Wim Dejonghe, former global senior partner of Allen & Overy, has teamed up with the technology entrepreneurs behind Belgium HR-tech scaleup Mbrella and a former Freshfields lawyer to co-found Falcon, an AI-native law firm built around AI and flat-fee pricing rather than the billable hour.
The new law firm is 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 high-volume commercial contracts, including 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.
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The founding team includes technology entrepreneurs and Mbrella founders, Amaury Gérard, Quinten Vandermeulen and David Nguyen, alongside former Freshfields lawyer Rémy Bonnaffé. The idea for Falcon grew out of the trio’s experience building and selling Mbrella. As Mbrella scaled and began signing larger customers, the teams says that 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.
“The traditional legal sector is due its neo-bank moment. 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”, said Dejonghe.
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Each engagement starts with an intake call of 45 minutes to understand how the customer’s business works, what deals they do, and what legal risk means for them. It then builds a playbook to support the legal contract review. Loop Earplugs, one of Belgium’s fastest-growing consumer brands, is one of its early customers.
“AI has shifted the dimensions of contract negotiations. It has made factual and repetitive tasks easy to automate. But it’s not a one and done solution. Legal experience and advice still need to sit at the centre of every decision”, said Rémy Bonnaffé, a former Freshfields lawyer and co-founder and Chief Legal Officer at Falcon. “Our new AI-native neo law firm strips out the hours spent on repetitive work without removing the lawyer out of the legal advice.”
Falcon is launching from Belgium, with the UK a key market from the outset and London identified as one of its next European hubs.