Legora is making a deeper play into legal research, and the move could reshape how firms pay for legal tech.
The startup, which is one of the highest-valued and best-funded companies building software for law firms and in-house legal teams, is growing its corpus of case law and other legal data. It has quietly hired former attorneys to collect the law in the jurisdictions it covers, then map how cases and statutes rank and relate to one another.
The goal is practical. Melanie Brown, Legora's senior director of legal data, said linking the software to a richer source of verified material could reduce the risk of 'hallucinations' — wrong information slipping into the system's outputs.
The bigger strategic target is clear: take share from a market controlled for decades by a duopoly. For large firms, access to LexisNexis and Westlaw is not optional. Lawyers rely on those databases to find cases or statutes and to check whether the authorities they plan to cite are still good law.
That moat is part data, part habit. In recent years, both conglomerates have invested heavily in technology for drafting and analysis, and Brown said the frustration she hears most often is that firms feel forced to choose between the best legal data and better technology.
Legora wants to make that choice disappear. The Swedish company has already signed licensing deals with 'tens' of publishers around the world, including Wolters Kluwer, and has another dozen in the pipeline. It does not license content from LexisNexis or Thomson Reuters, Westlaw's owner.
Getting citable case law into Legora is still tedious. In the United States, court rulings are public records, but the versions attorneys can actually cite remain trapped inside physical volumes owned by LexisNexis and Westlaw. Legora employees cut the spines off those books, remove headnotes and summaries, scan the pages, and verify the digital copies.
Brown said she wants the 'entire legal universe' to live on Legora. But the real test is whether law firms will be willing to turn off their LexisNexis and Westlaw accounts and spend more on a new platform instead.
That is the playbook founders will recognize: use product to attack distribution. If Legora can build a credible research layer, it may turn a trust problem into a product advantage. And if it cannot beat the incumbents outright, a better law library could still make its software stickier, more accurate, and harder to replace.
