20VC: From Only OpenAI to Die-Hard Anthropic: The Downfall of OpenAI in Enterprise | Harvey vs Legora: Legal AI is a Winner Take All | $7M ARR in a Single Day and Raising $200M Across 3 Rounds with No Deck with Max Junestrand, CEO @ Legora

Summary

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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) – Episode Summary

Episode Overview

In this episode of The Twenty Minute VC, host Harry Stebbings sits down with Max Junestrand, CEO and co-founder of Legora, a fast-scaling legal AI platform battling head-to-head with rival Harvey for dominance in legal tech. Their conversation delves into the winner-take-all dynamics of legal AI, building defensible enterprise products, the nuances of scaling in the US versus Europe, the real-world impact of generative AI on law firm structure, and the strategic choices behind Legora’s meteoric growth—achieving $70M ARR and winning 750 top law firm clients in just two years.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Legora’s Mission, Growth & Metrics

• Legora’s Core Focus

  • “[Legora] is the platform where legal work happens… AI is doing more and more parts of legal work and this has to happen on a centralized platform.”
    – Max Junestrand [05:15]

• Remarkable Growth

  • $70M ARR, 750 major law firm clients, 300+ employees after only two years.
  • “In a single day, in 2025, in December, we added $7 million of ARR—one day in 24 hours. And that was more than what we did in 2023 and 2024 combined.”
    – Max Junestrand [00:00], [28:23]

• Core Product Metrics

  • Success measured by “time spent on the platform and number of messages, slash, number of queries, number of actions taken.”
    – Max Junestrand [06:15]

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2. Legal AI is Winner-Take-All

• Market Dynamics

  • “It's totally a winner takes all. Number one will grab 90% and number two to number ten will share the remaining 10%. Got to run like hell. You got to win. There’s no number two… Everything else is losing.”
    – Max Junestrand [00:00], [41:19]

• Baking Off in Enterprise

  • Law firms trial multiple vendors; the best product and partnership wins.
  • “Firms will throw many vendors into a bake off… they say we're going to do a bake off. And in the bake off, it’s up to the vendor to display why you are their partner of choice.”
    – Max Junestrand [07:30]

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3. Product Vision, AI Model Choices & Competitive Strategy

• Application vs. Fine-Tuned Models

  • “We always believed that the majority of the value in our category would come from the application layer.”
    – Max Junestrand [11:53]

• Switching from OpenAI to Anthropic

  • Initially deployed only OpenAI models, but now primarily uses Anthropic/Claude due to superior enterprise fit.
  • “We are pretty die hard anthropic right now… If [Gemini] is better, we will switch immediately.”
    – Max Junestrand [13:34], [16:12]

• Model Promiscuity and Enterprise Needs

  • “We will be very promiscuous… Our clients have entrusted us to be their AI partner and to deliver them the outcomes that they need based on everything that you can do with AI.”
    – Max Junestrand [16:02]

• Future-Proofing for Clients

  • Legora’s adaptability in models and workflows is vital for keeping clients ahead.
  • “You sort of have the underlying models… then Ligora’s responsibility is to build the legal interpretation… but 80% comes from building normal software, like enterprise grade software around the models.”
    – Max Junestrand [13:58]

• Notable Quote

  • “Models plateau? No, I think Opus 4.5 is awesome. It's so good. And it continues getting better… If you go back… you feel like you're talking to a lobotomized system.”
    – Max Junestrand [12:26], [12:46]

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4. Go-to-Market: U.S. Expansion & Enterprise Penetration

• US Market Entry

  • “We were zero boots on the ground in the U.S. now we are 50 people… The US has by revenue, become our biggest market.”
    – Max Junestrand [21:23]

• Enterprise-Focused Partnership, Not Just Tools

  • Change management is essential due to the complexity of legal workflows.
  • “We invest a ton of upfront manual labor, time and effort in doing the implementation and activation… We need to make them successful because if they are not successful on Ligura a year from now, it's going to be a really sad conversation.”
    – Max Junestrand [08:59]

• Strategic Advice for Global Founders

  • “We did not need to invest a ton in marketing or like B2C content in the US… just get on demos and get on a few flights, demo the product, run a few pilots, always competitive pilots.”
    – Max Junestrand [24:02]

• On Launch Timing

  • “I took a decision to not sell the product for six months… We only have one shot with these lawyers because they are very impatient. If it doesn’t work, they’re not going to come back.”
    – Max Junestrand [24:57], [26:14]

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5. Pricing, Margins, and the Business Model Challenge

• Current Model: Per-Seat Pricing

  • “We charge on a per seat basis.” – Max Junestrand [29:32]

• Marginal Pressures & Pricing Evolution

  • “It's a bad thing the more they use the product… We have okay margins… It's not [SaaS] margins. And I think it will take time to get there.” – Max Junestrand [30:30], [30:39]

• Transition to Consumption-Based Pricing

  • “I actually don't think [per seat] is the right pricing model. I think it should be consumption based… I think the timing is more around when the clients are ready versus when we are ready.”
    – Max Junestrand [29:45], [32:07]

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6. Product Development: Bets, Pivots, and Competitive Edge

• Early Pivots

  • “The first version of the Legora product back in summer of 2023… was completely the wrong direction… After we got accepted into Y Combinator, we deleted all of that code.”
    – Max Junestrand [37:24]

• Focusing the Product Suite

  • “It was our agent, our assistant, our tabular review, and our word add in… if we have all of these three things and we combine them in a very user friendly way, that suite is going to be better than buying all of these three things separately.”
    – Max Junestrand [39:14]

• Competition & Motivation

  • “Competition can be played at a macro level, where you think us versus them, but you can also do it at a lower level… So you compete on all these micro levels and you celebrate them like crazy.”
    – Max Junestrand [34:59]

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7. The Changing Structure of Law Firms (and Knowledge Work in General)

• AI Reshaping Legal Labor

  • “Law firms will go through a quite significant consolidation period… Legora and I care about working with the winners of that space. Because the technology lever will be one of the, if not the most important lever.”
    – Max Junestrand [48:27]

• Impact on Juniors and Trainees

  • “I do think that… there will probably be less junior lawyers and trainees because I think you just won't need as many people to execute the work that the firm has.”
    – Max Junestrand [51:11]

• Firm Structure Predictions

  • Fewer mid-sized firms, more consolidation, and shift toward profit for top performers. Billable hour model to fade, but slowly.
  • “I think billing will move much slower than both you and I would think, because often it's actually demanded by the clients.”
    – Max Junestrand [53:54]

