Legora's internal legal team set out to support one of the fastest growth trajectories in legal tech: one financing round and four acquisitions, all within five months. This is a task that would have traditionally required significant outside counsel spend and a much larger headcount. With Legora embedded across every workflow, the team did it with a lean internal function that moves at the speed of the business it serves.

This shift marks a broader transformation in how the team operates: from legal as a bottleneck, to legal as an accelerant.

With Legora, the in-house legal team:

• Reduced contract turn time from days to hours, making room for more creative negotiations

• Completed full M&A due diligence in-house, saving an estimated $100,000 USD in external counsel fees 

• Removed 90% of all NDA reviews from the legal team's workload by building playbooks that allow the go-to-market team to self-serve

Here's how they achieved it.

The challenge: demand outpacing capacity

Legora's legal team spans commercial contracts, corporate and M&A, product counsel, procurement, employment, and a growing compliance function. Led by General Counsel Emma Kadri Bergstrom, the team supports an organization scaling at exceptional speed, with new jurisdictions, new deal structures, and new regulatory requirements all arriving simultaneously.

The recurring challenges were familiar to any in-house team operating at pace:

• High volumes of inbound contract review with limited bandwidth

• Frequent pace of M&A activity, requiring complex in-house and outside counsel work

• New team members needing weeks to get up to speed on contract positions and precedent

• Routine legal questions creating constant context-switching for senior lawyers

• Regulatory monitoring across multiple jurisdictions done manually

The team has always operated with Legora. “AI basically supports everything that I do,” says Scott Cohen, Legal Counsel. “I don't go through a single contract without the use of Legora.”

“I think of Legora as my junior associate,” says Mehack Ali, Senior Legal Counsel. “I think of it as my right hand. It's the first place I go, and then I assess what it comes back with as a lawyer.”

In a traditional legal team, institutional knowledge gets consolidated long after the fact. Legora changes that. “All of this information is usually synthesized at some point after a year, after it's no longer relevant,” explains Mehack. “To do that in real time, and to grow with it, that's what makes us AI-first.”

But as deal volume grew and complexity increased, the question became: how far could the team push the platform?

The solution: AI embedded across every workflow

To operate effectively at scale, the team built Legora into every stage of their work, from first draft to final signoff. The approach was to use AI to handle the mechanical and repeatable, so lawyers could focus on judgment, strategy, and relationships.

Using Legora's Word add-in, the team automated the most time-intensive part of contract negotiation. “The Word add-in has just totally taken away any inefficiency of having to copy and paste,” says Mehack. “We spend around 70% of our day in Word. To have Legora there, readily available, has made our jobs ten times easier.”

The ability to make track changes directly in the document, not just discuss issues but implement them, was the biggest step change. “It captures multiple instances of where the change runs through the document,” Mehack explains. “And it helps me teach. If I'm a junior associate and I've never done this before, I now have some idea of the context in which a response would apply.”

For Scott, the Word add-in transformed how he processes inbound redlines. He feeds Legora the customer's markup, the playbook guidance, and his specific directions, and lets it run. “What it prints out is 80 to 90 percent of the way there. I check the work, nudge the tone, challenge it where something doesn't look right.” A contract turn that previously took five hours now takes one. 

The same logic applies to playbook-building: Scott spent a weekend feeding all of the team's historical DPA negotiations into Legora, had it analyze the full set, and produced a paragraph-by-paragraph playbook based on that precedent, institutional knowledge that would otherwise have taken months to accumulate.

For drafting, Legora removed the blank page problem entirely. Emma describes being woken up to a request to sign a contract she hadn't yet drafted, and being able to produce a first version within one hour by feeding a term sheet and a similar precedent into Legora's agent. “As a lawyer, not only do you have to know what to change. You have to know exactly where to move a comma, how to phrase it in legalese, using the right defined terms from the contract,” she says. “All of that comes automatically now. You start from something, not nothing.”

On the compliance side, the team uses Legora's monitor feature to track regulatory changes across jurisdictions in real time, surfacing updates as they happen and turning ongoing compliance tracking from a research burden into a managed workflow. 

For new joiners, Legora has also become the fastest route to institutional knowledge. “I was able to create a guide for myself based on all the contracts and comments we'd had, dump it all into Legora, and have that be my coach,” says Scott, “to get me up to speed on what the GTCs are, why the provisions say what they do, and how it functions in the overall picture of what we're negotiating with our customers.”

