Lora’s AI Rise: Celebrity Ads, YC Scaling, and Agentic Workflows

Name: Max Junestrand, CEO of Legora
Uploaded: 2026-06-05T14:30:09+00:00
Duration: 22 min 47 s
Channel: Y Combinator
Description: Summary and key takeaways on Max Junestrand, CEO of Legora: Summary & Key Takeaways, covering The Jude Law Campaign Legal‑tech marketing has long been

Y Combinator

Jun 05, 2026

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22 min video

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2 min read

YouTube video ID: mjmswQurIU4

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Legal‑tech marketing has long been dismissed as bland and boring. Lora decided to prove that perception wrong by chasing actor Jude Law for six months. Hollywood’s anti‑AI sentiment initially made him refuse, but the team showed him testimonials from lawyers who saved enough time to see their families. Convinced, Law demanded creative control, so Lora brought in a Saturday Night Live writer and the cinematographer of Oppenheimer to produce a sleek, high‑profile ad that turned a dull industry into a sexy showcase.

Founding and YC Experience

Early team members turned down full‑time offers at McKinsey to join the startup full‑time. During Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, the founders lived in an Airbnb and worked from 1 a.m. to 10 a.m. to run sales calls. The founder split responsibilities: one team shipped the product in the United States while the founder focused on sales in Sweden and fundraising in the United States. Initial investor meetings felt tired and unprepared, but by the time Lora pitched Benchmark, the team had sharpened its narrative and secured the partnership.

Scaling and Strategy

In one year Lora expanded from 40 employees to roughly 500, establishing offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Texas, New York, London, Stockholm, Germany, India, and Australia. The company preserves a “founder mode” culture by staffing each department with former CEOs, allowing rapid decision‑making. Product strategy shifted from single‑feature tools to a bundled suite that includes chat, tabular review, and a Word add‑in, giving Lora an edge over competitors that focus on one function. The long‑term vision is to evolve into a multi‑product enterprise comparable to Alphabet, eventually moving beyond legal tech into broader enterprise solutions.

Future of Legal AI

The current bottleneck is moving from isolated task automation to end‑to‑end, agentic workflows. An agentic workflow lets a user issue a broad command—such as “structure the data room”—and the AI executes multiple steps in parallel, manipulating file trees, running diligence questions, and delivering a complete output in 20–30 minutes. Lora follows software development trends with a six‑month lag, using code‑first AI advances as a roadmap. Defensibility comes from proprietary workflow modes and data rather than the underlying large‑model intelligence, positioning Lora to stay ahead of providers like OpenAI and Anthropic even as those models improve.

Takeaways

Lora used a six‑month campaign with Jude Law, giving the actor creative control and professional writers, to turn the traditionally bland legal‑tech marketing into a high‑profile, sexy advertisement.
The founders left secure jobs at firms like McKinsey, joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, and survived an intense “work camp” where they sold from 1 a.m. to 10 a.m., turning YC into a signal that opened investor doors.
Within a year Lora expanded from 40 to roughly 500 employees worldwide, kept a “founder mode” culture by staffing departments with ex‑CEOs, and bundled chat, tabular review, and a Word add‑in to outpace single‑feature rivals.
The product roadmap shifted from automating single tasks to delivering end‑to‑end, agentic workflows that can structure data rooms and run diligence questions in 20‑30 minutes without real‑time user interaction.
Lora’s defensibility rests on proprietary workflow modes and data rather than the underlying large‑model AI, positioning the company to stay ahead of providers like OpenAI and Anthropic even as they improve.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Lora secure Jude Law for its legal‑tech marketing campaign?

Lora spent six months courting Jude Law, who initially declined because Hollywood was wary of AI. The team won him over by sharing lawyer testimonials about time saved, then offered full creative control, letting him bring a Saturday Night Live writer and the cinematographer of Oppenheimer to craft the ad, turning a bland sector into a high‑impact campaign.

What is an “agentic workflow” and how does Lora use it in legal AI?

An agentic workflow lets users give a broad instruction—such as “structure the data room”—and the AI agent carries out a series of parallel steps, like reorganizing file trees and answering diligence questions, without real‑time interaction; Lora’s system completes these complex tasks in about 20–30 minutes, moving beyond single‑task automation.