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8. Fundraising, Investors, and Leadership Reflections

Fundraising Advice

• “Build a good business. And it's very easy to fundraise.”
  – Max Junestrand [54:28]

Investor Choice

• “I placed value on Chathan [of Benchmark]… He's taken three companies public—that’s what I want to do. And I thought I'd be much better off working with that guy.”
  – Max Junestrand [55:15]

YC Experience

• Doesn’t regret doing Y Combinator, but if forced to remove one investor, would choose YC since others are board members.
  – Max Junestrand [55:53]

Obsession & Founder Mindset

• “For the last two and a half years, I've basically done nothing else than to think about Leia or Legora or the business… It is like running a mega sprint as part of a marathon and I love it.”
  – Max Junestrand [56:47]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If you just give it this, again, overarching task. It gives you back its plan and then you say, that looks awesome, Go execute. And it's pretty much the way that a partner would work with a senior associate and a senior associate would work with an associate… with AI in the bottom, but then that's available to everyone 24/7.”
  – Max Junestrand [19:36]

• “You only have one shot with these lawyers because they are very impatient. If it doesn't work, they're not going to come back.”
  – Max Junestrand [26:14]

• “I care a lot about maintaining [our pace]. When you join a company and you feel like a winner, I think you get burned out doing work where you don't feel like you're winning.”
  – Max Junestrand [33:56]

• “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, I would put you in that category, to be honest.”
  – Harry Stebbings [57:46]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:00] Winner-take-all nature & $7M ARR in one day
• [05:15] What Legora actually does & killer metrics
• [07:30] “Bake off” in enterprise sales for law firms
• [11:53] Why application layer and not model fine-tuning matters
• [13:34] AI model choices: OpenAI vs. Anthropic vs. Gemini
• [16:02] “Model promiscuity” and serving enterprise needs
• [21:23] US market entry & growth strategy
• [24:57] Six months of no selling to get product fit right
• [29:32] Pricing: per seat, margin challenges, and vision for consumption-based pricing
• [33:56] Challenges of scaling, maintaining culture and hunger
• [37:24] Early product mistakes, pivots, and building the right suite
• [48:27] Prediction: law firm consolidation, fewer juniors, and the technology lever
• [51:11] Direct answer on reduced junior lawyers in the future
• [54:28] Fundraising wisdom & investor signals
• [56:47] Intensity of founder obsession
• [58:47] Influences: Daniel Ek and the Swedish tech scene

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Summary

This episode gives an unvarnished look at how Legora is navigating a hyper-competitive legal AI market, the criticality of strategic product and AI model choices, and how operational excellence and customer partnership are becoming key differentiators. Max Junestrand’s candor provides startup builders and enterprise software investors with actionable insights into scaling, evolving the business model, landing in the US, and anticipating the workforce changes wrought by generative AI. With high growth, high stakes, and high expectations, this is a blueprint for running—and winning—a “winner-take-all” SaaS battle.

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Transcript

[Max Junestrand]

It doesn't really matter who was first, it matters who's best. It's totally a winner takes all. Number one will grab 90% and number two to number 10 will share the remaining 10%. Got to run like hell. You got to win. There's no number two. There is only being number one. There's only winning. Everything else is losing in a single day. In 2025, in December, we added 7 million of ARR one day in 24 hours. And that was more than what we did in 2023 and 2024 combined.

[Harry Stebbings]

This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And what a show we have in store for you today. Last week we had Harvey on the show that broke pretty much all records. This week we have their biggest competitor Legora on the show. And joining me is Max Junestrand, co founder and CEO at Logora, the legal AI company that has scaled to 70 million in ARR, 750 of the world's biggest law firms as customers and over 300 employees in just two years. They've $200 million from some of the best including Benchmark, General Catalyst, Redpoint and Iconic, to name a few. But before we dive into the Show Today, over 80% of Fortune 100 companies are running their businesses with Airtable. Airtable combines AI with the scale of an award winning, infinitely flexible no code system. A platform where you can see all of your data in one place and use it to make really big picture decisions. Think of it like mission control for your company. Airtable goes beyond organization and automating repet repetitive tasks. It lets you use your data to inform strategy, monitor progress and take action. Every cell is capable of performing hundreds of AI powered tasks like web research or localization and using those results to inform and update hundreds or thousands of other cells and workflows in real time. Unlock the true scale of your [e-mail] 20VC. Airtable, the infrastructure of innovation. And just like Airtable organizes your workf, Metaview organizes your conversation insights. This episode is brought to you by Metaview, who says hiring has to be fair. Every founder VC in exec I speak with knows this. Your ability to hire is the biggest constraint on your company's growth. But recruiting is slow, it's subjective and only getting more competitive. And that's why teams like Elevenlabs, Brex, replit, deal and 5,000 other organizations use Metaview, the AI company giving high performance teams a real unfair advantage in hiring. Metaview's built a suite of AI agents that behave like Recruiting co workers. They proactively find candidates. They take interview notes automatically. And they help you surface the best candidates in process. For the first time, AI handles the recruiting toil and gives you a single source of truth. That means hours saved per hire and a team focused on what matters most. Winning the right candidates as fast as possible. Don't let your competitors out. Hire you. Metaview customers close roles 30% faster. Try Metaview today and get a free month of sourcing at Metaview AI20VC. After Metaview captures what was said, Turing helps you build with the people who can deliver after it.

[Turing Representative]

Frontier Labs keep facing the same limitation. Models perform well on benchmarks but fall short once they enter real coding tasks, real tools and real workflows that disconnect between synthetic evaluation and actual system behavior. Is now a core blocker for agentic models. That's why Nvidia, Anthropic, Salesforce, Gemini and other leading labs partner with Turing. Turing is the research accelerator focused on post training reliability. They build realistic reinforcement learning environments, next generation data quality systems built from real world operational traces and coding datasets that stress models under the conditions where failures matter. State changes, workflow branching, brittle tool calls and the coding errors that break RL agents but never appear in benchmark reports. In reality, a model may demonstrate correct reasoning in your evaluation setup, yet still select the wrong parameter or mishandle a code update. In a realistic interface, Turing makes that failure visible and gives teams the signal they need to fix it. For labs advancing agentix systems, Turing provides the structure required to understand why these failures occur. To find out how, visit turing.com 20VC. That's turing.com 20VC. You have now arrived at your destination.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dude, we did our last show and.

