Legora CEO, Max Junestrand: $7M ARR in a Day & $200M Raised | Is Anthropic Crushing OpenAI?

1. 0:00 – 2:56

   Intro

   1. MJMax Junestrand0:00

      It doesn't really matter who was first. It matters who's best. We are moving at such a rapid pace that-

   2. HSHarry Stebbings0:09

      Last week, we had Harvey on the show. This week, we have their biggest competitor, Legora, and joining me is Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO at Legora.

   3. MJMax Junestrand0:16

      In a single day in 2025, we added seven million of ARR in twenty-four hours, and that was more than what we did in 2023 and 2024 combined.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings0:26

      There's this conception that Harvey have won the US, and that you have won Europe.

   5. MJMax Junestrand0:30

      Hmm. I think one of those statements are true.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings0:35

      [chuckles]

   7. MJMax Junestrand0:36

      It's totally a winner takes all. I mean, you know this. Number one will grab ninety percent, and number two to number ten will share the remaining ten percent. What that means for us is you've got to run like hell. You've got to win. There's no number two. There is only being number one. There's only winning, and everything else is losing.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings0:55

      [clapperboard claps] Ready to go? [upbeat music] Dude, we did our last show, and I have to admit, I was, I was so surprised, not... And this sounds awfully rude, but it's the end of the day, fuck it, uh, by how well it did in specifically this incredible founder community, where I got pinged by, like, three hundred or four hundred founders-

   9. MJMax Junestrand1:25

      Yeah

   10. HSHarry Stebbings1:25

       ... which is more than normal, actually.

   11. MJMax Junestrand1:26

       That sounds like a big number.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings1:28

       Yeah, it's pretty solid. Um, and mostly it's just kind of VCs. [chuckles]

   13. MJMax Junestrand1:31

       Yeah. [chuckles]

   14. HSHarry Stebbings1:32

       Um, but thank you so much for agreeing to do a second show with me.

   15. MJMax Junestrand1:34

       Always.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings1:35

       Now, before-

   17. MJMax Junestrand1:35

       Happy to be back.

   18. HSHarry Stebbings1:36

       Before I grill the shit out of you-

   19. MJMax Junestrand1:37

       [chuckles]

   20. HSHarry Stebbings1:38

       ... uh, sixty seconds, what does Legora do? Just to set the scene for people that don't know.

   21. MJMax Junestrand1:42

       Yeah. Legora is the platform where legal work happens. I think that's a better pitch than the one that I had last time. W- and what started to happen more and more is AI is, uh, doing more and more parts of legal work, and this has to happen on a centralized platform. And what we started out with was, I mean, 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, right? So more and more of these tasks are being, uh, bundled into the platform, and what we're seeing is that, um, a bigger and bigger part of a lawyer's day is being spent on Legora, which is amazing. That's my favorite, uh, data point.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings2:44

       Is that the number one metric you use in terms of product metric?

   23. MJMax Junestrand2:48

       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.

2. 2:56 – 8:31

   Why Does Everyone Think Harvey When They Hear Legal AI?

   1. HSHarry Stebbings2:56

      When people think AI law, there's a ton of fucking players around the space and around the verticals, but there's you and there's Harvey.

   2. MJMax Junestrand3:03

      Mm.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings3:04

      And if we're blunt, Harvey is the first name that comes up. When you think about that, why is that?

   4. MJMax Junestrand3:11

      I don't necessarily think that's the case anymore, and the reason I say that is, um, 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 two hundred 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 more work with. So what op- 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, uh, they get to bring in all these different vendors, and they say: "We're gonna do a 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, um, like, an outcome tomorrow, and they're buying into a vision of what an AI-enabled legal team can look like.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings4:42

      Mm.

   6. MJMax Junestrand4:42

      And so when they look across the board and they see all these different companies, uh, they make qualified bets, and more, and more, and more, um, we're seeing those firms make that bet on Legora. I mean, this year alone... Actually, I went into our HR system, uh, before I came in here. We went from thirty to three hundred in twelve months exactly, in headcount. And this time last year, we were working with roughly fifty clients. Now we're with seven hundred and fifty, and so, you know, a name might be associated with a category. I'm pretty sure, uh, Google was not the name that you thought of back when AltaVista was the biggest, uh, web browser, but now it is synonymous to searching on the web.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings5:28

      Now, I wanna unpack a couple of elements. You said about, like, partnership-

   8. MJMax Junestrand5:31

      Yeah

   9. HSHarry Stebbings5:31

      ... and that being very central to how they think and how they choose. You know, I had, um, Matt Fitzpatrick, the founder of... or the CEO of Invisible, which is kind of like a Macaw or a Turing, a competitor.