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Full Transcript YouTube

All right.
>> What do you want to talk about?
>> Uh, well, I wanted to start talking
about Jude Law.
>> Um, how
>> Jude
how does one um how does one grab Jude
Law to be um um your profile in
advertising?
>> So, has anybody ever looked at
advertisement or marketing for a legal
technology company and said, "That's
[ __ ] sexy."
No, it is the most boring, the most
bland. It makes like automotive parts
look hot.
And
I think it was after at least one bottle
of wine in the office and somebody
going, you know, this like AI powered
law slogan we have. What if we got like
Jude Law to like say it? Hey, I'm AI
powered law. and then like you know use
the computer a bit and we were like
that's a great idea. So we went to an
agency and we were like hey can you get
in touch with uh with Jude Law and they
said absolutely not he's impossible to
get and there's this very weird moment
in Hollywood right now where a lot of
the big actors and screenwriters are
anti- AI because they're starting to
write a lot of the scripts. They're
setting the colors. They're doing
cinematography.
And so for an actor to go and stand
behind an AI company is a quite big
stance in the market. And we got into
contact with Jude after chasing him for
about 6 months and he said absolutely
not.
But then we were like what is Jude going
to buy it after? He is a sophisticated
person. So we got on a call and we're
like but Jude like just let us show you
the product. Like let me show you our
customer testimonials. and we sent him
some of our videos and we sent him these
quotes. We have a customer Slack channel
that's called customer love and it's
just like this quote from like teams and
outlook where lawyers are going I use
Lora to review a thousand agreements in
one day and I got home to see my family
in time for the weekend and we just like
plastered a PowerPoint with like so many
of these slogans and he was like wow
this is amazing I want to like I can get
behind this but it's really important
for me that I stay Jude law like I don't
want to be a person I don't want to be
Lora I want to be Jude law and we went
well what if we're just like there's a
new phase of law and then we ran with it
and he said I want to bring my own
screenwriter I want to bring my own um
cinematographer and he ended up getting
a Saturday night live scriptor and the
cinematographer of Oenheimer
we were like
you know we raised a lot of money but
you know not that much Um, and you know,
they went into the studio and they just
like came out with this amazing film. It
was so funny. And now the marketing team
at Lora have set a really high bar for
themselves. So, uh, for the next
campaign. So, if anybody's working in
marketing, we need your help.
Um, I love that. I I saw the video and I
was like, "Wow, this is like amazing."
And then like as I landed in Stockholm,
it was everywhere. So 17 touch points.
Yep.
>> And and I'm sure you sent it to all the
great lawyers you know. You're like this
is so funny. Like you should look at
this. And we actually had a lead come in
through somebody's mom was like oh was
like this Lora thing I've heard about
before. Like dude Law and she's like
yes. You know so now we have the
connection.
>> Um
great. Let's talk about something.
>> That was a great opening question.
>> I love it. I love it. Uh let's talk
about um the audience here. So a lot of
people here are not starting companies.
A lot of them are working as companies
or working at startups or in school. Uh
when you were in school, how were you
thinking about the options of what you
should be doing with your life? You
know, when I was in school, I just tried
to do as much as possible. I couldn't
like I did a bit of computer science. I
went and studied a bit of business. I
did Mckenzie. I worked at two other YC
startups. I only did one week at the
picked with Anton. and Anton then tried
to hire me and I said no I'm going to
finish my degree. Um and so I felt like
I I got to see quite a lot and you know
frankly people ask me like did we pick
law or did law pick me? I think law
picked me and then we just decided to
run like hell and we never you know
thought about doing something else.
>> How do you think about risk at the time?
Like did it seem did that appear risky
to you to start something or did it seem
like a natural step? Well, it didn't
seem that risky to work on something
over the summer when I still had my
full-time offer at McKenzie in the back
of the pocket. Um, and then actually
when we got this got accepted into YC
was when I called them and I said I'm
not coming back. And I'm actually not
the only person at Lagora who's done
this. It's a group of, you know, 10 15
people who had offers at McKenzie in
particular. Even Jake, our CTO, who was
also a previous YC founder, um he he had
put off his he did an internship and
then he kept the offer for six years
and they started calling like are you
ever coming back and then one time no
I'm not coming back.
>> Um tell us about the the YC kind of like
the like you got started and then you
applied to YC and then what was like
just like what do you remember from the
the months before YC or the month?
>> So let me paint paint you the timeline
here. So, so we started working in the
summer of 2023 and there was like an