I have to admit I was so surprised. This sounds awfully rude, but it's the.

End of the day. Fuck it.

By how well it did in specifically.

This incredible founder community where I got pinged by like 300 or 400 founders, which is more than normal actually.

[Max Junestrand]

That sounds like a big number.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's pretty solid and mostly it's just kind of VCs. But thank you so much for agreeing to do a second show with me. Always before I grill the shit out of you. 60 seconds. What does Ligora do? Just to set the scene for people that don't know.

[Max Junestrand]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

Yes. Time spent on the platform and number of messages, slash, number of queries, number of actions taken, I think is the best sort of KPI.

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

I don't necessarily think that's the case anymore. And the reason I say that is 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 200 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 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, they get to bring in all these different vendors and they say we're going to.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do a bake off.

[Max Junestrand]

And in the bake off, it's up to the vendor to display why you are their partner of choice. And as a 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 like an outcome tomorrow. And they're buying into a vision of what an AI enabled legal team can look like. And so when they look across the board and they see all these different companies, they make qualified bets more and more and more seeing those firms make that bet on Liguora. I mean this year alone actually I went into our HR system before I came in here, we went from 30 to 300 in 12 months exactly in headcount. This time last year we were working with roughly 50 clients. Now we're with 750. And so a name might be associated with a category. I'm pretty sure Google was not the name that you thought of back when AltaVista was the biggest web browser. But now it is synonymous to searching on the web.

[Harry Stebbings]

I want to unpack a couple of elements you said about partnership and that being very central to how they think and how they choose. I had Matt Fitzpatrick, the CEO of Invisible, which is kind of like a macaw or a CH during a competitor, and he said that essentially it is impossible to sell into enterprise without an FDE model. Do you agree with that? And are you seeing that we have.

[Max Junestrand]

A very big team of legal engineers who are ex practising lawyers from the top tier best firms, but they're not fully seconded. They're forward deployed in the sense that their main job is to make you successful. An example would be a big firm that just went with Ligora White and Case Widencase 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 Ligura a year from now or two years from now, it's going to be a really sad conversation. So we invest a ton of upfront manual labor, 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. 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 Accountants had to learn Excel or 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 blueprints for the building that you want and the system AI generates it or generates it, and then you look at the math behind it and then you bring taste and you bring design. When architects were learning cad, I think was an enormous change management. And all the old architects would go, harry, we're going to use that computer system to do the hard work for you. And you would go, yeah, I'm super savvy and I'm going to get to spend more time doing the design or have creative ideas about how to solve my clients architectural problems. And I think that's kind of synonymous to what's happening today.

[Harry Stebbings]

You said about the value not being in the first move or advantage and actually value that comes from being second, what did Harvey not do? Well, that you learned from as specifically as possible?

[Max Junestrand]

Some of the things that we observed were spending a lot of effort on fine tuning models. That always seemed to me, at least back in 2023, like a waste of time because the general models were improving at such a fast rate. It felt like we should be building boats. And then when the tide rises, all of our products just get better. And frankly, my initial team, we were three people, we were three engineers.

[Harry Stebbings]

The thesis plays into the team structure.

[Max Junestrand]

Right. And we had €50,000 in angel funding. And so it wasn't really on the question of let's spend $3 million fine tuning a model, but it happened to be right as well. And we always believed that the majority of the value in our category would come from the application layer.

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think models are plateauing in performance today?

[Max Junestrand]

No, I think Opus 4.5 is awesome. It's so good. And it continues getting better. I mean, honestly, how much better is it? Well, it depends on the task in coding. I mean, I think it's gotten to the point now where I think you should just coin it AGI and focus on optimizing the cost pretty much, basically.

[Turing Representative]

What makes you say that?

[Max Junestrand]

I'm sorry, I'm naive because it's understanding of my Intent and its ability to execute on my intent, given the tools that it has available today, is so good. You don't need to sit with GPT 3.5 and you feel like you're talking to a lobotomized system. Pretty much. If you go back, it's crazy bad. And this was two years ago 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 is like a VP. You give it. Here's the thing. I want go execute and it just does it. And it's amazing.

[Harry Stebbings]

Has Anthropic won the Claude code game? Does anyone on your team use cursor? The question that I'm asking, it's a good question.

[Max Junestrand]

We're in both.

[Harry Stebbings]

You are.

[Max Junestrand]

We have both. Yeah. I'm actually not sure what the full team split is, but I know that we're using both very much. But we are pretty die hard anthropic right now at the company in terms of the models that we deploy in our system. So initially we were only OpenAI. So 2023, most of 2024, only OpenAI. And now we're majority using Anthropi.

[Harry Stebbings]

What changed? Just 4.5?

[Max Junestrand]

No, not 4.5. This was prior to that. I think it was maybe Sonnet 3 or 3.5 that we made the switch. What also happened was you had to start prompting the models quite differently. And then there's a question of like, where do we actually want to put our effort? Just pick a good model and double down on it and build all the application around it. Because I feel like our job, frankly, if you think about the pyramid of value, is you sort of have the underlying models and the frameworks. Then Ligora's responsibility is to build the legal interpretation of those models. So how do we make them the most useful in a legal setting? And a lot of that comes from the models, but 80% comes from building normal software, like enterprise grade software around the models. So all the scaffolding, all the ways that the users can actually interact with the system and then at the very, very top of that pyramid, we need to enable our partners, our clients, to do differentiated things. So our clients and the law firms and the legal teams we work with are very ambitious. They're vibe coding tools. Internally, they are developing MCP servers and they've understood that if you compete as a law firm, you used to compete on expertise, on marketing, on your ability to recruit, on your hourly rates, but increasingly you're competing on tech. Tech is the main lever for our clients to differentiate from their competition. And so they will use a platform like Legora to get everybody up to spend so much time in the US now second base. And then they will develop things internally to try and get a little bit of a head start against some of their peers.

[Harry Stebbings]

Unpacking so many things, just doing it kind of chronologically there. How promiscuous do you think you'll be with model usage over time? You mentioned you're pretty much exclusively anthropic now. When you look in the next 12 to 36 months, will you switch between them as they improve in model efficiency or do you think there'll be a continuing loyalty towards anthropic?

[Max Junestrand]

We will be very promiscuous. And that's a clip.

[Harry Stebbings]

That's a real clip.

