Legora built its US brand on purpose because its AI product changes too fast to describe

Legora, the Swedish legal AI company, built its global brand campaign around purpose rather than product because its software was changing too quickly for features or benefits to stay accurate, according to Stuart Shingler, its SVP of brand and communications.

Rapid development in AI products has made feature messaging impossible for the business, and rational benefits were even riskier, since a benefit that may not apply in nine months is a promise the company should not make.

“We couldn’t talk at feature level at all,” Shingler said. “And we couldn’t really talk about rational benefits either, because we didn’t know what those benefits were going to be by the time the work was out in the world.”

That left purpose. “It forced us to do what probably all B2B marketing should do anyway, which is go deeper than the emotional payoff and get to the purpose. Why does this exist? Why would a lawyer want to use it? Why would their firm want to buy it?”

Arriving second

Legora launched in America in second place. Its name was three months old, it had about 50 staff and a competitor already held the position it wanted. But it had proof: large US firms such as Goodwin and Cleary Gottlieb were using the product widely, and Legora was winning more head-to-head evaluations than it lost.

That made awareness the key variable: if a company wins most of the evaluations it enters, growth depends on being invited into more of them.

The risk was not simply obscurity. “There was a real danger that people would just know us as the ones who came along second or as the European version of somebody else,” Shingler said.

He and co-founder Max Junestrand looked at Spotify, not as a template but as proof such labels fade. Spotify was once seen as the European version of Pandora, which had defined streaming in the US, yet few Americans now think of it that way or even regard it as Swedish.

That allowed Legora to skip a challenger phase, since challenger positioning is defined against the incumbent, the comparison it most wanted to shed. “If we get into all the deals and win over the majority of the US market, then we’re not the number two,” Shingler said. “We’re not the ones who came along afterward. We’re the ones who have to go and create our own sense of purpose.”

A campaign of that scale takes most of a year, and Legora was growing so fast that the launching company would look very different from the one that wrote the brief. “The company we would be when this launched was going to be very different from the company we were that May, so we couldn’t show up as who we were. We had to show up as who we were going to be.”

Jude Law

The campaign, ‘Law Just Got More Attractive’, stars Jude Law with Rhys Thomas, known for his Saturday Night Live work, directing. Shingler is frank about the casting. “We wanted to be famous and he’s called Law. It didn’t need to be more complicated than that.”

The work addresses the distance between the career people pictured when they entered law and the admin-laden reality, a message that holds regardless of product updates.

Skipping the normalising step

Shingler said his team tries to remove one stage from its process. “We try not to have the part of the process where somebody says, ‘Yes, but we should probably do it like this, because this is how it’s supposed to be done.’”

Legora runs invitation-only side events, under the Sidebar name, alongside conferences its buyers attend. Ahead of the Legal Tech Talk event at the O2, a search for a venue found nothing suitable. Instead of settling for the least bad option, a team member suggested building a pub, arguing that taking over an existing bar is expensive and means giving up control anyway.

The Red Line opened for two nights in June in the Design District on Greenwich Peninsula. Actors played the bar staff and regulars, and nods to Legora were concealed in the wall art and on the beer pumps. The illusion held until guests headed to the toilets and saw the reverse of the set. It was designed to be packed away and reused, with leftover materials given to Ravensbourne University.

“Don’t rent a venue and invite people to it,” Shingler said. “Create the venue, make the world and invite people into your world.”

‘Objects by Legora’ began as a logistics issue, as a company now serving over 100,000 legal professionals cannot give out tote bags at that scale. In planning, the team asked itself to define success in the most extreme terms possible, and someone said the merchandise should be good enough to resell. Shingler recalls the ambition as: “I want somebody to want a Legora tote bag so badly that we find one for sale on Vinted.”

The products include leather notebooks and even staplers. They are given away to whoever gets there first and run out quickly, so the brand comes across as craft rather than giveaway.

The lawyer as hero

After a funding round, offers came in to sponsor Formula One. Legora turned it down. “We’d be one of a hundred logos on a car; there’s no story in that and the car might break down every race,” Shingler said.

The team instead looked for a metaphor customers would recognise in themselves: turning unseen preparation into judgment under pressure. Because lawyers play golf, PGA Tour player Ludvig Åberg came first, with Legora cast in the caddie’s role.

Next came Aaron Judge, captain of the New York Yankees, chosen because his home-run career was built on practice rather than natural talent, and because the Yankees mean a great deal in New York, the centre of the legal world. Legora’s Chelsea partnership extends to the academy and women’s team and links to Her Council, its initiative for women in law.

Many AI brands make the technology the hero, since it is what they sell and what investors funded. But that tells buyers publicly that their expertise is becoming optional, an odd message for the person signing the contract.

Legora chose the opposite. “The lawyer has to be the protagonist,” Shingler said. “Legora isn’t acting on their behalf. It helps them reason better and research better, and it opens up work they couldn’t have done before, but the win is theirs.”

Products are now overtaken roughly every quarter, but the wish to be good at one’s job does not go out of date.