M&A: full due diligence, entirely in-house

The clearest demonstration of the scale of Legora's impact came during the acquisition of Cadastral. Mehack led the process end-to-end, from drafting the letter of intent to closing.

The process began with finance providing deal terms in a spreadsheet. Legora translated those into the draft LOI. The full data room was then uploaded to a shared Legora project, giving the deal team a single collaborative workspace. “My first step was to create a project within Legora, add the team members working on it, so we were all collaborating in the same space,” says Mehack.

From there, Mehack ran a structured diligence process entirely inside Legora. “I asked Legora to give me some background and a timeline of Cadastral and all its history, just so I understand what the company is and what it does. Then my next instruction was: conduct a red flag analysis based on your review of the data room. I asked it to create a report prioritized by red, yellow, or green, whether this was a non-issue, a medium issue, or something that would stop the deal, and then to create recommendations as to how we should address these issues. Should it be addressed in the SPA? Should it be addressed pre-closing?”

Scott handled the commercial contracts in parallel via tabular review. “We dumped in all the supplier and customer agreements, set up the columns we cared about, like assignment, change of control, and had Legora draft the commercial section of the memo directly from the review.” The result was a complete diligence report, produced internally, in a fraction of the time a law firm would have required.

Crucially, because the team had done the work themselves, they arrived at closing with a running start on integration. “A lot of companies struggle with the post-closing work because then they have to redo or really get into the details that surfaced during due diligence when that was outsourced,” says Emma. “We didn't have to do that, so we were given a running start on post-closing.”

“An M&A diligence process done totally in-house would have been impossible before,” Mehack adds. “With Legora, that's now possible, as long as you have the in-house expertise.”

The result: legal at the speed of the business

By embedding Legora across negotiation, diligence, drafting, and compliance monitoring, the team has fundamentally changed what a lean in-house function can deliver. The team can respond to business questions faster, get looped in earlier, and spend more time on the work that actually moves the company forward.

In practice, this means:

• Standard contract turns completed in minutes, where previously they could take hours

• An estimated 15 hours saved per M&A transaction on commercial due diligence alone

• NDA review removed from the legal team's plate entirely, freeing roughly 40 hours per month for higher-value work

• New joiners contributing meaningfully within weeks, not months, using Legora to access institutional knowledge from day one

As Scott explains: “I don't think I would be able to flip as many contracts as I'm able to flip — and get us to that record-setting pace of a hundred million ARR in 18 months — without something like Legora.”

“A year ago, running full diligence in-house on a complex deal wasn't realistic; we'd have had to outsource or deprioritize it entirely,” says Emma. “Now we do it ourselves. When something urgent lands and the CEO needs my view at 9pm, I'm not giving him my best hunch. I'm grounding my response in actual legal sources, in real time.”

“Legora has enabled the legal team to be the strategic partner to the business,” she says, “to respond within a very short time of a question being asked. That has positioned us in a way where people want to loop us in. It's a lot more fun being a lawyer today than it was five years ago,” she says. 

“If you want to make your legal team an accelerant rather than a gatekeeper,” Scott says, “you need AI. Full stop.”

For Legora's legal team, the product they help build every day is also the tool that makes their own work possible. The result is a legal function that can grow at the pace of the business it serves. 

Looking ahead: redefining in-house legal 

The impact of Legora is also extending to how Emma defines what an in-house legal function can be, and what she looks for when building her team. “I run a lean in-house team at a company that's growing faster than anyone could have imagined. I'm not looking for the same profile I would have hired five years ago,” she says. “Embracing this technology isn't a nice-to-have anymore. It's the job.”

“I want people who aren't just comfortable with AI but who are actively pushing it forward, finding new ways to use it, building on it. A lawyer who treats AI as a tool they occasionally pick up is not the same as one who makes it part of how they think. That distinction is going to define careers."

It's also reshaping how in-house teams work with outside counsel. "I still use them,” Emma says, “but the dynamic has changed. I come to those conversations more prepared, with sharper questions, with a clearer view of the landscape before I even pick up the phone. What has emerged is something closer to a genuine collaboration: we talk about how to split work efficiently, what belongs in-house and what doesn't, rather than just defaulting to handing things over."

The future of the in-house function, she believes, belongs to teams that make that choice deliberately. Not AI as a faster version of the status quo, but AI as a reason to challenge what you thought was possible.