Legora’s AI-Powered platform transforms law firm efficiency with Elasticsearch

In today’s competitive legal landscape, legal professionals are seeking innovative ways to enhance efficiency and deliver more value to clients. Legora, with its AI workspace, is helping the legal industry achieve these goals by automating repetitive tasks and providing secure access to legal sources and proprietary data.

To power this groundbreaking platform, Legora deployed Elasticsearch, leveraging its generative AI search capabilities. As a result, the Swedish-based scale-up now has a fast-growing roster of European clients including Bird & Bird, Pérez-Llorca, Bahr, and RocaJunyent.

Sigge Labor, CTO and Co-Founder at Legora says the idea for the business emerged after observing the daily grind of legal work: endless document reviews, extensive research, drafting motion after motion.

He said: “We witnessed our friends––lawyers, who spent many years of their lives studying very hard to understand the foundations of our society, the law––bogged down with thankless tasks.” As machine learning experts and builders, Labor and his team knew AI could help. However, only with the rise of large-scale language models could they truly reimagine how lawyers work. This inspired Labor to apply emerging technologies, particularly natural language processing (NLP), to streamline the process.

From the start, the Legora team realized that relying solely on AI-generated responses for legal questions wasn’t enough. Complex legal queries can often lead to hallucinated or fabricated answers, especially when sources are cited.

Early challenges with using semantic search and vector database technology in new, smaller databases—particularly around security and self-hosting—also underscored the need for a reliable solution. To meet these goals, Legora turned to Elastic as the leading search platform. Labor says, “Elasticsearch gave us the stability, performance, and scalability we required, allowing us to focus on building an innovative product instead of managing search infrastructure.”

The company was drawn to Elastic’s forward-thinking approach, particularly in AI and vector search. Labor says, “Vector search is a critical feature of Legora’s solution. Legal queries often involve finding cases with similar scenarios, and vector search enables the system to identify semantically related cases, even when the search terms differ.”

This is particularly important in legal research, where nuances in language can make all the difference. Elastic’s vector search capabilities ensure the platform consistently surfaces the most relevant cases, empowering legal professionals to make informed decisions.

In terms of accuracy and speed, the Legora team was laser-focused on the scalability and security of its platform. Labor says, “We must be able to handle the demands of legal teams of all sizes, ensuring that large-scale adoption doesn’t disrupt service.”

Legora utilizes Elasticsearch hosted on Microsoft Azure. Labor says, “Many law firms in Europe, particularly in Sweden, already prefer Azure as their cloud service, making adoption easier for clients with prior investments in the platform." Additionally, Azure’s GDPR-compliant models were crucial for the European market, ensuring data processing remains within the EU.

Elasticsearch plays a vital role in managing and searching through large volumes of legal documents. The Legora platform integrates multiple LLMs to ensure the best model selection for each task, with redundancy measures in place to handle service interruptions.

Legora also employs a rigorous multi-tenant architecture to ensure data security and privacy for each user. Every query is authenticated, ensuring that legal professionals only access the data they are authorized to view. Legora also complies with ISO 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type I & II, international standards for information security management systems (ISMS), and a set of audit reports that evaluate an organization's security controls. Both frameworks focus on data security, confidentiality, availability, and privacy - essential elements that Elasticsearch satisfies.

End users can open a chatbot window and type in a search query using everyday language along with legal expressions and vocabulary. The platform retrieves relevant data from all available legal documents, grounding AI-generated answers in a comprehensive and trustworthy context. Labor recalls after demoing the platform for the first time to legal professionals, the reaction was one of ecstasy. There was an immediate realization that the system would help shift the focus from paperwork to client relationships. Labor says, “Our customers immediately saw the benefits - less paperwork means more focus on actual law.”

The reduction of paperwork significantly reduces the time lawyers spend on mundane tasks, such as reviewing countless documents or searching for definitions across multiple laws. The system now automates these tasks, previously handled through outdated and inefficient databases, freeing legal professionals to focus on creative and impactful work such as developing legal arguments or meeting with clients.

User feedback highlights how Legora transforms working practices. Labor says, “One lawyer likened it to the introduction of AI-powered co-pilots in coding tools. Just as developers were freed from repetitive tasks with VS Code, lawyers can now shift their focus to the aspects of their work they enjoy.”

Labor also stresses the contribution made by Elastic during the development of the platform and ongoing releases. “It is easy to manage and spin up Elastic clusters. And if I do need additional support, the Elastic team is always responsive and quick to act.” This allows Legora to focus on delivering customer value while maintaining high service and performance levels.

Looking to the future, Legora continues to innovate with a focus on improving jurisdictional accuracy and refining search capabilities. The company is experimenting with hybrid search techniques and exploring the potential of agentic AI to further streamline workflows. Labor says, “Technology moves fast, but our mission remains the same: pushing the boundaries of AI in legal practice, empowering exceptional lawyers.”