Founded in Stockholm in 2023, Legora is building what CEO and co-founder Max Junestrand calls “the agentic operating system for legal work”, bringing artificial intelligence directly into the daily operational workflows of legal teams. Traditional legal advisory models have long relied on billing hours for manual document review, creating a structural constraint where legal teams are perpetually time-crunched and routine tasks consume the vast majority of available capacity. As agentic operating systems scale inside enterprises, they automate away the foundational billable hours that traditional consulting firms depend on, forcing a fundamental reassessment of legal operations and software procurement.
Agentic operating systems transform how internal engineering and legal workflows function by replacing sequential human review with parallel processing. As Jacob Lauritzen, CTO at Legora, explained, coding agents have fundamentally altered how quickly the engineering team can develop and deploy new ideas across the platform. Instead of researching a single solution before committing engineering resources, the team can explore multiple possibilities simultaneously. As Jacob Lauritzen, CTO at Legora, explained, “We can explore 20 solutions at the same time and, within days, pick the one we know will be the best.” Diagnostic processes that previously required hours of investigation by multiple engineers are now handled by coding agents capable of searching millions of lines of logs and pursuing explanations simultaneously, taking the organization from an initial bug report to a working fix in around five minutes.
Automated Workflows and Enterprise Economics
The financial impact of this architectural shift is directly visible in enterprise deployments and internal operational metrics. General Counsel Emma Kadri Bergström points to the review of nondisclosure agreements as a primary operational bottleneck that has been systematically dismantled by automation. Before the introduction of automated workflows, reviewing routine agreements consumed around 20% of the legal team’s capacity at Legora. Today, that operational overhead has dropped to under 1%, freeing up internal resources as the business expands across multiple jurisdictions.
“AI doesn’t just make you faster. It also increases quality.”
This reclaimed capacity enables legal departments to absorb rapid corporate scaling without a linear increase in headcount. In the past year, the business expanded from three offices to 18, completed three financing rounds, and made five acquisitions while maintaining close operational integration. Beyond internal metrics, quantifiable gains are evident in large-scale enterprise deployments where software replaces manual due diligence. A Fortune 100 customer utilizing Legora reduced contract turnaround time by 90% and saved more than $20 million on external legal spend. How do these operational efficiencies translate when applied to broader M&A due diligence across thousands of complex documents?
Scaling Diligence and Risk Assessment
In traditional legal reviews, severe time constraints and high hourly costs force teams to focus their manual scrutiny on only the most critical contracts, leaving secondary agreements exposed to unassessed risks. Alex Fortescue-Webb, Global Head of Legal Engineering at Legora, points to due diligence as an area where automated tabular reviews allow teams to analyze thousands of contracts across multiple parameters in minutes. By surfacing hidden liabilities across the entire document set rather than a manually selected subset, automated systems alter the baseline quality of legal output.
Today, OpenAI serves as a key model provider for Legora, powering core workflows across the legal AI platform from agentic tasks to large-scale document review. While skeptics question whether autonomous agents can fully replace human judgment in high-stakes negotiations and complex risk assessment, enterprise adoption patterns indicate that human oversight is shifting from primary document drafting to final interpretation and strategic decision-making. When adoption exceeds critical thresholds within an organization, demonstrating that operational integration relies on organization-wide deployment rather than isolated tool adoption.
As Alex Fortescue-Webb noted, the commercial reality remains stark for traditional billable-hour models that monetize inefficiency, as platforms that compress contract turnaround times by 90% systematically erode the financial justification for manual document inspection.
What doesn’t add up
Legal teams previously spent endless billable hours parsing standard documents manually, but agentic systems now handle entire routine workflows concurrently. Inside Legora itself, automating non-disclosure agreements freed up roughly a fifth of the legal department's capacity. Traditional hourly legal consulting faces structural pressure as parallel software execution replaces manual review. Automating routine contract review undermines the fundamental business model of hourly legal billing.