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.

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.…

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