Wim Dejonghe, who was the global senior partner of the former Allen & Overy, has backed a new model law firm – Falcon – with money, strategic insight, and philosophical support. He prophetically stated: ‘The traditional legal sector is due its neo-bank moment.’ (See AL Interview below with the founders.)
That is to say, the lawyer who once led the Magic Circle law firm into its strategically game-changing merger with New York’s Shearman & Sterling, believes the legal market is about to witness a rapid evolution in the same way the financial world saw the birth of online banking and other new approaches. And Artificial Lawyer, which has been covering the growth of NewMods since the start, would have to agree…!
And now the new model firm that has gained such impressive backing: Falcon.
It’s been created by the founders of Belgium HR-tech scaleup Mbrella and a former Freshfields lawyer. The Mbrella founders are: Amaury Gérard, Quinten Vandermeulen and David Nguyen. They are joined by former Freshfields lawyer, Rémy Bonnaffé.
They’ve also raised around €1.5m to get them started, and as noted, Dejonghe is an investor as well.
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As with many other new model firms, the founders want to tap the commercial contract segment of the market initially – using flat fees, AI, and a fast turnaround. Also like many other new model founders they saw how legal work was made and could not believe there was not a better production and delivery system. So they decided to build it.
In this case they are ‘targeting an estimated €49 billion-a-year European market, offering small and medium-sized businesses commercial legal support at a fraction of the cost and time of a traditional law firm’.
Falcon will initially focus on NDAs, data processing agreements, master service agreements and customer and supplier contracts. ‘Clients submit contracts through chat apps such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, with every review signed off by a qualified lawyer and returned the same day,’ they said.
And here’s the video interview with two of the founders. AL will publish this again on Monday with the full transcript and additional commentary.
They explained: ‘As Mbrella scaled and began signing larger customers, commercial contracts became an increasing drain on their time, while outsourcing relatively straightforward work to traditional law firms could cost €3,000 – €4,000 and take days or weeks. They set out to build a law firm that could use AI to cut the time and cost of routine legal work without taking the lawyer out of the process.’
Meanwhile, Dejonghe, who will be a non-executive co-founder of Falcon, commented: ‘AI has changed how quickly legal work can be done, but the traditional model still rewards firms for the time that work takes. That tension is very difficult to solve from inside a billable-hour model.
‘Falcon has been built from scratch around faster delivery and flat-fee pricing, while keeping a qualified lawyer accountable for every piece of work. That’s why I had to be involved.’
More on Monday – but, as you can see, and as have seen over the last few weeks – if there is one major trend in the market other than AI adoption, it’s the growth of new model law firms. The fact that lawyers such as Dejonghe have now joined up to this market movement is truly a sign of the times.
More about Falcon here.
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