That's the intro right there, right?

[Max Junestrand]

Well, I think it's our responsibility to be that because our clients have entrusted us to be their AI partner and to deliver them the outcomes that they need based on everything that you can do with AI. And we need to deliver them the best possible thing at the best possible price using all the tools available to us. And so if Gemini is better, we will switch immediately. Or if OpenAI is better, we will switch immediately. Or if a new model comes out that's better, we will switch immediately. You know, proven that the evals is better. But then in specific workflows you could also let the users pick. So let's say they have a very deterministic thing that they want to run and they always want to run it on this specific model to not break the system.

[Harry Stebbings]

And you could also allow that in 24 months. Rank the model landscape for me.

[Max Junestrand]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

I think so.

[Harry Stebbings]

And we're not going to throw Grok in there at all?

[Max Junestrand]

No, we're not going to throw Grok in there at all.

[Harry Stebbings]

Elon. He said it. Don't kill me. It was not me.

[Max Junestrand]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

100%. Yeah.

[Max Junestrand]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah. And Jason Lamkin, a dear friend of mine, and he said, you know the shows with Jason, Rory, he said on a show recently that we're going to see inference running 24. 7 for a portion of the knowledge worker economy and how that really is going to be the defining theme of the year. Do you agree with that? And if so, what ramifications do you think that has?

[Max Junestrand]

So basically that you're continuously running tasks.

[Harry Stebbings]

Continuously 24 hours a day. Exactly. When lawyers leave the office, they're going to still have inference run for the.

Projects that they have.

[Max Junestrand]

For what it's worth, I don't think that we're there yet when we have tasks that take that much time to run. We don't have any task in Ligora that would take 12 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. I do think that we're going to move into a world where we start a lot of things as we go to bed and we wake up in the morning and it's done for sure. I think I already started doing that with deep research when that came out for the first time and it would take 25, 30 minutes to run. It was so cool. But you so quickly get used to our new shiny toys.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you think we don't talk about enough or don't see in the model environment landscape today that more people should see or talk about?

[Max Junestrand]

So one of the things that's very impressive with cloud code and do they call the new thing Coworker?

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah, cowork.

[Max Junestrand]

Coworker is maybe not so much about that tool itself, but about the paradigm that it has shown is useful and the right thing to go directionally. And the more we were working with Claude Code and Cursor in our engineering team, the more we just thought, hey, let's apply the same principles to the way that Ligura works. Basically, having the Ligora agent access all the other tools available in our ecosystem, as well as any MCP servers that the client brings. And then basically kind of letting it roam and you just give it this, again, overarching task. It gives you back its plan and then you say, that looks awesome, Go execute. And it's pretty much the way that a partner would work with a senior associate and a senior associate would work with an associate. I think this is like adding another layer in that hierarchy, basically with AI in the bottom, but then that's available to everyone 24 7. So one of the themes that I've noticed is that the partners at these firms that we work with are starting to think that the technology is so good that as they give a task to their team member, they will simultaneously give that task to Liguora. And then very often the quality that they give back is pretty good. And that has real implications.

[Harry Stebbings]

We're going to go to the structure of law firms in the future. I just want to unpack another thing there that you said earlier, which I don't want to forget, is you said, I'm playing more and more time in the U.S. there's this kind of perception when I speak to especially US VCs that Harvey, have won the US and that you have won Europe.

[Max Junestrand]

I think one of those statements are true. One part of that statement is true.

[Harry Stebbings]

My worry with you is your lack of confidence, my friend. Why is that not true? Because they seem to have the magic circle in the US well, that's not true.

[Max Junestrand]

And when we started the year, we were zero boots on the ground in the U.S. now we are 50 people. We're opening up our new office on Manhattan this week. Going to be 150 people. We've got three more offices in the US opening this year. The US has by revenue, become our biggest market.

[Harry Stebbings]

Wow.

Revenue wise, you have more.

[Max Junestrand]

It's the biggest country by revenue. Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you have more in US than you do in Europe?

[Max Junestrand]

In total? No. We have so much in the Nordics, actually, because we basically work with all the big firms. But it will be, I think, by the end of Q1. Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

Super interesting. So by the end of Q1, you'll have more in the US than you will in Europe.

[Max Junestrand]

Yeah. And the cool thing is that if you look at the AML 200 and by the way, many of these clients that we're working with in the US it's not the mom and pop shops. Right. We work enterprise. And so when we came to the US we had a strategy which was there's so many Nordic or European companies that have Launched in the US and failed very close to home. Klarna tried to launch in the US like a couple of times before it really worked. And so I had this heuristic which was if we can Sign and serve two of the AmLaw 200 law firms from Europe, we are ready to open in the U.S. so Cleary, Gottlieb, Whitehu, Wall street firm, Goodwin and Proctor, one of the best VC firms in the world. And I think both are in the top 20 law firms in the US we were able to work with both of them and give them confidence that we could support them better than anybody else. That gave me the confidence to go to the US and hire a team. And the awesome thing about building a team in the US is it takes two weeks for people to leave. We can talk about some of the differences between U.S. europe, but I think the termination period in the U.S. versus in, let's say, Sweden is actually one of the structural benefits of having a big office in the U.S. so how.

[Harry Stebbings]

Does it compare two weeks to leave.

[Max Junestrand]

In the U.S. versus three months? Everybody has three months.

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

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. It's wild. 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 it's like. But really awesome. People can just turn up in two weeks.

[Harry Stebbings]

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.

[Max Junestrand]

Yes, for sure. Well, I think we could. So why can't you? And we're very enterprise. That might be different. 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, demo the product, run a few pilots, always competitive pilots. And then again on the partnership level, show that we were willing to work with these firms on their ambition level because it's very high. 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. It's. We want to be the firm that dominates our market because we understand AI and technology better than any other firm.

[Harry Stebbings]

Just going back to the U.S. nick expansion, there do you regret waiting as long as you did?

[Max Junestrand]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

No.

[Max Junestrand]

So our first board meeting. So to give you some context, we were a YC. We raised $10 million from Benchmark. A month later, we raised another 25 million from Redpoint. And we had our first board meeting and we were like 12 people at the time. First board meeting, it's Benchmark, Redpoint and three founders. And we sit down and I tell them that we are not going to sell at all for the next six months. Red Point sort of looked at me and they were, I think, a little nervous that they had met me for basically an hour and 45 minutes and given me, paid a walking price and I was showing up and I said, we're not gonna sell.