   10. MJMax Junestrand5:41

       Mm-hmm.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings5:41

       And he said that, essentially, it is impossible to sell into enterprise without an FDE model.

   12. MJMax Junestrand5:48

       Mm-hmm.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings5:48

       Do you agree with that?

   14. MJMax Junestrand5:49

       So-

   15. HSHarry Stebbings5:49

       And are you seeing that?

   16. MJMax Junestrand5:51

       We have a very big, uh, team of legal engineers who are ex-practicing lawyers from the top-tier best firms, but they're not fully seconded, right? They're forward deployed in the sense that-... Their main job is to make you successful. Uh, an example would be, um, a, a big firm that just went with Legora, White & Case. White & 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, um, you know, a year from now or two years from now, it's gonna be a really, uh, sad conversation. So we invest a ton of upfront, uh, manual labor, and 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, um, for... If, if we're just staying in legal, if you're working with AI contracting, you basically have a contract lifecycle 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, uh, accountants had to learn Excel or, uh, architects having to learn CAD, right? Like, before, you 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, um, the blueprints for the building that you want, and the system g- AI generates it or, or generates it. And then you look at the math behind it, and then you bring taste, and you bring design. Um, when architects were learning CAD, I think it was an enormous change management, right? And all the old architects would go, "Harry, are you gonna use that A- you know, that, uh, computer system to do the hard work for you?" Uh, 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 client's architectural problems." Right? And I think that's kind of synonymous to what's happening today.

3. 8:31 – 14:57

   Why OpenAI is Toast? Switching to Anthropic!

   1. HSHarry Stebbings8:31

      You said about kind of actually the value not being in the first move or advantage, and actually, the value comes from being second. What did Harvey not do well that you learnt from, as specifically as possible?

   2. MJMax Junestrand8:42

      Some of the things that we observed were, um, s- spending a lot of effort on fine-tuning models, and that always seemed to me, at least back in 2023, like a waste of time.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings8:55

      Why?

   4. MJMax Junestrand8:55

      Well, also, mm, because the general models were improving at such a fast rate, that it felt like we should be building boats, and then when the tide rises, all of our products just get better.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings9:06

      Mm-hmm.

   6. MJMax Junestrand9:06

      And frankly, my initial team, we were three people. [chuckles]

   7. HSHarry Stebbings9:10

      [chuckles]

   8. MJMax Junestrand9:10

      We were three engineers, and so-

   9. HSHarry Stebbings9:11

      The thesis plays into the team structure.

   10. MJMax Junestrand9:13

       Right.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings9:13

       [chuckles]

   12. MJMax Junestrand9:14

       And, and we had fifty thousand euros in angel funding, and so, uh, it wasn't really on the question of, "Let's spend three million dollars fine-tuning a model." Um, but it happened to be right as well. Um, and we always believed that the majority of the value in our category would come from the application layer.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings9:32

       So you think work being done to fine-tune models does not give you an inherent advantage?

   14. MJMax Junestrand9:37

       It didn't do that back in 2023 as a starting strategy. I doubt that that's going to be the difference-maker today.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings9:47

       Do you think models are plateauing in performance today?

   16. MJMax Junestrand9:51

       No, I think Opus 4.5 is awesome. It's so good, and it continues getting better. I mean, honestly-

   17. HSHarry Stebbings9:59

       How much better is it?

   18. MJMax Junestrand10:00

       Well, it depends on the task. Uh, in coding, 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 optimizing the cost.

   19. HSHarry Stebbings10:10

       [chuckles]

   20. MJMax Junestrand10:11

       Pretty much, basically. And we are, we're-

   21. HSHarry Stebbings10:14

       What makes you say that? I'm sorry. I'm naive.

   22. MJMax Junestrand10:16

       Because I think its, its 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, um, you know, like a lobotomized [chuckles] system, pretty much.

   23. HSHarry Stebbings10:36

       [chuckles]

   24. MJMax Junestrand10:36

       Like, if you go back, it's crazy bad.

   25. HSHarry Stebbings10:38

       Yeah.

   26. MJMax Junestrand10:38

       And this was, uh, 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 4.5 feels like a VP. You give it: "Here's the thing I want. Go execute," and it just does it, and it's amazing.

   27. HSHarry Stebbings10:57

       Has Anthropic won the Claude code game? Does anyone on your team use Cursor? The question that I'm asking, so I'm, I'm investing.

   28. MJMax Junestrand11:04

       It's a good question. Uh, we're in both.

   29. HSHarry Stebbings11:06

       You are?

