Legora is building the agentic operating system for legal work

Building for a profession where time—and trust—are scarce

Founded in Stockholm in 2023, Legora ⁠ (opens in a new window) is building what CEO and co-founder Max Junestrand calls “the agentic operating system for legal work”: bringing AI into the workflows lawyers rely on every day.

The company started with the insight that legal teams are unusually time crunched, meaning some valuable work doesn’t get done. Think of the junior lawyer told to review an impossible number of contracts overnight and only able to focus on a fraction.

Legora can provide those services “on tap”, which is why Junestrand’s ambition is that every piece of legal work in the world should run on his platform. OpenAI has been part of that journey from the beginning: the release of GPT‑3.5 was the moment many of the legal use cases the founding team had been experimenting with became possible. Today, OpenAI is a key model provider for Legora, powering core workflows across its legal AI platform, from agentic legal work to large-scale document review. Legora builds on new OpenAI model capabilities as they become available, translating advances in intelligence into what lawyers can accomplish with its product.

An AI-native company building an AI-native product

Legora’s use of AI goes beyond the product it sells, and has expanded its use of ChatGPT Work, Codex and dots across its own teams. OpenAI’s technology is becoming part of both the product Legora builds for its customers as well as shaping how the company itself operates. “It’s incredibly important to me that we stay as AI-native as possible,” confirms Junestrand.

For Jacob Lauritzen, CTO at Legora, coding agents have changed how quickly the engineering team can develop new ideas. Instead of researching one possible solution and committing engineering time before knowing whether it’s the right path, teams can prototype many approaches at once. “We can explore 20 solutions at the same time and, within days, pick the one we know will be the best.”

The same approach changes how Legora responds when something goes wrong. Previously, diagnosing a product issue could mean several engineers investigating different possible causes over a number of hours. Coding agents can now search millions of lines of logs and pursue many possible explanations simultaneously, sometimes taking Legora from bug report to working fix in around five minutes .

Customers, of course, don’t see the engineering efficiency itself. But they do experience the results: problems can be resolved faster, feedback can reach product teams sooner, and new ideas can be tested with customers earlier in the development cycle.

Giving Legora’s own lawyers room to do higher-value work

Legora’s own legal team experiences the same transformation its product is designed to create for customers. General Counsel Emma Kadri Bergström points to the example of NDAs. Her team analysed the agreements they had historically signed and built a playbook that allows Legora to take a first pass at incoming NDAs, highlighting terms that fall outside acceptable parameters.

Before the workflow was introduced, Kadri Bergström estimates that reviewing these “boring documents” consumed around 20% of the legal team’s capacity . Today, it’s under 1% .

That reclaimed time matters because the company itself is scaling rapidly. In the past year, Kadri Bergström says the business has expanded from three offices to 18 , completed threefinancing rounds and made five acquisitions . The legal team has had to support that growth while remaining closely connected to the business.

AI has also allowed the team to take on work that might previously have been outsourced or narrowed because of limited capacity. In M&A diligence, for example, agents can begin reviewing contracts and surfacing information across the deal set, with lawyers reviewing and interpreting the output.

“AI doesn’t just make you faster. It also increases quality.”

—Emma Kadri Bergström, General Counsel, Legora

From faster review to broader, higher-quality analysis

For Legora’s customers, the opportunity isn’t simply to complete the same work faster. AI has also increased the scope of work that can be taken on.

Alex Fortescue-Webb, Global Head of Legal Engineering, points to due diligence as an example. In a traditional review, time and cost constraints can force teams to concentrate deeply on only the most valuable contracts. Legora’s Tabular Review workflow can analyse thousands of contracts across multiple questions in minutes, allowing lawyers to apply detailed scrutiny much more broadly.

That can alter the quality of the final work. Risks that might previously have sat in contracts outside the manually reviewed subset can now be surfaced for a lawyer to assess.

The results are already measurable. Junestrand cites one Fortune 100 customer that has:

- reduced contract turnaround time by 90%

- saved more than $20 million on external litigation and diligence

- returned 9.5 hours per lawyer each week for higher-value work