When Leya secured $10.5 million in funding in May from big Silicon Valley venture funds, the stage seemed set for the Stockholm-based company to enter the United States with its AI powered legal assistant.
The company’s software integrates with existing document management systems to answer in-house and outside counsel’s legal queries, help them conduct due diligence and give them quick access to information contained in their own documents.
But the company says it’s staying close to home. “While Leya is someday looking to expand to the U.S., they have no current plans to do so,” a spokesperson told Legal Dive.
Should it make the leap, the company would have to create what amounts to a new product. The core value-add of a legal assistant is not just in the quality of the AI tool it uses; it’s in the breadth and depth of the content it accesses. That could keep it focused on Europe, whose laws provide the corpus on which its tool has been trained.
"The smartest answers from AI are always going to be based on not just the AI's training, but [the] content,” Jake Heller, CEO and co-founder of Casetext, told Legal Dive. “It makes it a little bit harder if you're coming from Europe to start from scratch and build out the database of content. Not undoable, but more difficult for sure."
Casetext’s AI legal assistant, CoCounsel, launched last year with a focus on U.S. law but earlier this year it announced expansions into Canadian and Australian law.
CoCounsel benefits from Casetext’s affiliation with data giant Thomson Reuters, Heller said. “Thomson Reuters has such a wealth of content in terms of gathering all of U.S. law, spanning billions of pages, going back to the founding of the country – statutory law, regulatory law, case law, and commentaries on the law,” he said.
Leya has so far made its deepest inroads in Sweden and Denmark, but with a Spanish-language tool it released last year, it appears to be positioning itself to be the go-to legal assistant for Spanish-language law. That’s an area that has yet to see the kind of attention from generative AI software companies that English-language law has.
“Leya distinguishes itself … thanks to its ability to analyze documents in Spanish,” Maris Delgado, head of knowledge management at Spanish law firm Perez-Llorca, told Law.com in an interview earlier this year. "The quality of generative AI tools in producing Spanish-language outputs is a crucial aspect for us, especially considering that the generative AI market is predominantly English-focused.”
The company’s May capital infusion, from Benchmark, Y-Combinator, Hummingbird and SV Angel, could enable it to be a key vector for getting generative AI capabilities into Spanish-language law.
"Most folks are going to want not that many AI assistants in their lives,” Heller said. “Maybe one or two for legal."
By sticking to its Europe focus and moving into Spanish-language law, Leya could position itself to be one of those legal assistants outside of English-language law.