   30. MJMax Junestrand11:07

       We have both, yeah. Um, I'm actually not sure what the full team split is, but I know that we're using both, uh, very much. Um, but we are pretty die-hard, uh, Anthropic right now at the company-
4. 14:57 – 22:19

   24 Months: Which Foundation Models Will Win?

   1. MJMax Junestrand14:57

      and you could also allow that.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings14:58

      Can you help me? In twenty-four months, rank the model landscape for me.

   3. MJMax Junestrand15:04

      I'll bet based on the, what I've seen in the last sort of three, six months. I think for our type of work, it will either be Claude or Gemini. That is the top model, and 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, um, architecture around handling lack of context window, that we still prefer the Claude models, uh, or the Anthropic models. Um, and it seems to me like OpenAI is going down the, you know, let users fine-tune models, like that type of, uh, journey a bit more, which so far, I don't have a lot of reason to believe in.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings15:48

      Okay, so we're going for Anthropic slash Gemini, and then OpenAI?

   5. MJMax Junestrand15:52

      I think so. I also think it's, it's, um-

   6. HSHarry Stebbings15:55

      And we're not gonna throw Groq in there at all?

   7. MJMax Junestrand15:57

      No, we're not gonna throw Groq in there at all.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings15:59

      Okay.

   9. MJMax Junestrand16:00

      Um...

   10. HSHarry Stebbings16:00

       He launched. He, he said it. Don't kill me. [chuckles] It was not me.

   11. MJMax Junestrand16:04

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

   12. HSHarry Stebbings16:21

       A hundred percent.

   13. MJMax Junestrand16:22

       Yeah.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings16:23

       I guess.

   15. MJMax Junestrand16:23

       A- and, and, and we're an enterprise class type of system, thus, we should benefit more from their models.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings16:30

       Yeah, and Jason Lamkin, a dear friend of mine, and he said, he, you know, you know the shows with Jason Laurie. He said on a show recently that we're gonna see inference running twenty-four seven for a portion of the knowledge worker economy-

   17. MJMax Junestrand16:40

       Yeah

   18. HSHarry Stebbings16:40

       ... and how that really is gonna be the defining, uh, theme of the year.

   19. MJMax Junestrand16:43

       Mm.

   20. HSHarry Stebbings16:44

       Do you agree with that, and if so, what ramifications do you think that has?

   21. MJMax Junestrand16:50

       So basically, that you sort of are- you're continuously running tasks at all time-

   22. HSHarry Stebbings16:54

       Continuously, twenty-four hours a day

   23. MJMax Junestrand16:55

       ... for everything.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings16:56

       Exactly.

   25. MJMax Junestrand16:56

       Yeah.

   26. HSHarry Stebbings16:56

       When lawyers leave the office, they're gonna still have-

   27. MJMax Junestrand16:59

       Yeah

   28. HSHarry Stebbings16:59

       ... inference running for the projects that they have.

   29. MJMax Junestrand17:01

       For what it's worth, um, I don't think that we're there yet when we have tasks that take that much time to run, right? Like, um, w- 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. Um, I do think that we're gonna move into a world where we, you know, sort of start a lot of things as we go to bed, and we wake up in the morning, and it's done. Like, 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.

   30. HSHarry Stebbings17:46

       Yeah, I remember that.
5. 22:19 – 29:43

   Lessons Scaling from Europe into the US

   1. MJMax Junestrand22:20

      We can talk about some of the differences between, you know, US, Europe, but I think the, the termination period in the US versus in w- let's say, Sweden, is actually one of the structural, uh, benefits of having a big office in the US.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings22:36

      So how does it compare? Two weeks to leave in the US-

   3. MJMax Junestrand22:38

      Versus three months. On... Like, everybody has three months, basically.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings22:42

      And for you, as a founder, that is a night and day difference in terms of ramp?

   5. MJMax Junestrand22:46

      Well, w- 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? Um, it's wild. Like, w- so, 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 per on per. But, um, really awesome people can just turn out, turn up in two weeks.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings23:15

      So your biggest advice to founders on scaling in the US without committing large resources would be that you can do a freemium and test it from Europe?

   7. MJMax Junestrand23:23

      Yes. For sure. I think... Well, I think we, we could, so why can't you? And we're very enterprise. That might be different, right? We did not need to invest a ton in marketing or, like, B2C content in the US. I could just get on demos and get on a few flights. Um, you know, demo the product, run a few pilots, you know, always competitive pilots. And then, again, on the partnership level, um, show that we were willing to work with these firms on their ambition level because it's very high. Um, 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." We wanna be the firm that dominates our market because we understand AI and technology better than any other firm.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings24:16

      ... Totally get that. Do you, just going back to the US and the expansion there, do you regret waiting as long as you did?

