Transforming legal work with AI

In late 2022, the launch of ChatGPT took the world by storm. It could retrieve information from extensive training data, solve a wide range of problems, and even generate text based on user prompts.

Almost instantly, these new LLM capabilities were applied across software development, customer support, and educational contexts. Yet entrepreneurs Max Junestrand and Sigge Labor were convinced the technology could be pushed even further into new industries.

Witnessing firsthand the frustrations of lawyers losing countless hours to tedious administrative tasks, they saw an opportunity: what if these manual tasks could be automated with LLMs, so lawyers can focus on more strategically valuable work?

Enter Legora, a collaborative AI platform which automates repetitive and manual tasks for law firms and legal professionals, so they can focus on higher impact, strategic work.

“Historically, contract review, due diligence, and legal research have been some of the most time-intensive tasks lawyers have faced,” says Axel Junestrand, GTM Manager at Legora. “But with the rise of LLMs, it’s finally become possible to automate these critical tasks and empower lawyers to focus on more complex, client-facing work.”

The idea resonated instantly. Within eight months of the public launch, Legora was accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, raised a Seed round from Benchmark, and announced a Series A from Redpoint Ventures. Today they boast over 200 clients, including Mannheimer Swartling, the largest law firm in the Nordics, Spanish firm Pérez-Llorca, and UK firm Bird & Bird.

Customer relationship magic

Axel joined the Legora team in November 2023 to build out their GTM function. Although they had previously tested a range of CRMs including HubSpot, the team felt as though they’d be forced to adapt their GTM motion to fit these tools, rather than the other way round. 

Until one day, they stumbled upon Attio. Drawn in by the platform’s flexibility and intuitive UI, the team dove straight into onboarding and was immediately excited to build their CRM, their way.

“Prior to Legora I’d worked largely in software engineering, so I had no preconception of what a good GTM process should actually look like,” shares Axel. “We’d set up a rough sales motion that made sense for us in those early days, and what made Attio so compelling was how intuitive it was to create a CRM that replicated that exact process.”

“From the very first time we logged in to Attio, it was easy to find our way around the platform and build what we needed, when we needed it. The future potential of the platform was evident too – we knew it was the right tool to support our growth.”

An AI-native CRM for an AI-first team

Today, Legora leverages Attio across all GTM operations, from building out sales pipelines, to AI-enhanced prospecting, to automating repetitive tasks with workflows.

“As an AI-first company, we’re hyper aware of the value of LLMs when leveraged well, so we’re always looking for new ways to improve our operations with AI,” says Axel. “What’s been so impactful about Attio is how AI is seamlessly woven into the platform, making it easy to experiment with and build out new functionalities which genuinely enrich our existing processes.”

Supporting customers through their AI journey

Legora uses Attio to track their entire customer lifecycle, from their very first interaction to prolonged customer engagement.

“The fact that AI is such a new technology means that the journey from prospect to paying customer is often non-linear, especially in such a sensitive context as legal work,” shares Axel. “When we think about going to market, we’re really mindful of supporting clients through their unique AI journey – all the way from understanding their problems, to showing them ways AI might solve these, to onboarding them as a customer and supporting their exploration of the Legora workspace.”

Using Attio’s powerful and flexible data model, Legora has built a custom CRM which gives them total visibility over their customer relationships.

“Attio is the one place where our marketing, sales, and customer success teams can come together and instantly see the current state of the business. Our customer data and product data is all centralized in Attio, giving everyone all the context they need to best support our clients.”

As the Legora team scales, they’re continually iterating on and adapting their GTM motion in Attio. “The flexibility to test new approaches and configure our pipelines any which way has been incredible. Any team member can dive straight in and quickly add an attribute or edit a status, so our CRM always mirrors our evolving business operations.”

Augmenting GTM processes with AI

Extensive research into law firms is a crucial and resource-intensive part of Legora’s prospecting process, to ensure the team prioritizes the highest value leads. Now, thanks to Attio’s AI attributes feature, the team can run this process instantly.

“Seeing Attio’s AI agents in action is just like magic,” says Axel. “We simply define our goals and parameters, hit go, and in seconds we have an answer that previously would’ve taken minutes to find. As soon as you start repeating prompts across multiple records, the cumulative effect is immense – it saves us hours of manual work every week.”

Axel has configured a number of AI attributes to streamline manual data collection across the team. “An important signal we look for is the number of lawyers at a firm, which can be really time consuming to determine manually. We’ve built a new attribute for this using the research agent autofill, which yields accurate answers with no effort on our end.”

Legora also uses the Classify record prompt to segment leads into categories most relevant to their business.

“Having instant access to all the key data points we use in prospecting, without leaving Attio, has been really impactful. It’s already improved the precision and efficiency of our processes, saving our team countless hours previously lost to manual research,” shares Axel. “We’re excited to build out even more AI attributes as we continue to scale.”

Leveraging the power of human and AI

Legora has built a number of workflows in Attio to automate repetitive tasks across the team.

“We’ve constructed a workflow which automatically notifies the team in Slack whenever there’s new GTM activity in Attio,” explains Axel. “So when a deal is won, for example, we use the prompt completion block to summarize the key points. These are the output of which is then automatically shared with the team in Slack. It’s made handovers between sales and engagement so much smoother.”

The team has also found value in configuring workflows which enforce data hygiene within Attio, automating tasks ranging from updating status attributes to creating new records from inbound leads.

“Workflows enable us to minimize the time spent manually inputting data in Attio, freeing our time to build genuine customer relationships. That’s where we believe the real value of AI and automation is: in optimizing our processes so we can focus on understanding each customer’s unique problems and creating these authentic human connections,” says Axel.

“This is something the Attio team does super well. Whenever we request a feature or share some product feedback, we’re always notified when something new is shipped. It makes the whole experience of using Attio really special – we feel listened to, and can directly see our input having a tangible impact on the platform.”

Accelerating into the AI era with Attio

In only a year of using Attio, Legora has already increased its seat count six-fold. The team is confident in Attio’s ability to support their future growth. “The speed at which the Attio team ships new updates is incredible – it’s really exciting to be building Legora alongside another rapidly scaling company.”

Axel is particularly eager to see the new ways Attio incorporates AI in the months ahead. “There’s a really strong alignment between Attio’s vision for the future of CRM and how we think about AI at Legora, particularly in terms of automating actions so we can prioritize the most valuable, people-oriented tasks. We’re really looking forward to building more on top of the platform.”

“At the end of the day, Attio is simply how modern customer relationship management should be done,” Axel concludes. “It truly feels like magic – there’s no other CRM like it.”