflows faster, but to expand the kinds of legal work that can be undertaken, freeing lawyers for judgement, strategy and higher-value decisions that remain inherently human.