   9. MJMax Junestrand24:22

      No. Did I tell you that I took a decision to not sell the product for six months?

   10. HSHarry Stebbings24:26

       No.

   11. MJMax Junestrand24:27

       So our first board meeting, after we-- So to give you some context, um, we were at YC, we raised $10 million from Benchmark. A month later, we raised another twenty-five million from Redpoint, and we had our first board meeting, and we were, like, twelve people at the time. First board meeting, it's Benchmark, Redpoint, and the three founders, and we sit down, and I tell them that we are not going to sell at all for the next six months. And Redpoint sort of looked at me, and they were, um, I think, a little, uh, nervous, that they had met me for basically an hour and forty-five minutes, [chuckles] um, and given me-

   12. HSHarry Stebbings25:10

       Paid a whopping price. [chuckles]

   13. MJMax Junestrand25:12

       [chuckles] And I was showing up, and I said, "We're not gonna sell."

   14. HSHarry Stebbings25:16

       What price was the Redpoint round?

   15. MJMax Junestrand25:17

       One fifty.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings25:19

       Huh!

   17. MJMax Junestrand25:20

       And yeah.

   18. HSHarry Stebbings25:21

       That's interesting. Do you regret taking... I'm not saying Redpoint-

   19. MJMax Junestrand25:25

       Mm.

   20. HSHarry Stebbings25:25

       -but doing that round?

   21. MJMax Junestrand25:26

       No.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings25:27

       'Cause that's a lot of dilution.

   23. MJMax Junestrand25:28

       Yeah.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings25:29

       Twenty-five at one fifty, when you didn't need the money two months after a Benchmark.

   25. MJMax Junestrand25:34

       Yeah, but you, you couldn't know that you didn't need the money. And if I remember correctly, um, 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 'cause, [chuckles] 'cause I'm getting too much inbound. But back then-

   26. HSHarry Stebbings25:55

       Which is why I send WhatsApps. [chuckles]

   27. MJMax Junestrand25:57

       Yeah. [chuckles] But back then... That's a good, uh, that's a good thing. Back then, they were, um... You know, I, I turned around and said, "Hey, we're not gonna sell. Um, we need to get to the point...' Cause we only have one shot. We only have one shot with these lawyers 'cause they are very impatient. If it doesn't work, they're not gonna come back.

   28. HSHarry Stebbings26:17

       Mm.

   29. MJMax Junestrand26:17

       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're gonna need to rebuild and refactor a lot of it," because it had just been quickly put together. And what we told [chuckles] all the clients were, we were lucky, you know, it was summer, 'cause we could say, "Oh, it's, you know, summer in Europe, so we're not working. Um, and we're gonna wait to onboard you, uh, after summer. Uh, 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 October 1st, 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 s-- like, then we started to rip. And I'm very proud that I had the guts to tell the investors that that was the right plan. 'Cause I think if we had continued to push, we'd, we would have just churned everything.

   30. HSHarry Stebbings27:28

       And so when you look back at the timing of the US expansion, do you not think you could have gone sooner and not ceded so much ground?
6. 29:43 – 34:04

   Why Seat Models Are Not Dead in SaaS?

   1. MJMax Junestrand29:43

      system where they do their work.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings29:44

      So on an NRR standpoint, do you charge on a per-seat basis or on a per-task basis or on a volume per-task basis?

   3. MJMax Junestrand29:50

      We charge on a per-seat basis.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings29:52

      Is that optimal?

   5. MJMax Junestrand29:54

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

   6. HSHarry Stebbings30:00

      Yeah.

   7. MJMax Junestrand30:01

      And so, and, and-

   8. HSHarry Stebbings30:02

      And is that not like solving for a historical norm, not a future-

   9. MJMax Junestrand30:05

      Yes

   10. HSHarry Stebbings30:06

       ... optimization?

   11. MJMax Junestrand30:06

       It is. I actually don't think it's the right pricing model.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings30:08

       Yeah.

   13. MJMax Junestrand30:09

       I think, um, it should be consumption-based-

   14. HSHarry Stebbings30:12

       Yeah

   15. MJMax Junestrand30:12

       ... because you can have individual users racking up such big LLM costs that it-... um, 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, right? If, if, if they don't know how to manage a consumption-based pricing model-

   16. HSHarry Stebbings30:38

       Mm.

   17. MJMax Junestrand30:38

       -you can't have it. Um, and I think that will pivot. Um, 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.

