16-17 June 2027 – London, InterContinental O2 | Magazine

LegalTech Diaries Volume 18

Paulina Grnarova

Co-Founder & CEO
DeepJudge

LegalTech Diaries Volume 18

Paulina Grnarova​

Co-Founder & CEO
DeepJudge

You moved from the Google Brain team into building AI search for law firms, a sector you had no formal background in. What surprised you most about how lawyers work once you got close to the problem?

Working at Google made me very accustomed to the idea that if you have a question, you type it into a box and two seconds later you have an answer. What surprised me most when I started spending time with law firms was how disconnected lawyers were from the collective knowledge of their own firms.

A law firm’s primary asset is its expertise, and the work product its lawyers have produced is the manifestation of that expertise. Yet when I asked a very basic question, “How do you find out if the firm has done something like this before?”, the answer was often, “We send an email.” They even call them “pardon the interruption” emails. You email hundreds of lawyers asking if anyone has worked on something similar.

That was almost shocking to me. When you hire a top law firm, you expect to benefit from everything that firm has learned over decades. In practice, firms have accumulated this extraordinary body of knowledge, but individual lawyers had no way to access it when they needed it.

And in legal, that matters enormously because the expertise and the work product are a law firm’s most valuable asset. Making that knowledge accessible and actionable is not just a productivity improvement. It is about making the collective intelligence of the firm usable. 

You’re competing for attention in a market where some vendors have raised astronomical valuations. What do you think about competing on category rather than on funding headlines?

Right now, no matter where you turn in AI, you hear some version of “context is king.” And there is a good reason for that. To make AI actually useful, you need to give it the right context. And where does that context live? Scattered across all the different systems an organisation has built up over years.

There is a second piece to this that I think is even more important. In a world where everyone increasingly has access to the same models, how do you stay differentiated? By making use of what is uniquely yours: your institutional intelligence. Your work product, your experience, your decisions, your understanding of your clients. Again, where does that live? Scattered across all those different systems.

That puts DeepJudge at a really critical point in our customers’ technology stack. We turn that fragmented knowledge into institutional intelligence that people can use directly, and that makes their AI applications and agents dramatically more useful. It also means customers do not have to bet their knowledge strategy on any one model or application.

We take that position very seriously. We’ve been the most recommended legal AI vendor for two years running, and we’re seeing a tremendous amount of interest in what we’re building. Funding is obviously important, but ultimately I think you build a category by becoming essential to your customers.

How do you think about DeepJudge’s role in the broader legal AI ecosystem?

DeepJudge has a very special position in the legal AI ecosystem. We are the AI platform that legal teams turn to for searching and analysing institutional knowledge–wherever it lives–automating workflows, and building agents grounded in what their organisation knows.

And I think the broader picture is really exciting. We also recognise that legal teams are investing in a range of AI technologies. DeepJudge can transform what other AI applications can do for a firm. When an AI application can work with the firm’s own knowledge and experience – not just general knowledge or the information provided in the moment – it becomes specific to how that organisation works.

Our partners include Thomson Reuters, Harvey and Legora, as well as broader platforms like Perplexity. We also recently announced that the DeepJudge plugin for ChatGPT Enterprise is now available, with deeper workflow integrations over the coming months to be developed in collaboration with leading law firms. Each brings different capabilities and experiences to lawyers. DeepJudge brings the firm’s institutional intelligence into those experiences, so the firm’s own judgment, experience and understanding of what good looks like can scale across the organisation.

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