early applicant program for the winter
batch. It was like an AI what you
>> Yeah. Like an early applicant.
>> It was perfect timing like your batch
was probably the not the peak but it was
the first best AI batch.
>> Yeah. And so we got like an early
application in and you know hopefully
you guys saw some change between the
delta between our first interview and
then three months later. And when we got
accepted, I remember you calling me and
going, "Hey, are you going to move to
San Francisco?" And that's a trick
question. Everyone say yes and then you
don't have to move.
So I was like, "Yes, Gustav. Yes,
Gustav. I'm going to move. I'm still in
Stockholm." Um, and after we got uh
accepted, I think that bought us time.
So we got the offer in August and we
were like, "Wow, this is really great."
Now we have time before YC to like
really work on the product, like really
get everything in order and we didn't
know what to expect of YC at all. I had
actually expected a lot more companies
to have figured things out. I expected
coming into YC with you know lots of
other really smart and good companies
that were already doing tons of revenue
and that knew what they were doing and
it was you know quite the opposite
actually like a lot of people were still
searching we realized that we had
amongst the highest revenue in the batch
and we were coming in with such FOMO
like three college dropouts from Sweden
and we were like we're going to meet
these PhDs from like MIT and Google and
da da da and we just came in with I
think a lot of confidence but also with
imposter syndrome and when we became
part of the batch we actually took our
company with us. So we were about 10
people in the company at the time and
all of the engineers came to us to live
in the Airbnb and so we were [ __ ]
grinding and it was so
it was like a like a real goolog. It was
like a work camp.
Like I I hope that MJ is in here to like
put that in in writing. But like we
worked so [ __ ] hard and we bought
this really shitty food and like me and
the other sales guy to him. We bought
this ring like these lights to put on
our laptops because we were doing sales
calls between 1:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m.
every day and then we tried to sleep for
a few hours and then we'd go to IC. I
think the thing that we had which a lot
of other companies didn't we already
knew what we were going to do. It was
pretty clear to us at the time and so I
decided to move back to Sweden. I uh
bunkered in a conference room and I just
started selling and I was running around
Stockholm with my little briefcase and I
think people were flabbergasted by the
fact that somebody was so excited about
legal technology because these uh chief
innovation officers, these knowledge
managers, these legal partners had never
seen somebody be excited about selling
them technology ever. They're used to
these really tired salespeople and our
product was frankly not that great, but
they wanted to work with me and they
wanted to work with us. And half of them
probably thought I was on cocaine. Like
they were I was like, "This is the
[ __ ] future and you have to work with
us and we're going to make you win. And
by the way, the biggest firm in the
Nordics already work with us. So if you
don't, you're kind of a loser." And they
were like, "Okay, I get it. I have to
get on the train. And then we made a
very tactical hot swap. So the team that
was in uh in the US shipping in YC, they
came back to take care of the customers
because I had to go to YC to do the
fundrais. And I think this is a
underappreciated
part of YC for at least firsttime
founders with very little network. Uh
there's a lot of investor reach and
there's a lot of signaling value to be
incy. You basically get a lot of
investor inbound building up to demo day
and then you just schedule everything.
So you have like 80 meetings in a week
and you just like start to crunch it
out. And I have found that one of my
real skills and strength is when it
counts I [ __ ] deliver. And so, you
know, I got put in these investor
conversations. I remember we did a
practice round.
>> We didn't. Yes.
>> I was pretty shitty. Like we were Yeah.
He's like, "Yeah, you were
>> tired. Tired and unprepared.
>> We were tired, unprepared, bad. And I
don't You guys didn't You guys gave some
feedback, but you were probably like
they're screwed." And then we got into
the into when like scared lag like it
mattered and we [ __ ] smashed it. And
I remember going to the Benchmark office
and Benchmark is one of these like
legendary VC firms. And I sat down with
Peter Fenton and with Chathan who's now
on our board and we did a 30inut pitch.
They loved it. And I walked out and
Peter Fenton turned to Chaon and said,
"The guy is perfect. The only problem is
that he's from [ __ ] Sweden."
And I'll tell you what, I don't think
that's going to be a problem anymore. We
are [ __ ] show them
and then it's like then it's like a
domino like the next thing, you know,
leads to the next thing and you get put
in these environments where you need to
show up. You need to find a way to keep
energy as you go along. This is hard
because as you start racking up notes
from investors, you start reading into
the notes and thinking they must be
right, I must be wrong. And you get a
little bit sadder for every meeting.