   18. HSHarry Stebbings30:50

       And so task expansion is incredibly useful for retention, not for revenue optimization.

   19. MJMax Junestrand30:55

       Mm-hmm.

   20. HSHarry Stebbings30:55

       In other words, the more they do, it's more likely they are to retain-

   21. MJMax Junestrand30:58

       Yeah

   22. HSHarry Stebbings30:58

       ... but it doesn't actually help your dollars.

   23. MJMax Junestrand31:01

       Right. But another int-- no, ac- actually, it costs us more.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings31:04

       Yeah.

   25. MJMax Junestrand31:04

       I mean, so, uh, it's, [chuckles] it's a bad thing- [laughing] ... the more they use the product. But, um-

   26. HSHarry Stebbings31:10

       Do you have good margins?

   27. MJMax Junestrand31:12

       We have okay margins. Um-

   28. HSHarry Stebbings31:14

       I respect the honesty of that answer. [chuckles]

   29. MJMax Junestrand31:17

       Yeah, yeah. Right? It, it's, it's not SaaS margins, and I think it will take time to get there.

   30. HSHarry Stebbings31:23

       Will it get there, do you think, or is-
7. 34:04 – 40:26

   How to Use Competition To Drive a Fire in Your Team?

   1. MJMax Junestrand34:04

      And-

   2. HSHarry Stebbings34:04

      In the land grab time, what is the biggest challenge that you face?

   3. MJMax Junestrand34:09

      The 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, uh, teamwork, and just, like, raw grit that got us here when you double the team. Like, I think we, we just hired, uh, two, two new, um, 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, uh, you know, another, another, uh, legal tech, um, provider, "um, everybody left at 6:00." And we have dinner in the office at 8:00. And so when your entire team globally operates at that level and at that pace, with that m- you know, goal in mind, uh, that's awesome, but I care a lot about maintaining that. I think the other main challenge is there's so many things-

   4. HSHarry Stebbings35:18

      How do you maintain that?

   5. MJMax Junestrand35:20

      Well, I still interview everyone, so I ask quite brutal questions about, you know, why, why, 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 it sort of... 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, uh, momentum breeds momentum. Like, we were signing deals on New Year's Eve. Um, we had a, we had a big, um, Christmas dinner, and whilst we were having, uh, glögg, or what's it called? Mulled, mulled wine.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings36:03

      Yeah, yeah.

   7. MJMax Junestrand36:03

      You have that in Sweden. We were having the, the wine before the, before the dinner, and we had the big sales dashboard in, in front of, uh, like, at the, at the wine thing, and everybody kept looking at it. 'Cause, like, everybody wants momentum. Everybody wants to win. And when you join a company and you feel like a winner-... you know, I think you get burned out doing work that, you know, where, where you don't feel like you're winning.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings36:31

      Do you think competition is helpful in creating that vibe?

   9. MJMax Junestrand36:35

      Hundred percent. Hundred percent. For of course.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings36:39

       Do you light the tinder, so to speak, and fuel the fire?

   11. MJMax Junestrand36:44

       Oh, yes. [chuckles] Of course. I think I'm very good at it, actually. [laughing] Um, 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 beat that marketing team, or, uh, 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, right? I think what I've learned this year, I, I actually used to be quite bad at celebrating. Um, I remember when I was in, in business school, my, my dream job was to go to McKinsey, 'cause I thought that- [laughing] ... that's where, that's where all the amazing people went. Um, 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, um, in the grocery store, and I celebrated by buying a bag of peanuts.

   12. HSHarry Stebbings37:47

       Wow!

   13. MJMax Junestrand37:47

       Yeah, that was a bit crazy. So I was really bad at celebrating, like, really bad.

   14. HSHarry Stebbings37:52

       Explains why you're so thin, but, [laughing]

   15. MJMax Junestrand37:55

       [laughing] But this year, we've learned to celebrate, and it's amazing. And you, you celebrate the wins really hard, 'cause then you also really feel the losses. 'Cause I think it's, it's easy to get to be blindsided if you have momentum and you have suc- success. You can-- you, you, you, you need to see the world for what it is.

   16. HSHarry Stebbings38:14

       I heard [clears throat] from some of your investors that internals at Harvey call you their CPO, speaking of-

   17. MJMax Junestrand38:21

       [chuckles]

   18. HSHarry Stebbings38:22

       ... comparisons of teams.

   19. MJMax Junestrand38:24

       Well, I, I think you'll have to ask them. That's funny. Um, I-

   20. HSHarry Stebbings38:28

       I am gonna ask you, have they ripped your product?

