Legora is buying another startup as the battle for Big Law's business heats up
Legorathe Swedish startup building software for law firms, has acquired a company as it races to close the gap with rival Harvey.
Legora tells Business Insider it has bought Stockholm startup Qura, which built a search engine for lawyers that pulls together hundreds of legal sources, from case law to regulations. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in 2023, Legora sells a suite of AI-powered software tools for faster, more precise drafting and document analysis. Its core pitch is that it helps law firms strip the drudgery from legal work so lawyers can focus on serving clients.
The fence and Harvey are locked in a competition to become the default platform for legal work. To fuel that race, both have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from tier-one venture capital firms. Legora was just valued at $5.5 billion in March; Harvey, at $11 billion.
Now, with its second acquisitionLegora looks to crack one of the hardest problems in law — legal research — says Max Junestrand, Legora’s 26-year-old cofounder and chief executive.
The nightmare scenario for any lawyer is filing a brief that cites a fake caseone made up by artificial intelligence. Large language models work by predicting what word is most likely to come next, not by checking whether the answer is true.
One way to reduce the risk of bogus citations or other hallucinations is to connect the model to a reliable body of legal material, such as case law and treatises. The model can still misread or overlook content, but it makes wholesale fabrications less likely.
The challenge for startups is that legal data is hard to get. In the United States, much of the law may be technically in the public domain, but access often is not. Federal courts, for example, charge by the page for filings, while older state court decisions may sit offline in filing cabinets rather than searchable databases.
Legora’s rivals moved quickly to crack that problem. Last June, Harvey struck a partnership with LexisNexis to bring the publisher’s legal data into its platform. On Tuesday, London legal-tech company Luminance said it had signed a similar deal with LexisNexis. Cliowhich makes software for running law firms, took a different approach. Last year, it acquired legal research provider vLex in a $1 billion deal.
Legora was slower than some to lock up legal data. Its platform connects to a patchwork of sources from around the world, from France’s highest court for civil and criminal cases to an Australian tribunal that reviews antitrust decisions. It also includes Edgar, the SEC’s main database for corporate filings.
Junestrand said Legora already had more partnerships than Qura, so the deal was not really about adding more sources. It was about the technology Qura built to make sense of them. Qura’s search engine is designed to scan legal materials, surface relevant details buried deep in documents, and produce quick summaries or more detailed analyses of legal questions.
Junestrand offered this analogy: Legora is building the car, while Qura has been building the road system beneath it. “Without that structured road system, you’re not really navigating,” he said. “You’re just guessing.”
Junestrand also pointed to Qura’s revenue, growing 40% monthly over the past six months. Founded in 2023, the company raised a pre-seed round of about $2 million.
Earlier this month, Legora said it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, a measure of contracted revenue over a year. How startups calculate that figure became the subject of an online debate over the weekend. Asked about it, Junestrand stood by the number.
For Legora, getting legal research right is critical. In most industries, a hallucination is a nuisance. In law, it can mean a sanction or a black mark on a lawyer’s reputation. That risk was on display this week, when the elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell apologized to a federal bankruptcy judge over a court filing with fake citations and quotes invented by AI. The firm didn’t say what platform was used.
As the legal-tech rivalry heats up, the company that wins may just be the one clients trust not to embarrass them in court.
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