How $1.8bn Legora is changing the way Big Law delivers client work

Legora has become one of the fastest-growing players in legal AI. The two-year-old company, valued at $1.8 billion in October, has signed up a wave of major UK law firms this year and now counts some of the world’s largest practices as customers.

For Alex Fortescue-Webb, the company’s head of UK and Ireland and a former lawyer, the real shift happening inside law firms is even bigger than the funding headlines suggest.

"GenAI is genuinely transformational," he tells us on The Non-Billable Podcast. "It’s going to affect almost every workflow of almost every lawyer in the industry." That pace of change is why Legora has built out a legal engineering team staffed with former lawyers who act as "a bridge between the lawyers and the technology." Their mission, he says, is to "help users work with Legora in the most productive way possible."

The new legal workflow

So what does Legora actually do? At its simplest level, it tries to make AI "as easy and intuitive as possible to integrate into your day-to-day work as a lawyer." That usually means document-heavy work: contract review, drafting, due diligence and analysis.

Fortescue-Webb gives one example many transactional lawyers will recognise. Drag an SPA and term sheet into Legora and "it will give you its assessment of the differences in seconds" then suggest edits. Tasks that used to take an hour reduced to minutes.

The biggest gains so far, he says, have come from high-volume workflows: "We’ve had clients telling us that they’ve saved literally thousands of hours on matters by using the platform." Litigation and large-scale diligence exercises, in particular, are where huge time savings are being made.

Solving the context problem

But limits remain. The biggest is context - a problem that many of the leading legal AI players are trying to solve. Lawyers carry huge amounts of tacit knowledge - the emails they never uploaded, the conversations in the lift - which AI can’t access. "You forget how much peripheral context you have as a lawyer," he says. Solving that means integrating more tightly into firms’ systems so AI can surface the right information at the right moment.

That challenge informs Legora’s newest product, Portal - a collaborative workspace that lets firms share AI-powered work directly to clients. A due diligence report that once sat in a static Excel file becomes interactive, searchable and linked back to every underlying clause. Firms can even build client-facing workflows that embed their own expertise, productising their knowhow. "Their IP and expertise would be embedded in their portal," he says.

The platform race

Despite the rapid growth, and inevitable comparisons to rival Harvey, Fortescue-Webb insists Legora’s focus is simple: "How do we keep serving customers well and enhancing the experience for them?" The platform race is just beginning.

Listen to the full conversation on The Non-Billable Podcast.