   21. MJMax Junestrand38:31

       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, and I think we have had a history of making, uh, 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, uh, they ripped our name, and it's, it's our tabular review. It's just called Tabular Review, their product, which is totally fine. Um, 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, you know, one product is a Rolls-Royce, and the other product... or maybe a Volvo, [chuckles] and the other product is, is, is maybe a, a cheaper version.

   22. HSHarry Stebbings39:32

       What product decision did you make that, with the benefit of hindsight, was a mistake?

   23. MJMax Junestrand39:37

       Mm.

   24. HSHarry Stebbings39:37

       And what did you learn?

   25. MJMax Junestrand39:39

       The first version of the Legora product back in 2020, summer of 2023, that was completely the wrong direction. We built it, uh, 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, uh... basically, LangChain was too bad at the time, so we built our own, uh, agent architecture.

   26. HSHarry Stebbings40:19

       Mm.

   27. MJMax Junestrand40:20

       And that, we did that very early, which I'm very proud of, and that was, like, the right direction to continue on. Now, Lang-

   28. HSHarry Stebbings40:25

       And you still have

8. 40:26 – 52:41

   Is Legal AI a Winner-Take-All Market? How Does It End?

   1. HSHarry Stebbings40:26

      that today?

   2. MJMax Junestrand40:27

      Uh, no, I, I, it's been completely rebuilt many times. I last, I last committed code in, uh, October 2023.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings40:34

      But I'm just intrigued as to how you think about that we're seeing more and more companies a la Deal or a la Rap-

   4. MJMax Junestrand40:39

      Mm.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings40:39

      uh, not Raplet, Revolut-

   6. MJMax Junestrand40:40

      Yeah

   7. HSHarry Stebbings40:40

      ... build their own complete vertical software.

   8. MJMax Junestrand40:43

      Yeah. I think we're not the size of Revolut or Deal, right? And so it probably doesn't make sense for us to do that. W... And, and LangChain and a lot of their surrounding tools have gotten a lot better.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings40:54

      Mm-hmm.

   10. MJMax Junestrand40:54

       And so I think we're in the job of, and our engineering team is in the job of picking the best third-party things.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings41:00

       Yeah.

   12. MJMax Junestrand41:01

       W- the other right product decision we made was, or, or, or wrong, was that we were doing too many things. So in 2024, we were 12 engineers, and we were trying to build, like, 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. So, um, there's actually a pretty funny doc, um, from October or November 2024, that was called the Leia Product Manifesto.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings41:47

       Oh, my gosh, I remember.

   14. MJMax Junestrand41:48

       Yeah, we were Leia this... uh, in 2025, we were still, like, called Leia.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings41:52

       Yeah, I remember.

   16. MJMax Junestrand41:53

       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, 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 another, uh, with a bunch of other legal tech companies that were only focused on the Word add-in. Our tabular review was, uh, competing with-... at the time, like Hebia, and companies who were only focused on, like, tabular review as, or the matrix, I think they call it. Um, 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, uh, removed five or six other things that we were building, just deleted the code, and then we hard committed on these things.

   17. HSHarry Stebbings43:00

       Can I ask, when you look at the landscape, when you think about kind of that bundling versus unbundling-

   18. MJMax Junestrand43:05

       Yeah

   19. HSHarry Stebbings43:05

       ... how you thought about that? When you look at the landscape today, how does that landscape look in three to five years? Is this a winner-take... If we, okay, actually, a much better way to ask that is, is this an Uber and a Lyft?

   20. MJMax Junestrand43:17

       Mm.

   21. HSHarry Stebbings43:17

       Or is this a Google Cloud, AWS, Azure?

   22. MJMax Junestrand43:22

       The reason why I don't think it's a Uber and Lyft is because Ub- in Uber and Lyft, there was no product differentiation. The products were pretty much the same.

   23. HSHarry Stebbings43:31

       Mm.

   24. MJMax Junestrand43:32

       And it was very-

   25. HSHarry Stebbings43:32

       It's strategy differentiation on global versus global.

   26. MJMax Junestrand43:35

       Yeah, but it was very hard to build something different. I mean, Uber, for what it's worth, I mean, the product looks the same today, basically, right? With the addition of, you know, bells and whistles, but it's the same fundamental thing. But, um, the difference to our story is that the product differentiation really matters, and there, and the, and the amount of things that you can go and build is so vast. It's like this universe of, uh, 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.

   27. HSHarry Stebbings44:21

       Mm.

   28. MJMax Junestrand44:21

       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, you know, no unicorn outcomes. [lips smack] 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, like all SaaS. I mean, you know this. Uh, 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 you've gotta run like hell. You've gotta win. There's no number two. There is only being number one. There's only winning, and everything else is losing. And the type of people who think like that are the people who work at Legora.

