TL;DR
Wim Dejonghe, who as global senior partner at Allen & Overy helped steer its merger with Shearman & Sterling, has co-founded Falcon, a law firm built around AI and aimed at Europe’s SMEs. The Global Legal Post reported the launch on Friday 2 October. Falcon starts in Belgium with €1.5 million of pre-seed funding and names the UK among its expansion targets.
What Falcon sells
The offer is a subscription: €1,000 buys a client six commercial contract reviews a month, covering documents such as NDAs and data-processing agreements. By Falcon’s estimate, a traditional firm would charge €3,000 to €4,000 for that volume, with turnaround measured in days or weeks. Contracts arrive through workplace apps like Slack or Teams, and every review is approved by a qualified lawyer and sent back on the day it arrives.
Its in-house tools sit on top of general-purpose models such as Claude and ChatGPT. New clients start with a 45-minute call so Falcon can learn their business and risks. Belgian consumer brand Loop Earplugs is an early customer.
Dejonghe’s co-founders include Rémy Bonnaffé, formerly of Freshfields, and the entrepreneurs who started Mbrella, a Belgian HR start-up. Syndicate One led the round, which closed in July.
The pitch against hourly billing
Dejonghe told the Global Legal Post that hourly billing is too costly for many smaller businesses and rewards inefficiency. “You basically pass on inefficiencies to the client, and I think that really needs to change and will change … with AI,” he said. Clients still want “the judgment of a lawyer” over what the AI produces, he added, and could treat Falcon as part of their in-house team: “Rather than paying a salary, you pay a subscription.”
Falcon also expects interest beyond SMEs, from fast-scaling start-ups and from bigger companies that already employ in-house lawyers.
The UK angle
Bonnaffé said Falcon is talking to lawyers in Paris, Amsterdam and London who could come on board as “founding lawyers”. If it enters the UK, it will not be the first AI-led firm here. The Solicitors Regulation Authority has already approved LawFairy, a rule-based firm with no lawyers in the loop, and Garfield AI helped a freelancer win a county court claim, as we reported in June.
Looking forward
Falcon’s model differs from both by keeping a lawyer’s sign-off on every document. In our view, the more interesting signal is the name attached. When a former global senior partner of A&O argues that the billable hour fails SME clients, larger UK firms with their own small-business practices have a reason to look again at how they price routine contract work.