[Harry Stebbings]

What price was the red point round?

[Max Junestrand]

150.

[Harry Stebbings]

That's interesting. Do you regret taking. I'm not saying Red Point, but doing that round?

[Max Junestrand]

No.

[Harry Stebbings]

Because that's a lot of dilution.

[Max Junestrand]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

25 at 150 when you didn't need the money. Two months after a benchmark.

[Max Junestrand]

Yeah, but you couldn't know that you didn't need the money. And if I remember correctly, one of our competitors did another round quite quickly after. So I think it was good to solidify that there's interest in Liguora stock. And now I just get like, you know, at this point I'm just archiving emails because I'm getting too much inbound.

[Harry Stebbings]

But back then, which is why I send WhatsApp.

[Max Junestrand]

But back then, that's a good thing. That's a good thing. Back then they were. I turned around and said, hey, we're not going to sell. We need to get to the point because we only have one shot. We only have one shot with these lawyers because they are very impatient. If it doesn't work, they're not going to come back. And that's why activation and getting the time to value is so important in the product. But to go back, we took six months, calculated time and said, we're not going to sell. We have to solve our infrastructure, our reliability, the scalability of the product. And we need to rebuild and refactor to a lot of it because it had just been quickly put together. And what we told all the clients were, we were lucky it was summer because we could say, oh, it's summer in Europe, so we're not working and we're going to wait to onboard you after summer. And there's so much demand that we're Going to have to do it in October because September is completely full. We can't onboard more clients. But October 1, 2024, we were ready to onboard 1,000 lawyers a day comfortably on the product. And we got to that point and then we started to do rip. And I'm very proud that I had the guts to tell the investors that that was the right plan because I think if we had continued to push, we would have just churned everything.

[Harry Stebbings]

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?

[Max Junestrand]

Well, for what it's worth, I don't think we conceded a lot of ground and we are winning back a lot of ground, if you put it that way.

[Harry Stebbings]

So customers aren't loyal?

[Max Junestrand]

No, I think everybody is still treating this as an extended pilot and an option on AI. It's like a call option. They're not doing five year contracts, they're doing one to three year contracts. And in law firm time, that's a blink. Many of these firms have been around for 200 years. So two years might be half of lifetime, but for them it's a short time.

[Harry Stebbings]

So when we look at the numbers, the retention for a Harvey is it's 98% logo retention, 178% net revenue retention. Do you have as good numbers?

[Max Junestrand]

So for both those numbers, yes. But on nrr, I don't think that's a fair number for me to comment on because so much of our growth is not about renewing contracts from 2024 in a single day. In 2025 in December, we added 7 million of ARR1 day in 24 hours. And that was more than what we did in 2023 and 2024 combined. And so NRR and logo retention, it's up to 2026 to determine where those real numbers will be. And I think for what it's worth, the ability of these products to go quite broad will be very interesting because to some extent there's initial use cases that you can solve with AI that we target and then the more time we spend with our clients, the more problems and opportunities we see. And so what's happening to the product is they're growing quite a lot. And so what I think will happen is that this will be like a suite, like a platform kind of play that just becomes more and more of the central system where they do their work.

[Harry Stebbings]

So on an NLR standpoint, do you charge on a per seat basis or on a per task basis, or on a Volume per task basis, we charge.

[Max Junestrand]

On a per seat basis.

[Harry Stebbings]

Is that optimal?

[Max Junestrand]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

And is that not solving for a historical norm, not a future optimization?

[Max Junestrand]

I actually don't think it's the right pricing model. I think it should be consumption based because you can have individual users racking up such big LLM costs that it basically becomes unsustainable on a per user basis. The reason why we have that is you need to make it easy for the buyer. If they don't know how to manage a consumption based pricing model, you can't have it. And I think that will pivot and I'm unsure exactly what that timing is. I think the timing is more around when the clients are ready versus when we are ready.

[Harry Stebbings]

And so task expansion is incredibly useful for retention, not for revenue optimization. In other words, the more they do, the more likely they are to retain. But it doesn't actually help your dollars, right?

[Max Junestrand]

No, actually it costs a lot more. So it's a bad thing the more they use the product.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you have good margins?

[Max Junestrand]

We have okay margins.

[Harry Stebbings]

I respect the honesty of that answer.

[Max Junestrand]

Yeah, right. It's not sauce margins. And I think it will take time to get there.

[Harry Stebbings]

Will it get there do you think?

[Max Junestrand]

Yes, I think it will get there. Not only do I think it will get there, but I think your ability to price versus traditional sauce products will be insanely high. Because you used to use a lot of these products to do very narrow parts of the work and they were all disconnected to give you an insight into the life of a lawyer. It's like you have this product over here that you use to compare two contracts. You have this product over here that you use to extract relevant data from contracts. You have this other product over here where you go and look up legislation, you have this other product over here where you go and look up case law, all these different things. So you as the human had to sit there, comb through all these different systems and aggregate the stuff yourself. But now, similar to Opus 4.5, you're just going to send the task to Liguora and it can be pretty arbitrary and then you let it figure it out and it just goes and does all the work, or at least a big portion of the work in a much, much, much, much shorter time at a very high quality level. And when you do that, you are not being priced against the other SaaS products you are being priced against. What would I pay a lawyer to go out and actually do this work.

[Harry Stebbings]

So in three years time, will you still have seat based pricing?

[Max Junestrand]

Absolutely not.

[Harry Stebbings]

When does that change?

[Max Junestrand]

When our clients are ready to buy on consumption.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why do you sound so confident that will be within three years?

[Max Junestrand]

Respectfully, because cursor is consumption. A lot of other enterprise tools are for consumption. I just think legal takes a little bit more time, but within three years? Well, look, you got to understand my vantage point. Three years is longer than I've been CEO at Liguora for. So three years for me is a very long time. Going forward.

[Harry Stebbings]

On the margin optimization side, is it a little bit like obviously we're investors in lovable where they're able to do model selection, dependent on task and optimize margin because of that.

[Max Junestrand]

You can do that, of course, which we do to some extent, but it's also, I don't think we're in the margin optimization time yet.

[Harry Stebbings]

You're in the land grab time.

[Max Junestrand]

Yes, that's the right way to phrase it.