   29. HSHarry Stebbings45:15

       One segment that I do find interesting, or two segments, is like the verticalization.

   30. MJMax Junestrand45:20

       Mm-hmm.
9. 52:41 – 59:55

   The Future of Law Firms: Do Juniors Get Fired?

   1. HSHarry Stebbings52:41

      In terms of the structure of law firms, I, dude, I'm, I'm, I'm dating a lawyer.

   2. MJMax Junestrand52:46

      Yeah.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings52:46

      She sh- By the way-

   4. MJMax Junestrand52:47

      Amazing

   5. HSHarry Stebbings52:47

      ... thank- they thank- thank you. They thank you for the work that they now no longer have to do because you do it. But you will need far fewer trainees, you will need far few- fewer juniors.

   6. MJMax Junestrand52:58

      Yeah.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings52:58

      Do you agree you will need far fewer juniors, and what is the structure of a law firm in the future?

   8. MJMax Junestrand53:02

      So I think law firms will go through a quite significant consolidation period. Because so far, uh, there hasn't been a lot of, um, 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 wanna own the whole stack, or do you just wanna work with the best service layer?

   9. HSHarry Stebbings53:32

      And so you're seeing a roll-up play where you integrate AI?

   10. MJMax Junestrand53:34

       Absolutely.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings53:35

       Use up the margins, find people-

   12. MJMax Junestrand53:35

       I mean, look, I don't think there's gonna be an AM Law 200. I think it's gonna be an AM Law 20, uh, or maybe AM Law 12. I don't think it'll be a Big Four, uh, because of regulation, and it just takes time, but it will definitely consolidate. And at the end of the day, Legora and I care about working with the winners of that space. Because, as we talked about, I think l- the technology lever will be one of the, if not the most important lever to utilize in, um, competing against other firms in the, in that environment. It, it looks different for different practice areas and in different calibers, but let's take a bread-and-butter M&A transaction. In a bread-and-butter M&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. So it's, it's kind of, um, an equilibrium, where the price gets offered at, let's say it's a hundred, a hundred thousand 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. Uh, let's say they're offering it at eighty 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, uh, run a law firm, and who can win most of the market, and then hold that market? 'Cause then I think you're able to deliver additional services that go outside of what the very, very, very competitive things are.

   13. HSHarry Stebbings55:26

       Will we have fewer junior lawyers and trainees? Will law firms be smaller?

   14. MJMax Junestrand55:30

       Well, 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, uh, if you have a physical data room, now, w- that, that's why it's called a data room. You used to have to send people there, uh, they would open up all the boxes, and read everything, make all the commentary, right? And then it became a virtual data room.

   15. HSHarry Stebbings55:54

       So then you have to assume that there's gonna be more-

   16. MJMax Junestrand55:55

       Right, and so then you go to the, uh-

   17. HSHarry Stebbings55:56

       But you have to assume that there's gonna be more transactions-

   18. MJMax Junestrand55:59

       Yes

   19. HSHarry Stebbings55:59

       ... in the future.

   20. MJMax Junestrand56:00

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

   21. HSHarry Stebbings56:10

       So, so just to really be clear, you do not think there will be less trainees and junior account, junior lawyers?

   22. MJMax Junestrand56:15

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

   23. HSHarry Stebbings56:32

       Also, I-

   24. MJMax Junestrand56:32

       So-

   25. HSHarry Stebbings56:33

       Most, most law firms are partnerships, correct?

   26. MJMax Junestrand56:34

       Right, and so the profit-

   27. HSHarry Stebbings56:35

       The partnerships accrue profit-

   28. MJMax Junestrand56:36

       Yes, so-

   29. HSHarry Stebbings56:37

       ... so if I can take out-

   30. MJMax Junestrand56:38

       But, but I'm already seeing patterns of this, where firms that we work with will have, um, you know, somebody leaving, and they will not fill the vacancy, but they're doing more revenue than they did last year, and so it's higher profit. And I think it might also create an opportunity for... I think big law will do really well, 'cause they have a lot of moats and a lot of brand and a lot of data. I think small law can do really well, 'cause 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. Um, but it's, it's like for engineer- but in, but in engineering, let me... L- like, l- 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, like, they need to increase the size of the pie.
10. 59:55 – 1:01:33

    How We Raised $200M and 3 Rounds with No Deck

    1. HSHarry Stebbings59:56

       Dude, uh, I'm gonna ask you a quick fire. Does that sound okay?

    2. MJMax Junestrand59:58

       Shoot.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings59:59

       Three rounds, no deck.

