Lawyers are not an easy crowd for an AI pitch. They are cautious, busy, and paid to find the hole in every argument.
Legora just hired someone to make the case anyway.
The Swedish legal software startup told Business Insider it has hired Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir as its first chief marketing officer. Her job is to help Legora win over lawyers and turn it into a household name as it competes with larger Silicon Valley rival Harvey.
“I talked to all the lawyers that I had worked with in the past,” Inanoglu Ozdemir said on a call during her second day at the Stockholm office. They told her: Law is changing, and Legora has a chance to shape its future.
She also noted the dozens of new recruits who joined her orientation — typical for Legora as it scales its global workforce. Last year, it grew from 40 to 400 employees.
Until recently, Inanoglu Ozdemir oversaw a 450-person marketing team at Atlassian, the publicly traded software company behind Jira and Trello. Her move comes as Atlassian is reshaping itself around artificial intelligence, a push that has included layoffs and a string of executive departures.
At Legora, Inanoglu Ozdemir is stepping into a much smaller company with, potentially, a bigger upside. The company is chasing a multibillion-dollar opportunity to sell the software that lawyers use to get work done, like contract drafting and legal research. It’s added elite law firms like Cleary Gottlieb and HSF Kramer as customers.
Investors like Accel and General Catalyst, meanwhile, have rallied around Legora’s hard-charging founder, Max Junestrand. The company has raised more than $850 million in capital, pushing its valuation to $5.6 billion. Harvey was last valued at $11 billion.
Leaving Atlassian for Legora means trading the scale of a public company for the higher risk (but higher reward) of a startup. It also offers a closer seat to the technology shift jolting the way we work.
Over the past year, Inanoglu Ozdemir said, she became obsessed with the idea that AI agents — software that can carry out multistep tasks with little human direction — would transform professional services, including industries like legal that have worked much the same way for decades.
“You can either take your experiences and go from one big company to another — you take the blue pill, right?” Inanoglu Ozdemir said. “Or you take the red pill and you go, ‘Something’s going to get disrupted here, and I want to be on the frontline of that story.'”
Legora and Harvey compete on product and features. They’re also fighting on another plane: brand. In a market where law firms are being asked to trust artificial intelligence with sensitive client work, awareness and credibility become a kind of wedge.
“Brand is becoming almost a moat,” Inanoglu Ozdemir said.
That helps explain why Legora has been spending like a company wanting to be remembered. Earlier this year, it booked the actor Jude Law for a glossy ad campaign. It has also moved into sports sponsorships, signing a Swedish professional golfer, to make Legora feel less like a niche software vendor and more like a category leader.
Inanoglu Ozdemir said Legora told her during the interview process that when customers pilot its software against competitors, pilots convert into long-term contracts 78% of the time. She said she believes that once Legora gets a seat at the table, the product can win.
Her job is to make sure more law firms know enough about Legora to invite it in.
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