Please welcome CEO of Legora, Max Junestrand, and President and Chief Legal Officer at Salesforce, Sebastian Niles. Hey.
Max was looking for some walk-on music.
Oh, we were waiting for it.
It's great light here. It's great to be here with you. It's awesome.
Oh, yeah. See? Yeah, it's just noisy.
I mean, it's Dreamforce. They're actually talking about this panel. Oh. And they're trying to get all of Dreamforce across the whole week to come over.
Now, if you didn't know, we think of this area of law, high stakes, high trust, name of the panel. But, you know, I was talking to Mark Benioff earlier today, and he was just saying how there are moments, right, in industries where everything is changing. Yeah. And this is fundamentally such a moment in the broader technology space, enterprise, software, AI. And what I also said to him, though, well, it's also this very interesting little area of the world of law. And I think this is a moment, right, where the legal industry is undergoing profound change. Yeah. And one of the areas that we'll unpack today is, all right, who are the players? Who are the participants? Who are the firms? Who are the companies that are choosing to define that change rather than just sit back and have a half of them.
So Max, you've heard of this, started as a very tiny, a stealth startup and the like, Legora. I believe in, was it 2023 in Stockholm? That's right. You know, at, and he didn't plan it this way, at the age of 23, right? I know you thought he was probably 18, 19, but he's a little older than that.
I heard somebody yesterday thought I was 43.
That's why I had to get, I'm trying to keep up here. So, right. So 2023, at the age of 23, you now have what? Over 1,000 users across a whole slew of countries.
So we just wrapped 1,000 employees in the company. And we actually did the data. So 150,000 lawyers in the world use Legora, which is about 3% of all the lawyers in the world. And we've only been around for three years.
So it's gone very rapidly. So thousand employees, so you're scaling and you say 100,000, 150,000.
Right, so he's got the latest stats. I have the stats from last night. It's really impressive. So okay, the area of law, I've always had the view that if you can get right the questions of platform technology, data, AI agents, right, in this field, you create a transformation playbook, right, for entire enterprises. You create acceleration, you know, playbooks, but you also are calibrating trust, yeah, right, and risk in ways that are just so important going forward. So something else that happened, so you may have heard if you were at the keynote, I believe you were, you know, Mark Benioff and Jensen, you know, of Nvidia were talking and they said because we can do so many more things now or just do things so differently, might that mean that organizations can be even more ambitious than ever before and that people, individuals can be more ambitious, you know, where this is going. Talk to us, Max, about what is, what is the ambition of Legora, what is your ambition here and what's the broader scale of impact that you hope to have?
Yeah, well, so to maybe take you back to 2023, Stockholm, Sweden, a smaller legal market than now, our biggest client. What we started out with was, let's build delightful software for lawyers that makes the life of being a lawyer more fun. And we ended up at that initial mission statement because we had a couple of friends who were clerking at courts in Sweden. And then we're effectively summarizing court cases all over summer. What has happened is legal has in many ways become the tip of the spear for us into broader professional service work. We've started in law and we've now moved into compliance, into risk. And to your point of, you know, when you have more intelligence on tap that you can just magically turn on and let it flow, can you go do more things? And the answer is yes, you can. There will be due diligence done from a legal perspective on every single asset before it goes to IC for an investment conversation. There will be more claims and litigation in the world. There will be more patents being filed. There will be more, you know, compliance with regulation that's updating all the time. And I think the what's interesting about law in particular is that it's so supply constrained because lawyers and attorneys have this really good idea that in order to practice you need to pass this bar exam and you get a piece of paper that says that I'm allowed to practice, right? And that has fundamentally put a cap on the legal services that are available but the demand for legal services are almost infinite because if you could review every contract you would, if you could have an agent think about your taxes all the time and, you know, make optimizations or have an agent in an enterprise look at all the incoming regulation and how that affects the company you would but it's too expensive today. So I think my job as a CEO is to always raise the bar of ambition. It's to say we did amazing last quarter, right? Like the investors are cheering us on, the customers are happy, you know, employees are satisfied but like can we do more? And this goes against Swedish culture because in Sweden there's something called Jantelagen or the law of Jante which effectively means you shouldn't believe that you are something and so you are not allowed to boast about your achievements, you're not allowed to have big dreams like this is not how you should go about your world. But clearly we are a bit different as I like to say we're like the perfect American-Swedish marriage and we're the latest exports from Stockholm since IKEA and ABBA and, you know, now we're flying off the shelf here in America.
Oh, it's incredible. So yes, welcome to America.
Thank you. Um, really, we're loving it, loving it.
And very soon welcome to New York. So all those things you described, you know, you got to keep up in New York. We're coming. And I see you're coming. You're coming. And on that point of how you're driving forward and charging forward, let's take maybe a little more sober note on this that may also be exciting. So there is a point of view that human judgment cannot be outsourced. That legal insight, right, risk analysis, that subtle, hard to, you know, describe or identify question of that judgment, not only is deeply human, but it cannot be outsourced. So what are you seeing, though, whether it's that topic, but more broadly, as you bring AI, bring agentic transformation into these core sensitive workflows? Or kind of thinking about, okay, where do you deploy the agents? What's the handoff to the humans or the handoff, you know, the agent to the supervisory agent to another agent all overseen by humans? What are you seeing in that space and what are you recommending?