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

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, teamwork and just like raw grit that got us here when you double the team. I think we just hired two new people in the US and they were really surprised by how late everybody was working. They were like, oh, at the other place I was at, which was another the legal tech provider, Everybody left at 6 and we have dinner in the office at 8. And so when your entire team globally operates at that level and at that pace with that goal in mind, that's awesome. But I care a lot about maintaining that.

[Harry Stebbings]

How do you maintain that?

[Max Junestrand]

Well, I still interview everyone, so I ask quite brutal questions about 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 you get pulled in, like when you see everybody else doing it, you're just like, okay, of course I'm going to do it. And momentum breeds momentum. We were signing deals on New Year's Eve. We had a big Christmas dinner whilst we were having gleg or what's called muled wine. You have that in Sweden. We were having the wine before the dinner and we had the big sales dashboard at the wine thing and everybody kept looking at it because everybody wants momentum, everybody wants to win. And when you join a company and you feel like a winner, I think you get Burned out doing work where you don't feel like you're winning.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think competition is helpful in creating that vibe?

[Max Junestrand]

100%, of course.

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

Oh, yes. I think I'm quite good at it, actually. 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 be that marketing team, or 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. What I've learned this year. I actually used to be quite bad at celebrating. I remember when I was in business school, my dream job was to go to McKinsey because I thought that's where all the amazing people went. I found out maybe that was not the case. But when I got the call and I got the job, I was in the grocery store and I celebrated by buying a bag of peanuts. Wow. Yeah, that was a bit crazy. I was really bad at celebrating. Really bad.

[Harry Stebbings]

Explains why you're so thin.

[Max Junestrand]

But this year we've learned to celebrate, and it's amazing. You celebrate the wins really hard because then you also really feel the losses. Because I think it's easy to be blindsided. If you have momentum and you have success, you need to see the world for what it is.

[Harry Stebbings]

I heard from some of your investors that internals at Harvey call you their cpo. Speaking of comparisons of teams.

[Max Junestrand]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

I'm going to ask you. Have they ripped your product?

[Max Junestrand]

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 our product development. One of them is improving the parts that we have, and the other one is making new qualified bets. I think we have had a history of making 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 they ripped our name. And it's our tabular review. It's just called tabular review in their product, which is totally fine. 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 one product is a Rolls Royce or maybe a Volvo, and the other product is maybe a cheaper version.

[Harry Stebbings]

What product decision did you make that, with the benefit of hindsight, was a mistake? And what did you learn the first.

[Max Junestrand]

Version of the Legora product back in summer of 2023? That was completely the wrong direction. We built it 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. Basically LangChain was too bad at the time. So we built our own agent architecture and we did that very early, which I'm very proud of. And that was like the right direction to continue on now.

[Harry Stebbings]

We still have that today.

[Max Junestrand]

No, it's been completely rebuilt many times. I last committed code in October 2020.

[Harry Stebbings]

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 Revolut, build their own complete vertical software.

[Max Junestrand]

Yeah, I think we're not the size of Revolut Ordeal, and so it probably doesn't make sense for us to do that. And LangChain and a lot of their surrounding tools have gotten a lot better. 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. The other right product decision we made or wrong was that we were doing too many things. So in 2024, we were 12 engineers and we were trying to build 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 kind of looked like a Frankenstein monster. There's actually a pretty funny doc From October or November 2024 that was called the Leia Product Manifesto.

[Harry Stebbings]

Gosh, I remember.

[Max Junestrand]

Yeah, we were Leia in 2025. We were still called Leia.

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah, I remember.

[Max Junestrand]

And it basically outlined that we were going to do three things, but we were going to do those three things so well that our suite was the best basket money could buy. And it was our agent, our assistant, our tabular review, and our word add in. And we were competing with local products for these different things. Like the word add in was competing with a bunch of other legal tech companies that were only focused on the word add in. Our tabular review was competing with, at the time Hebia, and companies were only focused on tabular review or the Matrix I think they call it. And then we had 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 going to 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 removed five or six other things that we were building, just deleted the code and then we hard committed on these things.

[Harry Stebbings]

When you look at the landscape, when you think about kind of that bundling versus unbundling and how you thought about that, when you look at the landscape today, how does that landscape look into three to five years? Is this a winner take? Okay, Actually a much better way to ask that is is this an Uber and a Lyft or is this a Google Cloud, aws, Azure?

[Max Junestrand]

The reason why I don't think it's a Uber and Lyft is because in Uber and Lyft there was no product differentiation. The products were pretty much the same and it was very differentiation on global versus yeah, but it was very hard to build something different Uber for what it's worth, I mean the product looks the same today basically with the addition of bells and whistles. But it's the same fundamental thing. But the difference to our story is that the product differentiation really matters and the amount of things that you can go and build is so vast. It's like this universe of 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. And as soon as you got to single digit million revenue, you would get an acquisition offer which would be life changing money for the founders, but no unicorn outcomes. So the product strategy will impact the trajectory of all of the businesses in our vertical tremendously. I think it's totally a winner takes all all sauce. You know, this 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 got to run like hell, you got to win. There's no number two, there is only being number one, there's only winning. Everything else is losing. The type of people who think like that are the people who work at the grand.

[Harry Stebbings]

One segment that I do find interesting or two segments is like the verticalization. It's like we're investors in solve AI for patent. Lawyers love them, they've done amazing. You have verticalization in that sort of way. And then you also have verticalization in the we're going to own the whole vertical and do like a Crosby. We're going to be your law firm and use ours. How do you feel about those two?

[Max Junestrand]

I don't think that owning the entire service layer and software layer is a winning strategy. Basically building an AI native law firm. The reason is I think there are so many talented lawyers that are very good at utilizing software and I would not want to compete for them. I think it's easy to get into that space and try and solve lower complexity tasks. I mean, you're starting out with kind of non disclosure agreements, master service agreements. You can get there pretty quickly. But then that will be a very crowded space in and of itself. I would much rather be the shovel seller to all the world's amazingly talented lawyers who want to turn their firms into software powered entities. I don't think that there will be a ton of margin profit in the low complexity work because I think as soon as AI can do a task, it will do that task. The only question is kind of where does it get transacted? And the big law firms, they already do NDAs for free for their clients because they got to win the expensive private equity work. And so it's like, are you going to show up as Crosby or somebody else and go, hey, pay me 50 bucks an NDA? I'm not sure.

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay, so we think that's not a good strategy. What about the verticalization?

