He Built a $5.5B Legal AI Company by 26 | Legora, Max Junestrand

1. 0:00 – 0:51

   Intro

   1. SPSpeaker0:00

      Over the past two years, we've grown from three engineers in Stockholm, zero clients, and now over seven hundred and fifty clients, three hundred people, more than doubled every single quarter. This is only a few months after you just raised [laughs] your previous series. What are you going to be doing this- using this money for? I think the reality is that this market has only done zero to one. Mm. Now we are on the journey of one to ten and ten to one hundred, and there's so much left to build. So when I think about our space, we're still on the starting line. We can't be fast followers. We've gotta be the innovators. Hi, I'm Max. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Legora. Legora is the platform where legal work happens. We solve legal tasks with the help of AI in the mission of creating 10X lawyers. [keyboard clicking]

2. 0:51 – 3:35

   From Zero to $5.5B in 2 Years

   1. SPSpeaker0:52

      So I think for me, without competition, there is no excitement. Don't get stressed being in a competitive environment. I get energy from it. I grew up in Sweden, in the Swedish archipelago. It was a small community where I didn't get enough competition, so I got very interested both in sports and in video games. I used to compete in this video game called Dota 2. Having gone through that very competitive environment, I wanted to take some of that with me to college. Gaming a lot for me back in those days taught me that if you wanna be great, you have to grind. It's not enough to just play more hours. You gotta play smarter, and you gotta learn more. You have to bring a level of intensity better than anybody else. In Dota, you're five players on one team. That group of five people have to collaborate seamlessly to reach the right goals together. I think some of my leadership style is probably influenced by some of the early gaming, working with individuals who, in many aspects, I find much smarter than myself. I think that is a, a core job of, of a CEO to be able to attract people within all different types of fields who bring skillsets that you don't have. And then you've gotta make the band play together, and then when they start to work together, something new unlocks, and we're playing what I like to call the, the infinite game, both on a product level but also on a company level. So today, we're going to focus on what matters most to all of you, which is making it easier and more effective for your teams to work with AI. So when I think about our space, as I said, it really feels like we're still on the starting line. Despite having grown the company from zero to unicorn, we've done zero to one, and now there's journey of one to ten and then ten to one hundred left to do. So one of the things that made the legal industry very attractive to us was that there were so many problems, meaningful problems to go and solve. I think incredibly important for Legora since the very beginning has been to grow together with our customers. We were incubated in the biggest law firm in Sweden, Mannheimer Swartling. They were generous enough with their early time and space. We actually got conference room in their office. When I was doing a demo, I would ask the users to take, you know, maybe one of their old memos or, or part of, of a case that they had worked on, upload it into the system, and then ask Legora to do a first draft of it. When they saw the results, I mean, it was kind of a, you know, you know, leaning back, drop-the-chin moment, I think. Those types of experiences breeds momentum and gives you a lot of energy to keep moving forward even faster.

