By Jos White and Maximilian Eichler.

The legal industry is on the brink of a major transformation driven by generative AI, with experts comparing its impact to the adoption of email. LegalFly, founded by former Tinder executives, is at the forefront of this revolution, offering a secure, end-to-end automation platform for legal work. The stage is set for significant value creation in LegalTech over the next decade and we’re proud to be a small part of LegalFly’s story by leading their Series A.

An industry in transformation 

“GenAI is the biggest innovation for legal professionals since the adoption of eMail” - a quote we have heard many times from industry experts over the past months. It causes significant disruption in the industry and the potential productivity gains are virtually uncapped, but this also implies a drastic change in how legal professionals work and monetise their expertise. 

Law firms face a version of the innovator's dilemma, where this new age of workflow automation makes them much more efficient but at the same time cannibalises billable hours. We are still early in the adoption cycle with law firms, but many legal professionals have accepted the permanence of GenAI in their work and thus are exploring the best strategic fit for their firm.

The adoption in the corporate world is more straightforward, as legal-focused GenAI can unlock major inefficiencies in the organisation and automate a lot of manual tasks even beyond the legal team, thereby drastically reducing costs, empowering teams across the company and even creating a profit centre in some use cases.

Legal services is one of the largest markets in the world with a global revenue TAM of $787bn-$1.1tr today. Legal AI is expected to capture a significant share of that market with global revenue TAM estimates for legal AI reaching up to $149bn in 2031.

This opportunity size has attracted many players over the past decades. Large established companies (e.g. Ironclad, LexisNexis) have added co-pilot features to their product stack. This provides some improvement to the product experience but does not deliver a step change in terms of productivity and process automation. These incumbents have a large number of customers and a lot of data. They are not about to go out of business, but they haven’t been built to leverage the full potential of GenAI and will struggle to compete with the new entrants over the medium to long term. They will also serve as the foundation for this future generation of AI native application-layer tools. We believe the second wave of GenAI-native companies have the best timing to capitalise on this market disruption, as adoption barriers are falling and product innovation accelerates.

We expect massive value creation & capture through legal AI over the next decade, which therefore leaves room for multiple market leaders across different ICPs and use cases. We are convinced that companies focused on in-house teams are best placed to win the market, driven by increased pressure on cutting costs and no concern about cannibalising their business. European startups are more likely to create outliers due to concerns on privacy, data security and operating across multi-jurisdictions.

An end-to-end automation platform for legal work

Legal teams are eager to adopt AI, but don’t want to work with various point solutions and are highly sensitive to concerns on security, privacy, and accuracy. LegalFly is perfectly positioned to capitalise on the wave of underlying LLM developments, with a holistic cloud-based platform for legal workflow automation.

LegalFly sets a new benchmark for data protection and security in the legal industry by implementing on-premise anonymisation, ensuring that sensitive client information remains within the client's control. This approach utilises a specialised model to secure data before it interacts with any large language models. Additionally, LegalFly's platform is designed to be LLM-agnostic, allowing it to select the most suitable foundational models for specific legal tasks. This combination of robust security measures and adaptable AI technology positions LegalFly as a leader in both effectiveness and data privacy for legal AI solutions.

Having launched less than 12 months ago, the company has been able to generate exceptional inbound demand and their recent growth has been nothing short of spectacular, attracting stellar enterprise customers such as Slaughter & May and Allianz.

Tinder veterans revolutionise legal AI

LegalFly was founded in 2023 in Ghent, Belgium by Ruben Miessen (CEO), Kasper Verbeeck De Wael (CTO), Dennis Montegnies (CISO), and Gregory Vekemans (CDO). They’re a truly complementary team with leadership, technical, commercial, security, and UX expertise. They most recently worked together at the Match Group, incl. many AI projects at Tinder, until they embarked on a mission to remove legal & compliance bottlenecks for corporates by automating legal work. They bring a fresh perspective to the legal AI landscape, rethinking process automation and optimization from the ground up. Instead of relying on traditional methods, they focus on developing the most effective solutions for today's legal professionals, aiming to create a seamless digital toolkit that enhances productivity and streamlines daily operations - all in one beautiful and intuitive UI with enterprise grade security built in by default. 

Ultimately we believe LegalFly will democratise legal services for organisations around the world and reshape an industry in the process. We are very excited to become investors in the company and really looking forward to working with Ruben, Kasper, Dennis, Gregory and the rest of the team.

‍Why Notion? A note from the founders…

During our fundraising round, we saw immense interest from venture capitalists wanting to invest in LegalFly. Over the course of three months, we received nearly a hundred inbound requests from VCs wanting to discuss our fundraising plans. We were privileged to select a shortlist of the world's top investors to meet with.

“From our first meeting, it was clear that Notion was not just an investor, but a true partner. Every conversation with Jos was genuine, based on honesty and trust. He demonstrated how he could help us scale the business across multiple stages and functions, while maintaining a relationship we could rely on and enjoy” said Ruben Miessen, CEO of LegalFly.

Jos' track record of building and selling companies for $700 million is truly inspiring. Unlike most VC partners, he thinks and acts like an entrepreneur and fully understands our goals. Jos' humbleness and collaboration from our first meeting set him apart. The entire founding team felt the strongest connection with Jos, and we ultimately chose Notion because of their collaborative and founder-friendly approach.

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