    4. MJMax Junestrand1:00:02

       Oh! [chuckles]

    5. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:02

       What's, what's the biggest advice on fundraising?

    6. MJMax Junestrand1:00:05

       The advice that I got in YC was, "Build a good business, and it's very easy to fundraise."

    7. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:11

       Mm.

    8. MJMax Junestrand1:00:12

       Um, that's what I've lived by. I don't think I'm a master fundraiser by any means, but I am-

    9. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:20

       With respect, I'm gonna push you. Sorry. You got Benchmark early, which then led to Redpoint.

    10. MJMax Junestrand1:00:26

        Yeah.

    11. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:26

        Do you think Benchmark is just a massive signal which led to a quick successive round that you wouldn't have had otherwise?

    12. MJMax Junestrand1:00:34

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

    13. HSHarry Stebbings1:00:57

        But you place so much value on them that you took the discount?

    14. MJMax Junestrand1:01:00

        Yeah, I placed value on Chetan.

    15. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:02

        Chetan, not Benchmark?

    16. MJMax Junestrand1:01:04

        Yes.

    17. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:05

        Interesting.

    18. MJMax Junestrand1:01:06

        So 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 eighty partners. Nobody knew my space better than him. I thought it was great. Um, and you know, he's taken three companies public, and that's what I want to do, and I thought I'd be much better off working with, with that guy.

11. 1:01:33 – 1:06:27

    Quick-Fire Round: Best Advice, Closest Mentor, Biggest Mindset Shift

    1. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:33

       Unthinkable reality: you start another company, but you can only bring one investor with you.

    2. MJMax Junestrand1:01:38

       Yeah.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:39

       Who do you bring?

    4. MJMax Junestrand1:01:39

       Chetan.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:40

       Really?

    6. MJMax Junestrand1:01:41

       Oh, yeah. That, that's it. That's easy.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:43

       Okay, you can delete one investor from your cap table. Who do you delete?

    8. MJMax Junestrand1:01:47

       Well, I think I'll delete YC.

    9. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:50

       Do you regret doing YC?

    10. MJMax Junestrand1:01:52

        No, I love YC. Uh, but all the other, other investors are, are on my board, so I would feel very rude- [laughing]

    11. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:57

        [laughing]

    12. MJMax Junestrand1:01:58

        ... saying someone else.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings1:01:58

        That'd be a fucking awkward board meeting, wouldn't it?

    14. MJMax Junestrand1:02:00

        It would be very awkward. No, no, but, um, yeah, I th- I think because... Well, I think that's unfair. They're extremely helpful still. YC rocks. Uh, I still speak with Gustav every quarter. Uh, but all the other are either board observers or board of directors, so that I, I don't-

    15. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:18

        That's really tough

    16. MJMax Junestrand1:02:18

        ... I can't comment on that.

    17. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:19

        What's your most unpopular belief about where AI, AI is heading?

    18. MJMax Junestrand1:02:23

        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, they, they, they would deliver more value as being part of a broader ecosystem.

    19. HSHarry Stebbings1:02:49

        What do you know now that you wish you'd known at the start of Layer?

    20. MJMax Junestrand1:02:53

        What the intensity of doing and thinking about nothing else would, um, 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 Layer or Legora or the business, and, you know, when you're in, when you're in college or, or prior to that, I was doing so many different things, and I sort of, I... You know, 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. Uh, th- this is not that, right? Um, it is like running a mega sprint, uh, 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 it would have made it... I think it would- I would've been better at handling other disappointments or, you know, parts of my life that, that I couldn't focus as much on.

    21. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:05

        I think our job is much easier as venture investors than we give credit to. I think when you find obsessed founders that are just quite unhinged and psychopathic-

    22. MJMax Junestrand1:04:13

        Mm

    23. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:13

        ... I would put you in that category, to be honest. I'd put me in it, too, to be honest. Um, but when you find them, it's quite obvious. You know, I... When I sit down with Alan Cahn at Fuse Energy, I said: "Do you angel invest?"

    24. MJMax Junestrand1:04:23

        Mm.

    25. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:23

        And he goes: "Are you, you fucking stupid?"

    26. MJMax Junestrand1:04:26

        Yeah.

    27. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:26

        I said, "Potentially, my mother thinks so."

    28. MJMax Junestrand1:04:29

        Sure.

    29. HSHarry Stebbings1:04:29

        "But, you know, tell me why." And he's like: "To angel invest, I'd have to either sell Revolut shares or Fuse Energy shares."

    30. MJMax Junestrand1:04:34

        Yeah.

Episode duration: 1:06:37