In the fast-emerging market for AI legal tools, a two-horse race is taking shape. Harvey, the OpenAI-backed startup that has become the industry’s breakout success, is now facing an ambitious challenger: Stockholm-based Legora, which is pitching law firms a new way to protect and monetize their intellectual property.
Harvey has sprinted to $100 million in annual recurring revenue and an $8 billion valuation, turning the AI-for-law market into a serious money sport.
Legora, fresh off a $150 million funding round, is countering with workspace software that it says enables law firms to collaborate with clients and sell secure, private access to their documents and templates. Legora wants to give firms what they actually want: higher margins.
Fears are growing that corporate legal teams may take on more tasks they once sent to outside counsel. That’s because the rise of generative artificial intelligence helps them do more with fewer resources.
Legora’s pitch is that software helps law firms provide a better client experience and actually grow revenue. Its latest product, Portal, will enable firms to package their expertise behind a firm-branded workspace that clients can pay to use. Legora says Portal will centralize all legal work, replace email chains, and keep data out of AI training by default.
Max Junestrand, the former pro gamer now running Legora as CEO, came into legal as an outsider and built for speed and usability. Speaking to Business Insider over Zoom last week, he argued the company’s edge is in bringing collaboration to legal work.
“Serving lawyers, you need to be extra-client-obsessed because they’re used to doing that for their clients,” Junestrand said. He put its mission this way: “Our job is to make you win. If you win, we win.”
Legora is riding a tailwind as law firms scramble to test and adopt new tools in response to client demands for efficiency. The Stockholm-born startup closed a Series C funding round last week at a $1.8 billion valuation and says it has grown from 250 to over 400 customers across 40 markets.
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Whether corporate legal teams will pay for a metered software portal is the question. Large enterprises are extremely sensitive to how firms handle their data because the same firm they use might also work with their rivals. Legora will have to answer how it handles conflicts when workflows encode firm knowledge.
Junestrand says Legora is up to the challenge. “It’s always been clear that we exist at the mercy of the work that our clients want to deliver,” he said.
Legora isn’t the first to build a law firm client portal. It’s a bet that, unlike the legacy file-sharing systems of many legal firms — Thomson Reuters’ HighQ, iManage Share, and NetDocuments — Portal moves beyond a glorified Google Drive. Legora bills the product as a monetizable surface for firm intellectual property and agentic workflows that clients can run themselves, while Legora’s legal engineers tailor and maintain the setup.
Legora wouldn’t say whether firms will charge clients by usage or subscription, or how Legora itself prices the portal. Harvey also partners with law firms to build bespoke software that clients pay to use, and Harvey itself takes a cut of the revenue. Harvey doesn’t have a client portal and instead integrates with iManage and Microsoft’s Sharepoint.
Legora has tapped firms from Big Law and the Big Four as early design partners. At Linklaters, one of London’s elite “Magic Circle” law firms, attorney Greg Baker said he tested Portal on common deal scenarios, while MinterEllison CEO Virginia Briggs said the tool has potential to create “real value for our clients.” Other design partners include Cleary Gottlieb, Goodwin, and Deloitte. General availability is planned for early 2026.
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