[Max Junestrand]

Yeah, I think you can quicker get to a lot of value in verticalizing. I'm not sure what the TAM looks like within each of those verticals.

[Harry Stebbings]

If you look at patents, it's a $485 billion market.

[Max Junestrand]

Yeah. So it's a huge market. So maybe you go win patents and that's amazing. Or patents becomes part of a broader thing. Unclear. I think there will be many winners in different layers of the ecosystem. And I also think that there's one part which is kind of the central hub that will, you know, let's say somebody goes to Ligua and they want to write a patent, then why don't we just ping Solve intelligence.

[Harry Stebbings]

Yeah.

[Max Junestrand]

As a, hey, solve intelligence, come write us this patent and then it comes back and does it. Or maybe that's what Copilot wants to do.

[Harry Stebbings]

Right.

[Max Junestrand]

I think there's a lot of Venn diagrams and a lot of overlap right now. I think it's more down to execution than it is to underlying markets. Being smart about the markets you have.

[Harry Stebbings]

Hired now 150 people in the U.S. 50 or 150?

[Max Junestrand]

No, we're like 50.

[Harry Stebbings]

50 in the U.S. now. Okay.

[Max Junestrand]

I think we'll be 150 before summer.

[Harry Stebbings]

It's a lot of people still. When you think about that, do you think the canonical wisdom thought that the US Works harder? They are harder driving, they are more transactional but bullish, and they are in the office late, and we in Europe just like to chill the fuck out. Do you think that's fair, having hard 50?

[Max Junestrand]

I don't think that's fair. I think we were very good at seeding the Lagora culture in the US And a couple of our best people from Europe went to the US and have spent a lot of time there.

[Harry Stebbings]

So actually, the.

Hey, we're all such hustlers. We're so good in the US It's a bit of bullshit.

[Max Junestrand]

I think it's a little bullshit. But for what it's worth, the culture that we have in our US office now, I almost want to spend more time in the US just to be there, because it's electric. I mean, New York is on fire. And I have a hard time spending a lot of time in New York and then coming back to Stockholm because New York is always up, it's always awake. It's my tempo. Whereas Stockholm is when you walk out on the street, not when you're in the office. It's a little sleepy.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why are you not living in New York or living in the US?

[Max Junestrand]

I'm de facto living on a plane. I had 200 travel days last year in total, last year, I spent a meaningful amount of time on product. And we have all engineering in Stockholm. We're 10% YC founders in our engineering, product and design team.

[Harry Stebbings]

Wow.

[Max Junestrand]

Which I think is a high number. Two of our batchmates have actually joined the company.

[Harry Stebbings]

How are they different than norm YC engineers?

[Max Junestrand]

I think what's cool about it is we're structured in a way where I think my management style is very. It's a lot of delegating. It's not very micromanaging, and it's very. Here's the thing. Go wrong with it. I think founders do very well with that. I also think it basically gives all the different components of our platform, which is separated into pods. We have one team working on this piece of the product, one team working on this piece of the product, and there's a YC founder running part of the product, and then they just run like hell on their thing. And they're competitive about their part being better than all the other parts, or rather their equivalent in other products. I also think YC has a way of attracting very ambitious people who want to win.

[Harry Stebbings]

Before we do discuss the future of law firms and then do a quick fire, I have to ask you, I'm going to ask Harvey on the show, which you know about their revenues. I have to ask you for yours. Where are you guys at?

[Max Junestrand]

Well, I'll tell you a little bit later in the quarter, but in December we added 7 million in a day and we've basically doubled every single quarter for the last six quarters.

[Harry Stebbings]

Will you be at 200 by the end of the year?

[Max Junestrand]

Definitely. Otherwise I'll come back.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the stretch goal?

[Max Junestrand]

You can shame me.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the stretch goal?

[Max Junestrand]

You'll have to ask Patrick or CRO.

[Harry Stebbings]

If you were at 300, would you be happy?

[Max Junestrand]

Well, I don't view the number in isolation. I'll be happy by the end of the year if we deliver on all the promises we've made to clients. And we don't even need these competitive pilots. If you're a lawyer and you do serious legal work, you're on Ligora. It's like figma. If you're a designer that makes money, you're on Figma. I want that to be the truth. And if we do that, I'm sure 300 is the number or even more. Right?

[Harry Stebbings]

Okay. In terms of the structure of law firms, 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 fewer juniors. Do you agree? You will need far fewer juniors. And what is the structure of a law firm in the future?

[Max Junestrand]

So I think law firms will go through a quite significant consolidation period because so far there hasn't been a lot of incentives to consolidate law firms. But now actually private equity wants to get in on the action. They want to fund different law firms who want to become AI powered again. Coming back to the idea of do you want to own the whole stack or do you just want to work with the best service layer?

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

Absolutely. Juice up the conversion. Look, I don't think there's going to be any amlot 200. I think it's going to be an amlod 20 or maybe amlod 12. I don't think it'll be a big four because of regulation and it just takes time. But it will definitely consolidate. At the end of the day, Legora and I Care about working with the winners of that space. Because the technology lever will be one of the, if not the most important lever to utilize in competing against other firms. It looks different for different practice areas and in different calibers, but let's take a bread and butter M and a transaction. In a bread and butter M and 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 didi and the work, it's kind of an equilibrium where the price gets offered at, let's say it's £100,000. 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. Let's say they're offering at 80k. 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 other aspects of what it takes to run a law firm. And who can win most of the market and then hold that market. Because then I think you're able to deliver additional services that go outside of what the very, very, very competitive things are.

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

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. If you have a physical data room, that's why it's called a data room. You used to have to send people there. They would open up all the boxes, read everything, make all the commentary. Right. And then it became a virtual data room.

[Harry Stebbings]

But you have to assume that there's going to be more transactions in the future.

[Max Junestrand]

Yes. So more transactions. Probably fewer people running those transactions. But every person can run more transactions because of technology. More transactions because of technology.

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

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

[Harry Stebbings]

Also, most law firms are partnerships, correct?

[Max Junestrand]

Right.

[Harry Stebbings]

Partnerships accrue profits.

[Max Junestrand]

But I'm already seeing patterns of this where firms that we work with will have somebody leaving. They will not fill the vacancy, but they're doing more revenue than they did last year. And so it's a higher profit. I think it might also create an opportunity for Big law will do really well because they have a lot of moats and a lot of brand and a lot of data. Small law can do really well because 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. But in engineering, let's just take another example, we're hiring more engineers, although they're writing more code. Right? Because there's more stuff to do. So the thing for the law firms is they need to increase the size of the pie.

