Leya's history is young but fast-moving. The Swedish startup was founded in May 2023 and already has more than 100 customers, including large law firms such as Pérez-Llorca in Spain. Its artificial intelligence tool is available in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom and Spain in the respective national languages and, of course, adapted to the respective legislation.
Leya serves as a conversational chat for consultations and also allows lawyers to streamline some tasks. It can review multiple documents at the same time, whether in a due diligence or litigation situation. It has been dubbed the European Harvey because both startups were born in the heat of the GPT models, one in the United States and the other in Sweden. This represents an important difference in approaching the EU market.
Neosmart spoke to one of the three founders of the company, Max Junestrand, CEO of Leya. He welcomes us in a video call from a sunny courtyard of a modern office building in Stockholm. He tells us that the three who started the project are engineers, none of whom have a legal background. The connection to the legal world comes from the experience of one of Junestrand's colleagues, who shared an apartment with law students and saw how they struggled with their first document exams.
“I can give Leya a whole folder of documents and have her check them all at once,” Junestrand emphasizes. We start the interview with a demo. The CEO of Leya starts by explaining how the system works: “You can see how Leya extracts the answers to the questions we ask and makes sure it always links to the original citation and the source it used for the answer.”
You can provide Leya with your own documents, such as an NDA, and work with the tool at different levels. It depends on how comprehensive you want the response to be. “I can simply ask the tool for a review or use a predefined, longer prompt that Leya then executes.”
And the questions come naturally, so the demonstration soon turns into an interview driven by curiosity.
Do you have many predefined prompts?
Yes, and we allow law firms or in-house legal teams to write these prompts as predefined shortcuts that Leya can reuse. We also help our clients to define the prompts themselves together with our legal experts.
Does Leya have access to the prompts that some of your clients use?
We do not see them. And they are not shared between clients. But if you and I worked on the same team or in the same company, we could share them with each other. I can also create my own databases for my entire team. This way, if you and I work in the same company, we could have shared databases with our knowledge that the AI can then access and reuse in its work.
Which database providers do you work with?
We work with open databases, such as Eurolex and the documentation of the European Union. But in Spain, for example, we have the legal database Iberley, and in Sweden we work with another database. But I think the most important thing for the Spanish market is that we have all the latest Spanish legal material, including court decisions.
How does the agreement with Iberley work?
If you are a subscriber to Iberley and a subscriber to Leya, you can use all this information in Leya. Or you can also get it via our tool [by subscribing via Leya].
Looking back, how did the project come about?
Leya was originally created when our student friends started their first job as interns in large law firms. They were given very manual tasks and had to check many contracts to make sure they contained, for example, intellectual property and confidentiality clauses. They hadn’t studied law just to review hundreds of files. So we tried to solve some of these problems with the previous generation of AI models.
What are we talking about?
That was almost four years ago, about three years ago. But it was really difficult, especially in languages like Swedish or Spanish.
Until ChatGPT appeared...
Later, when GPT came up, we tried again and had success. And then we created a company around it.
What value does Leya have for a law firm?
We work with all departments of a law firm. And not only do we help them use LLMs in different parts of their existing workflows, but we also look ahead.
What do you mean by that?
We are asking how you have done it in the past. Could we rethink the whole process using LLMs? Instead of checking 200 files at once, why don’t you check them in tabular form? That takes about a minute instead of two hours.
How would your tool help a lawyer?
I’ve spent enough time with lawyers to say that it matters. If they are litigation lawyers, they work one way with Leya. If they are mergers and acquisitions lawyers, they work in a completely different way. For example, if you are working with litigation or arbitration, you might be creating timelines, drafting arguments and outlines, reviewing evidence, or investigating what the other party might put forward. An in-house lawyer might analyze data processing agreements, make sure consulting agreements comply with all policies, compare terms and conditions with internal policies, review NDAs, or conduct legal research in a country where you might not be an expert.
Have you measured the time saved by using Leya?
We have not measured this internally, but we have heard examples from many clients. One of them told us that he was able to do two weeks' work in three hours. And I think that we and our clients hope that AI will take over some of the really manual steps in reviewing contracts as part of due diligence.
Is Leya aimed at small or large law firms?
We are thinking of large law firms, but also medium and small law firms as well as in-house legal teams. Leya is not intended for a specific size, but for every lawyer.
How can an independent lawyer use your solution?
They can book a demo, which we usually do in five minutes, and then decide if they want to have an account.
How do you differentiate yourself from other competitors like Harvey?
I think we are very focused on what the work of lawyers looks like today and how we can make it even better. There are a lot of design decisions that are very different between our two platforms. Also, the way we integrate local material and language, namely Spanish, is of course a key differentiating factor for this market. Overall, I think we have a more coherent product experience. We integrate directly with iManage (a document management system widely used in many law firms).
Is it easy to adapt to the different jurisdictions in Europe?
Yes, we have gotten very good at it. The more you do it, the better you get.
But what lessons have you learned?
That it’s very important to work with the best lawyers in each jurisdiction if you want to get into it, because they know it best. And I also think it is necessary for the LLM to understand and respect the local differences in order to work with this material in the best possible way.
What role do language and local legislation play?
This is crucial. We do a lot of work behind the scenes so that the LLM and AI can understand and work with the legal material better than they would otherwise. So we teach the AI what priority to give to different sources, keep that information up to date and make sure it only works with the most relevant context for different questions.
How do you ensure the confidentiality of the information?
No prompts or data are shared between clients or users. And we only use LLMs hosted on Microsoft Azure, to which all confidentiality and abuse monitoring exemptions apply. And nothing is used to train an AI model in secret.
Does the tool work with a self-developed AI model or with a version of GPT?
We use a combination of both, GPT-4 Turbo and some of the other models provided by GPT. And now we also host some other tools on Azure that we use.
What does Leya expect from this year?
The most important thing for us is to develop the best product on the market. And that's what we are focusing on. If we can do that and if it brings great benefits to end users, I think the commercial aspects will take care of themselves.