It's hard to keep your momentum and your
energy up. But you have to because
investors, they can see that. They can
they can smell it that you are not
confident in your own company. And in
order to get anyone else to be confident
that you're going to succeed, you have
to be confident yourself. And I think
you had that naturally. Yeah, I can I
think I can on on the go create that.
And you know, one one of the other
things is that some companies will work
out and some companies will not. And
that's okay. And you know, we have
thought a lot about what we want to do
in the long term with Lora. Um we have
decided that this is our lives work and
I've decided that personally. This is my
company. And so when you've decided that
your the amount that you care and your
ambition I feel like creeps up and so
you know one day would love to erase
that legal in front of legal tech Lora
and you know I think one of the best
companies in the world is Google because
of their um their breadth like they
created such a good business in
advertisement and search that they got
the opportunity to do self-driving cars.
within the same umbrella, Alphabet.
Like, that's [ __ ] cool. And Facebook
was so successful that I mean, they're
kind of fumbling the ball a bit. But,
you know, at least they like tried to go
do meta and it was like a cool idea. Um,
I used to build video games for for the
VR headset and I remember being very
nauseous when I had to game test all of
them myself. Um, and that's what we want
to do with Lagora. We want to create
from Europe. I mean, the largest tech
company we have is SAP.
like [ __ ] SAP, are you serious? And
now I think there's a unique moment in
time where the leverage and and shift
can happen. And I tell this to law firms
all the time. You know, if you're ranked
number 150 in the US, AI is your [ __ ]
ticket to go from 150 to 10, right? And
I think this is our opportunity as well
from this part of the world. Um,
technology is democratizing access to
technology, access to talent. And the
only thing we need is the ambition. And
at Lora, we actually did the math. 15%
of our entire engineering and product
organization are XYZ founders. And so
we're just a group of people that I
think have all, you know, like locked
arms and we're like together, you know,
apes together strong. You know what I
mean? Yeah. That's like Lora. And now we
get to build something truly truly
massive together which I'm um you know
equally excited about with the
organization and the team that we're
building as much about as the product.
>> We do say every startup is a series of
mini games and once you won your miniame
you're on to the next one and now you
are winning a mini game. You won
multiple ones but you're on to the next
one. Maybe that's about to start now.
>> Yes. But I also remember in October of
2024 was when we went into full like
general availability. We were like 30
people in the company and I had a slide
and we had three core features. We had
our our agent in our assistant. We had
this big thing called tabular review and
then we had a word addin and we wrote a
three-paged word document that was our
product manifesto and it basically said
we're going to be the best in the chat.
we're going to be best on this table
thing and we're going to be the best in
word and there just happened to be one
company that only focused on building
this word addin and one company who only
focused on building this tabular review
thing and then of course you had chach
for the assistant and we said if we can
be the best at all these three and
bundle them we will win but the problem
was we were doing 1 million ARR the
company that was only focused on the
table thing they were doing almost 50
they were doing 50 times our revenue
venue focused on one single thing and we
had the other stuff as well and now we
just enormously surpassed them and we've
turned so many other clients. So I think
it's also to be um to be mentioned that
it's easy to overfocus on the like here
and now and you do need a even in this
like very fastm moving shortterm world
you need to have a slightly longer
horizon strategy of how you're going to
win. Uh Pidge had a fun uh advice at the
office that we should write a sci-fi
novel about you know what a lawyer 10
years from now and how they will work
because at the end of the day it's that
future we are building for and when
others are opportunistic like we will
dig into the ground to the ground and
like keep grinding it out.
>> Where is Lora today? Um you passed 100
million in ARR
>> and I don't even know how many people
that work at the company. So things are
going well.
>> Things are going [ __ ] great. Um we
this time last year we were 40 people.
We're now close to 500 spread all the
way from San Francisco to Chicago to
Texas to New York, London, Stockholm,
Germany, India, Australia. We are going
global. Uh because turns out lawyers
work the same way all over the world
give or take. And the
energy and the feeling in the company is
that,
you know, we've we're about to hit base
camp and now the real climb is about to
begin. We have sort of proven it to
ourselves that we could do this part of
the journey, but nobody is content. We
wake up, we're excited, we're going
hard. And I think one of the things that
is that is very clear is that Lorra is
