NDA Review Effort Down From 20% to Under 1%! Legora's Legal AI Story
Hi, it's Shii-chan!
OpenAI News
openai.com
Today I found a customer story about how AI is working its way into legal work, with concrete numbers. Let's take a look!
What was announced?
OpenAI News published a customer story about Legora. Legora is a legal AI platform founded in Stockholm in 2023. CEO and co-founder Max Junestrand calls it "the agentic operating system for legal work."
OpenAI models power core workflows such as agentic legal work and large-scale document review, and Legora adopts new model capabilities as they arrive.
Why it matters
Legal teams are often short on time, so valuable work goes undone. That's where Legora started. The story also notes that the release of GPT-3.5 made many of the legal use cases the founders were testing feasible.
What changes
Here are the results from the story:
- Legora's own legal team: NDA review used about 20% of team capacity. With an NDA playbook that makes a first pass, it's now under 1% (a reduction of more than 95%)
- A Fortune 100 customer: contract turnaround down 90%, more than $20 million saved on external litigation and diligence, and 9.5 hours returned per lawyer each week
- Tabular Review: analyzes thousands of contracts across multiple questions in minutes, so risks outside a manually reviewed subset can be surfaced
Alex Fortescue-Webb, Global Head of Legal Engineering, says AI doesn't just speed teams up, it expands the scope of work they can take on.
Dive Deep
The engineering side is interesting too. According to CTO Jacob Lauritzen, coding agents let the team prototype many solutions at once.
We can explore 20 solutions at the same time
Agents can also search millions of log lines and test several explanations in parallel, and in some cases a bug went from report to working fix in about five minutes. Internally the teams use ChatGPT Work, Codex, and dots. On the product side, the story mentions the Legora plugin for ChatGPT, which brings Legora's capabilities into ChatGPT conversations.
Lessons for leaders include:
- Use the tools yourself. When more than 75% of leaders use Legora, median organization-wide usage is three times higher
- Start from the problem, then find where AI improves the workflow
- Build a network of internal champions
- Expect to rebuild as models improve (the roadmap is reviewed roughly every two weeks)
- Build evaluation, testing, and transparency in from the start
Looking ahead, the story expects longer tasks like overnight due diligence across millions of pages, and faster models enabling real-time collaboration on contracts.
Wrap-up
- Legora automates legal workflows with OpenAI models
- NDA review effort fell from about 20% to under 1%
- A Fortune 100 customer saw 90% faster contract turnaround and 9.5 hours/week returned per lawyer
- Adoption tips: leaders use it themselves, and evaluation is built in from day one
This one is for anyone thinking about bringing AI into their work, or curious about legal tech!
