A legal AI startup has a plan to take on Lexis Nexis and Westlaw

Legora CEO Max Junestrand.

Legora Legora says it wants to collect the world's legal data as it deepens its presence in Big Law.

The company has hired a team of former attorneys to build an index of legal research.

The move puts the unicorn startup in closer competition with incumbents LexisNexis and Westlaw.

Legora helped sell lawyers on artificial intelligence.

Now it wants to keep bad law out of their files.

In legal terms, a case is "good law" when a lawyer can still safely rely on it.

It has not been overturned, superseded by a new statute, or undercut by a court decision.

Getting that wrong can mean citing a rule that no longer applies: an embarrassing mistake at best, and one that could damage a client's case.

To help it get there, Legora, one of the highest-valued and best-funded startups building tech for law firms and legal teams inside large companies, is growing its corpus of case law and other legal data.

The company has quietly hired a team of former attorneys to collect the law in the jurisdictions it covers, then map how cases and statutes rank and relate to one another.

Its push into legal research is chasing two goals.

If Legora can link its software to a rich source of verified material, it could reduce the risk of "hallucinations," or wrong information slipping into its system's outputs, said Melanie Brown, Legora's senior director of legal data.

The second reason: Legora is fighting for a larger share of a market that has been controlled by a duopoly for decades.