In the battle for Big Law’s business, legal artificial intelligence startup Legora is bulking up its talent roster. Legora is acquiring Canadian legal-tech startup Walter to sharpen its tools for lawyers, the companies tell Business Insider exclusively.
Legora, based in Stockholm, sells software to law firms and corporate legal departments that aims to free up lawyers from busywork. It announced earlier this week that it raised $550 million in new funding, giving it a war chest to fund expansion and potentially more deals.
Legal tech is entering its consolidation era. In recent years, investors have poured billions of dollars into startups trying to win over law firms as customers. Firms are now coming out of those software pressure tests and are beginning to choose long-term vendors. Not all of the tools will survive the transition, and some are looking for buyers with distribution and balance sheets strong enough to carry them.
With this initial acquisition, Legora is signaling its intent to be one of those buyers. The companies declined to disclose the terms of the deal.
Legora’s chief executive Max Junestrand said that after seeing Walter’s product, it became clear the companies were operating from the same “blueprint for the future of legal AI.” Bringing Walter into the fold, he said, accelerates that vision — and gives Legora a team already building in the direction it wants to go.
Swedish meatballs and a handshake
Forty days ago, Ryan Wilson, Walter’s cofounder and chief executive, had never met Junestrand. One warm intro, a flight to Stockholm, and dinner at a Swedish meatball restaurant later, they shook hands on a deal to combine forces.
Wilson isn’t a lawyer. A repeat tech founder based in Vancouver, he created the company after growing frustrated with how legal services are delivered. He felt clients pay appropriately for legal judgment, but too much for the administrative grind surrounding the work.
Founded in 2022, Walter began as a shared portal for law firms and their clients to manage their data. Last year, the company pivoted. Instead of trying to pull lawyers into a new software platform, it began building agents — tools that can carry out multi-step tasks with minimal human hand-holding. These agents worked directly inside Microsoft Word and Outlook, where much of the legal profession already lives and works.
The fleet of agents debuted last September. Over the next few months, Walter booked more revenue than it had totaled in three years prior, Wilson said. Law firms, including Fasken Martineau and McCarthy Tétrault, two of Canada’s top firms by revenue, are using Walter.
The company had raised millions of dollars in investment, Wilson said.
Wilson said on his first call with Junestrand, the two traded demos and discovered they were building many of the same features, just in a slightly different order. They were, as Wilson put it, “an ocean apart,” but pursuing an eerily similar vision for how legal tech should evolve and how to get there.
Just as important, he said, was alignment on values. After multiple exits — he most recently sold Ollie Order, a Canadian alcohol marketplace, to the private-equity backed software company Next Glass in 2021 — Wilson said he had the luxury of putting culture over price. Walter’s team is small and tightly knit, and all nine employees have invested their own money in the company. Any deal, he said, had to reflect that.
Everyone at Walter is joining Legora, with most moving to Stockholm.
For Legora, this acquisition looks to be about speed. By absorbing a team that was building similar tools inside a lawyer’s daily workflow, the company can accelerate its push toward more autonomous software and deepen its bench in a tight AI talent market.
For Walter, the deal offers scale. Instead of competing for distribution in an increasingly crowded field, its team will plug into a better-capitalized platform with ambitions to become Big Law’s global default workspace.
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