Inside $1.8bn Legora: Alex Fortescue-Webb on the legal AI platform race

Alongside Harvey, Legora has quickly become a frontrunner in the legal AI platform race, offering lawyers a suite of productivity tools for contract review, drafting, legal research and large-scale document analysis. Its rise has been startlingly fast. Founded just two years ago, Legora hit a $1.8 billion valuation in its October funding round and has signed a wave of major UK firms this year alone.

Today on the podcast, we’re joined by Alex Fortescue-Webb, Legora’s head of UK and Ireland and head of legal engineering. Alex began his career as an M&A lawyer at CMS before moving into legal operations and managed services roles at BCG, Axiom, Thomson Reuters and EY.

Alex breaks down what Legora actually does: reviewing and comparing documents in seconds, handling heavy diligence exercises, and assisting with drafting directly inside Word. He also talks through the current limits of legal AI - especially the challenge of missing context - and why complex tasks still need to be broken down into smaller steps.

The conversation also covers Legora’s new Portal product, which lets firms expose richer, AI-powered work product to clients and offer controlled self-serve tools built on their own IP. Alex argues this shift will make knowledge management even more critical as delivery becomes more productised.

Finally, Alex discusses Legora’s rapid momentum with leading firms, the company’s US push and recent funding round, and how he views the competitive landscape. His focus: not beating rivals, but driving real adoption so AI becomes embedded in how lawyers actually work.

Chapters

00:01 Introduction
01:00 Welcome and Alex’s Role at Legora
01:13 Inside Legal Engineering: Ex-Lawyers as the Bridge to AI
03:20 What Legora Actually Does for Lawyers
05:41 SPA vs Term Sheet: A Practical Legora Use Case
07:48 Who’s Using Legora Most (And How Usage Varies)
09:10 Where Firms See the Biggest Time Savings
11:12 The Limits of Legal AI Today: Context and Zero Data Retention
13:13 Solving the Context Problem and Future Integrations
14:25 Portal: Rethinking Law Firm-Client Collaboration
19:01 Productising Know-How and the Future of Knowledge Management
22:20 Legora’s Growth Story and Adoption Playbook
25:45 Funding, US Expansion, Harvey - And the Legal AI Platform Race