He Built A $1.8B AI Company With No Experience | Max Junestrand

In this week’s episode, we’re joined by Max Junestrand, Co-Founder and CEO of Legora.

The company only went through Y Combinator last year, has raised $260M to date, and is already one of the fastest-growing companies across legal AI.

Legora is betting that the next decade of law won’t be won by “better PDFs,” but by software that fundamentally changes how legal work gets done.

Max takes us from Legora’s pre-LLM origins (back when “AI wasn’t cool” and building anything useful was brutally hard) to the post-GPT inflection point that turned legal into one of the most ripe, underrated verticals in all of AI. We talk about why their growth has felt like a new company every quarter, why law firms are unusually primed for a platform shift, and how the real unlock isn’t just smarter models — it’s embedding the product directly into workflows like due diligence at scale and Word-native drafting.

What emerges is a clear worldview: if AI can do a task, it will — and the winners will be the teams that ship relentlessly, wire AI into the operating system of legal work, and help lawyers climb the ladder faster rather than just pushing paper.

In this episode, we explore:

* Choosing the “unsexy” category on purpose — why Max thinks legal AI is the most exciting vertical, and why more founders should be building here.

* “Before AI was cool” — Legora’s early work started in 2020, when pre-LLM ML simply couldn’t deliver real value… and how GPT flipped the entire feasibility curve overnight.

* Building inside a law firm, not outside it — embedding with top Nordic firm Mannheimer Swartling, going practice area by practice area, and solving real problems before scaling distribution.

* How they move so fast — the internal rule: take what a normal company does in a year and compress it into a quarter — and why demand in legal AI makes that pace possible.

* The evolution of legal AI UX — from “ChatGPT wrapper” era to tabular review at massive scale (tens of thousands of documents), to Word-native drafting and redlining, to precedent-driven contract generation with hundreds of edits.

* Why it’s becoming “unethical” not to use AI — the idea that AI is the newest rung in the review ladder: junior → senior → partner → AI… because it’s another set of eyes you can’t afford to ignore.

* The junior lawyer shake-up — how AI pushes people earlier in their career into reviewer-level work, shifting the value toward judgment, client communication, and problem-solving over pure document grinding.

* Adoption friction is cultural, not technical — why younger lawyers adopt fastest, but change gets blocked if partners don’t encourage it — and what that does to incentives inside firms.

* From services to productized workflows — why AI forces law firms to rethink leverage, scale, and monetization — and how “outcome-based pricing” becomes more natural as the billable hour looks increasingly mismatched.

* Fundraising without the theater — Max’s take: the best way to raise is to build a great business, then let investors come to you — including rounds that closed in days, not months (and without a traditional pitch deck).

* What the next 1,000 days looks like — why Max is most excited about agents with tool-calling + memory that can run longer workflows… and why reliability compounds (or collapses) across multi-step tasks.

* The ethos behind the hustle — not “996” as a badge, but a mission-driven intensity — and the customer stories that make the grind feel worth it (like giving someone their Friday night back).

If you want a real window into how legal AI is evolving — and what it looks like when a company tries to build the operating system for an entire profession — this one’s for you.

Also available onApple Podcasts // Spotify

Chapters:

(0:00) Intro(3:30) Doubling ARR Every Quarter (5:35) The Paradigm Starter & Latest Insights Across Legal AI (8:48) What Does AI Mean For Junior Lawyers?(11:44) How Lawyers Adopt Legora (20:06) Going Through YC W25 & Launching Fast (24:33) Max Takes Us Inside The Day-To-Day Legora (30:12) Building Insanely Quickly (33:51) The YC Experience (36:08) Hiring Former YC Founders(38:46) Legora’s Fundraising Journey (41:26) Max’s Day-To-Day (44:10) The Nordic’s Ecosystem (45:20) The Game Plan (46:22) The Next 1,000 Days (48:07) Max’s Other Startup Ideas

Thanks for listening and see you in the next episode 👋

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