[Harry Stebbings]

So you think we'll have more engineers in two years time?

[Max Junestrand]

I think so actually, because I think you can just do more stuff. You'll have more people writing code and doing things or starting new things and projects and things in two years than you have today.

[Harry Stebbings]

I think you're being quite optimistic, which is really nice. But I think we're going to see more labor displacement than I think people expect and I think we're going to see that in the next 12 to 24 months. Jason Lamkin again friend said this is the year that we're going to see AI displace large amounts of knowledge work and that's going to show up in labor figures. Do you think that's too soon?

[Max Junestrand]

Well, I think it's within that time frame that AI gets pretty good at completing end to end tasks very deterministically within our vertical. So unless they can find something else to do than that thing within the firm or growing the pie, then yeah, but here's the cool thing, right? Like if you use technology to complete more of the work, then you need to think about how you win more work from the other firms. But yeah, I mean on a total. But I'm talking for individual firm. If you're talking the total level. Yeah, probably.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you worry about the demonization of you as a technology leader displacing labor?

[Max Junestrand]

No, that's not something that I worry about.

[Harry Stebbings]

I should worry about in time. I think it's something that will. Can I ask you timesheets how lawyers spend a lot of their time, every two days they have to do their timesheets. Do you know this?

[Max Junestrand]

Yeah, it's wild.

[Harry Stebbings]

Fucking wild.

[Max Junestrand]

Adrian, who's our VP product, his YC company did AI timekeeping.

[Harry Stebbings]

Wild. A billable hour's over.

[Max Junestrand]

No, I don't think it is. I think Billing will move much slower than both you and I would think, because often it's actually demanded by the clients because they want to get a breakdown of everything that the lawyers actually do. And it will start to be replaced by fixed fees in different practice areas and for different types of tasks, but you will still have a sort of ephemeral billable hour above that.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dude, I'm going to ask you quick Fire, does that sound like three rounds? No. Deck, what was the biggest advice on fundraising?

[Max Junestrand]

The advice that I got in YC was build a good business. And it's very easy to fundraise. That's what I've lived by. I don't think I'm a master fundraiser by any means, but I.

[Harry Stebbings]

With respect, I'm going to push you. Sorry. You got Benchmark early, which then led to a red point. Do you think Benchmark is just a massive signal which led to a quick successive round you wouldn't have had otherwise?

[Max Junestrand]

No. So Redpoint was not the fund that first wanted to preempt us. There was another firm that wanted to preempt us for the A round and they gave a very competitive term sheet for this year's seed. Much higher price than Benchmark. Benchmark was, I think, the lowest price out of any seed fund.

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

Yeah, I placed value on Chathan.

[Harry Stebbings]

Chathan, not Benchmark.

[Max Junestrand]

Yes.

[Harry Stebbings]

Interesting.

[Max Junestrand]

I picked on partner. I heard Benchmark was good. I can do that research. But I met within two weeks, probably 80 partners. Nobody knew my space better than him. I thought it was great. It's taking three companies public. That's what I want to do. And I thought I'd be much better off working with that guy.

[Harry Stebbings]

Unthinkable reality. You start another company, but you can only bring one investor with you. Who do you bring?

[Max Junestrand]

Chetham.

[Harry Stebbings]

Really?

[Max Junestrand]

Yeah. That's it. That's easy.

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

Well, I think I'll delete yc.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you regret doing yc?

[Max Junestrand]

No, I love yc, but all the other investors are on my board, so I would feel very rude saying somebody else.

[Harry Stebbings]

That'd be a fucking awkward board meeting.

[Max Junestrand]

It would be a very awkward. No, no. But yeah, I think, because they're not that well, I think that's unfair. They're extremely helpful. Still, YC rocks. I still speak with Gustav every quarter, but all the other are either board observers or board of directors. So that. But I can't comment on that.

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

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 deliver more value as being part of a broader ecosystem.

[Harry Stebbings]

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

[Max Junestrand]

I wish I knew what the intensity of doing and thinking about nothing else would sort of impact your own psyche and personality. For the last two and a half years, I've basically done nothing else than to think about Leia or Legora or the business. And when you're in college or prior to that, I was doing so many different things. 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. This is not that it is like running a mega sprint as part of a marathon and I love it. But I think, could I go back and also have that expectation going in? I think I would have been better at handling other disappointments or parts of my life that I couldn't focus as much on.

[Harry Stebbings]

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, I would put you in that category, to be honest. I'd put me in it too, to be honest. But when you find them, it's quite obvious. When I sit down with Alan Chang at Fuse Energy, I said, do you angel invest? And he goes, you fucking stupid? I said, potentially. My mother thinks so, but tell me why. And he's like, to angel invest, I'd have to either sell Revolut shares or Fuse Energy shares. That would both be a terrible fucking decision. So, no, I don't angel invest.

[Max Junestrand]

No, no, because you can't focus on doing that. You can't make good decisions. Or you can invest 10k in a friend's company because it's nice, but you can't do it. Seriously.

[Harry Stebbings]

Penultimate one, which founder do you most respect and admire and look up to?

[Max Junestrand]

I'm pretty bad at having idols. I wish I was better at it. I was super nervous the first time I met Daniel Yek from Spotify. I remember I was super. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. In 2024, he had reached out to us and was like, hey, love what you guys are doing.

[Harry Stebbings]

Daniel's amazing.

[Max Junestrand]

He's amazing. When I grew up looking at Niklas and Daniel and Sebastian and seeing these Swedish tech companies succeed, that was phenomenal. That was a huge inspiration. And now having met Alex and Gustav who are taking over Daniel, they're also fabulous. But I don't go around on a daily basis thinking, oh, I look up to this person, I want to be like them. I try to draw inspiration from where I see good and then I run at it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Final one what's the best advice you've ever been given?

[Max Junestrand]

The best advice I have ever been given was probably from YC and Joel at Saunalabs, which was to take the check with benchmark over anyone else.

[Harry Stebbings]

Dude, thank you so much for doing this. It's so lovely to do it in person. I really appreciate the friendship. Thank you for not letting me on the cap table. I think about it every day. It's fine I've got over it, you prick. But you're a hero, my friend.

[Max Junestrand]

Thank you so much. Harry, let's go.

[Harry Stebbings]

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[Turing Representative]

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