3. 3:35 – 6:53

   The Secret Behind Hypergrowth

   1. SPSpeaker3:37

      We had a couple of different options. We could have raised money from European VCs. We had a couple of term sheets. Or we could, uh, accept the offer to join Y Combinator and go to San Francisco. Did we have to do YC? Uh, I don't know, because we had so much business already growing in Europe. But what attracted us of going to SF was Sweden is a small ecosystem. And so if we wanna play in the big leagues, we need to be in the States. If we are going to do this thing, let's be the best at it. I didn't want to bring sort of complacency into my, into my job. I want to do things, and I want to be the best at it, and I want to do really hard things. We wanted a foot in the door towards the, the American market. I mean, we went from zero to almost a million ARR in, like, a month and a half during Y Combinator, and a big reason for that was because I was spending a majority of my time still in Europe. I tried to make it work from San Francisco. I bought this, uh, ring light shine on my face when I took calls between 1:00 AM and 10:00 AM over the night towards, uh, the other side of the world. So I think for Legora, it's incredibly important to be where our customers are. And so when we think about both serving them on the ground but also tuning the product to their needs, it's just a must-have. So when we entered the US market, we really wanted to make sure that who we work with in the US as our first set of clients are excellent lawyers, excellent law firms, but also carry a lot of weight in the market. And we were very lucky, get in contact with Cleary Gottlieb and also Goodwin and Procter. I think with both those two firms, there was a lot of alignment in what they want to achieve with AI and how Legora can help them get there. We had alignment, and then it was, you know, time to go. After that, we quickly opened an office here in Manhattan. We're in a much, much scrappier, uh, place than what we're in today. I handled, I think, the first 30 law firms and in-house teams coming onto the platform with all the onboardings. The learnings that we took from those early days is that you only get one shot. Lawyers are so busy that you don't get a second chance onboarding them on the product, so it has to work, has to be... It can't break, and the use cases need to work, and it needs to solve. And you need to do a good job of setting the expectations of what the product can do today versus what the product will be able to do a week from now, a quarter from now, a year from now. They understand that not only is this tech sort of here to stay It is the way that work will be done. They wanna get on the train, they want their voices to be heard, and they want to have a say in what that future looks like, and that is awesome. That is not something that we take for granted. My favorite accomplishment so far is frankly just reading through our customer love Slack channel, where we collect feedback and aggregated usage of the real impact that the product is having for the people that we serve. There's nothing as rewarding, at least for me, as when people that we serve let us know we've made their day better or we've helped their business in some way. They were able to finish a piece of work and get home to their families to see their kids before they went to bed. I think the focus on let's deliver the most value for our users, other problems sort of around that seems to solve itself. [gentle music]

4. 6:53 – 9:52

   Be Your Own Best Boss

   1. SPSpeaker6:54

      Well, so as you can see, we're, we're in our new space here in New York, and there's quite a few, uh, empty desks here behind me. We're growing super aggressively across, you know, all different teams. I think we're gonna have filled almost all of this before summer this year. The team is about 300 people today spread across several offices in Denver, New York, London, Stockholm, India, Sydney. So I think the hardest part for me growing the company from three to 300 was that your role probably changes the fastest. You cannot be married to the way that things were done or to what you're doing. You just gotta wake up every day and think about, "How do I optimize for the business today and maybe a month, a quarter, a year out?" And those are the decisions you have to take. You need to be your own best boss, and you have to be very disciplined about not working on the easy things, but working on the really hard things. And I think it's your responsibility as the founder and as the CEO to keep the company focused. We can't be fast followers. We gotta be the innovators. Most importantly, it's how do you scale and continue to keep the culture? You know, I have some ideas around that. I, I take a very active part in, in our recruiting, still interview everyone who joins the company. One of the things that I look for in, in everyone that we hire, and I think how much capacity does this person have to grow? Tell me about the hardest problem that you worked on. What was that problem? What did you directly contribute to solving that problem, and, and how would you do it differently if you had to go back to that problem today? Because I think the ability to learn from the way that you approach a problem the first time to the time that you have to approach a problem the second time is super important, the most important skill that you need to bring to the table. And then I always look for a sense of ambition. We're looking for people who want to take responsibility of the outcome of the company, the outcome that we deliver in the market. That value has probably been the most important part of, of helping us go from where we were to where we are today. If I were to give some advice to myself starting out again, you need to really be excited about what you're doing because if it goes well, you're gonna be working so hard, and you're gonna be focused on these problems for such an intense period. I wake up every day, and I'm thinking about, how do we deliver more value, and how do we make Legora a more successful business? I think had we picked, you know, maybe something we weren't as excited about, that would have been much harder. You know, I, I can't wait, have a town hall in Q1 of 2027, see the size and, and see what we've accomplished by then. Because if you would have told me that we would, you know, be sitting here Q1 of 2026 back in the start of 2025, I would have never believed you. So yeah, I think there's, uh, there's a lot to be excited about. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 9:52