run by a lot of founders in the entire
company. And so there's like a lot of
this founder mode energy and different
product departments are basically run by
ex CEOs and so they're all just running
at full speed ahead. And the things that
I'm most excited for is actually the
change that happened over Christmas. So
I think everybody here felt like a big
step change in the u intelligence of the
and the capabilities of the models and
what that has unlocked for us in the
product and the approach that we had for
a really long time was about how do we
augment the lawyer and the work that
they're doing? How do we help them in
their like individual task? But now
because of the capabilities of the
agents and the harness that we have
built for our type of tasks, the content
that we now have access to, all the
different tools and the trust that we
have within these large enterprises
where we can access all of their
documents, all of their emails, like now
we can build really powerful um
proactive agents in a way. And so, you
know, instead of opening your email
inbox and it's sort of like super messy
and if you're a law firm partner, you
have, you know, 500 geared up from from
just yesterday, like Lora will have
taken that looking in the looked in the
context of all the matters that are
happening. It will have done work on
your behalf and we're starting to
actually move into a world where one of
our main bottlenecks is evaltoend
work products because we're no longer
just working with an individual task.
We're really looking at the sort of
>> what's an example?
>> An example would be a a large M&A
transaction where there's like many
different steps. You can break down the
steps and take the due diligence part
for instance where you get the entire
data room and then you well for often
it's like completely unstructured. So
the Lora agent now has access to tools
where it can manipulate the file tree.
So you can just tell it like hey
structure the data room here's our
template folder structure. and it's just
like bipop, you know, let me go do it.
And then you tell it, okay, it's this
type of company. Here's the type of
diligence uh questions that we want to
run through. Let me know if any content
is missing. And then Leguar starts to do
the thing. And some of these tasks take
20 minutes, 30 minutes. They take a long
time to run. And so now the lawyer or
the legal professional is moving from
like working with it um in real time to
very much like working with cursor or
clar code like you're giving broader
instructions and then you're having the
agents go out and do work in parallel
and I think that has been a very
exciting movement for us. I feel like
we're also trailing like six months
behind code. So code will always be at
the frontier because it's naturally a
lot easier. It's binary. It's um the
context problem is a lot easier. The
models have been trained on it sort of
out of the box and so it's very easy for
us to see where the future is headed
within our domain just looking at that.
>> Got it. Um thank you. The question that
a lot of people have are talking about
is
when I was in YC um the question we
always got is what if Google does this?
And it was a valid question at the time
because they were actually pretty good.
Uh now over the next 15 years they
didn't do that very much like they
actually did not execute on almost
anything of the new internal products
that new products that they started and
eventually started sort of somewhat
laughing at the question maybe not in AI
but on the other topics we were kind of
laughing at the question. Um you're
getting the question or other founders
here are going to think about what is
open AI going to do? What is entropic
going to do? Um and um curious mostly
what you have for a founder who's
worried about that. Yeah. Like what do
you tell them?
So I would view it very much you you
we've actually seen this play out one
time before with um databases and
infrastructure and AWS and I think you
can look at companies like MongoDB and
you know how did they position
themselves against AWS and what did they
build which wasn't natural for a bigger
platform like AWS to build um and I
think the real question is like what is
your mode when the models continue to
get smarter, right? I think that's the
sort of real underlying question here.
It's not like is Anthropic going to do
it? Is OpenAI going to do it? It's like
what's defensible in your business
assuming a continuous uh either
exponential or linear increase in the
model intelligence. Cuz if we all think
about a world where the model is so good
that it on the fly writes all the code,
gets all the data, figures out all the
print, like everything to solve a task,
then we should all go have a pin colada
instead. And so I don't just like I
naturally don't think that's going to be
the end state. And so what we think a
lot about is what are the uh inputs and
outputs? What what is the proprietary
data? What are the workflow modes? What
is the behavior that we're teaching our
users? And I think for Lorraa, we
understood that we had to get big

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How did Lora secure Jude Law for its legal‑tech marketing campaign?

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How did Lora secure Jude Law for its legal‑tech marketing campaign?