Big Law isn’t the dream anymore. Young lawyers are betting on startups instead.
2025-04-29T09:00:02Z
Attracted by AI-driven opportunities and flexible work, young lawyers are betting on legal-tech startups over Big Law, despite some pay drawbacks.
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Last spring, Laura Toulme made a decision that would have raised more than a few eyebrows on her old litigation team. She left a clear career path at Hecker Fink to join Harvey, an AI-powered legal-tech startup backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund. Now, as an applied researcher at Harvey, she spends her days translating legal workflows into machine-readable algorithms.
“It felt like this is a train I had to jump on now or I’d miss it,” Toulme explains, recalling how a lively call with an early employee convinced her that the future of law had arrived.
She’s far from alone. According to an American Bar Association survey released this month, over 6% of 2024’s law school graduates have already defected to business and industry employers. While most grads — 54% — landed in law firm positions, others are choosing to put their JD degrees to work at startups, building the next generation of legal software.
Startups like Harvey, Legora, and Eudia are capitalizing on this trend, helped by significant funding to expand their teams. With legal-tech fundraising surpassing $2 billion last year, according to PitchBook data, new grads and junior associates now have more opportunities than ever to trade in billable hours for stock options and the chance to influence the future of their industry.
If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em
As a 14-year-old, Jonathan Melke knew he would be a lawyer someday.
“I like to argue,” Melke joked, in a clipped German accent.
After law school, he accepted a spot at Hogan Lovells, a prestigious global law firm. In his role advising tech and consumer electronics brands on European regulations, he came across Legora, a Swedish-born legal startup working to streamline contract review, due diligence, and legal research.
Melke sent founder Max Junestrand a LinkedIn request, and within hours, Junestrand replied, inviting him to chat. Junestrand outlined Legora’s mission: automate the drudge work so lawyers could focus on big-picture thinking.
After the call, Melke applied for a job on Legora’s growth team. “I want to build the future,” he said, not watch it pass by.
Max Junestrand celebrates as his company Legora’s logo lights up the Nasdaq MarketSite screen in Times Square. Legora
Historically, young attorneys steered away from tech jobs because they worried it would hurt their ability to return to working at a law firm, says Omar Haroun, a three-time legal-tech startup founder. He said securing capital and hiring lawyers for his latest startup, Eudia, has gotten easier since the legal-tech gold rush.
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Going into tech “was probably thought of as a career-limiting move before,” said Haroun, “and now, it’s starting to become a career-enhancing move.”
Long viewed as laggards, law firms and lawyers have begun to adopt artificial intelligence to deliver better, cheaper, and faster services. This has led to an explosion of startups taking large language models and repackaging them as apps to assist with legal work.
Founders are flocking to legal tech for a reason. “Legal work is perfectly suited to how AI works,” said Anna Barber, a venture capitalist at the early-stage fund M13 and a Yale Law School graduate. “It’s very logical, it’s very rule-based. The best answer can be discerned from looking at documents and facts and prior artifacts.”
Until recently, big law firms relied on armies of junior associates to scour these artifacts for the information they needed to support their cases or sign off on deals.
Increasingly, that research can be supported by artificial intelligence. This is cause for concern among some young attorneys, according to Kristina Subbotina, who left Cooley to start a solo law practice, Lawlace. Her assistant, who’s been applying to law schools recently, asked her if becoming a lawyer “even makes sense” anymore.
The paradox, several lawyers said, is that the threat of automation is nudging more fledgling lawyers not toward the safety of Big Law but toward the startups where the code is written. Large legal startups Harvey and Eudia say law school grads account for over 20% of their workforces.
There are other explanations for this shift. Peggy Gartre, a career counselor specializing in law degree-preferred positions at the Dean School of Law at Hofstra University, thinks many young people are disillusioned with the traditional practice, with its billable hour quotas and heavy workloads. Plus, the number of years it takes to become a partner at a major law firm is getting longer and longer, said Kimberly Kappler Fine, who runs an online platform for lawyers wanting to move from law to industry.
Then there’s the Trump factor, said Fine.
President Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders targeting law firms he doesn’t like. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Recently, the White House has taken aim at major law firms over what the president has labeled as “frivolous” lawsuits against his administration. Firms like Kirkland & Ellis and Paul Weiss, among others, have negotiated agreements with the administration to avoid penalties. Fine argues that this capitulation, rather than the “fear factor” around automation, is driving some lawyers out of the profession.
Pay cuts and payouts
In her second year as an associate at Campbell Teague, Nehan Sethi started getting contacted by friends of friends who were building software for reviewing contracts and tracking billable hours. They asked her to test drive their tools. Sethi realized that, as a lawyer, she had something to offer these startups.
Now working in business development at Harvey, she tailors sales demos for lawyers to showcase how the platform can be applied to specific areas of the law. Recently, she helped sign Harvey’s first firm-wide customer in India. Sethi said having a lawyer on a sales call changes the nature of each conversation.
“They take us seriously,” she said. “They understand that we know what they need and the product knows what they need.”
Startups offer flexible hours, mission-driven work, and a shot at upside. But for all the perks, they still can’t compete with the gilded path to Big Law partner in one critical way: compensation.
Big Law firms offer massive salaries to offset the high cost of attending law school. Starting salaries top $225,000 and increase significantly with experience. Equity partners in these firms can earn considerably more by receiving a cut of the firm’s profits.
Toulme, the Harvey researcher, says the company offers generous salaries and stock option grants — yet even a startup with around half a billion dollars in funding could not match her salary as an associate. That helps explain why equity sits at the center of every recruiting pitch.
Startup hires receive stock options that, on paper, appreciate each time investors mark up the company’s valuation. If Harvey or Legora someday break the IPO tape, early employees could convert those slips of paper into life-changing windfalls. Toulme believes that Harvey’s future success will more than cancel out the pay cut she took to get on board.
Of course, belief only goes so far. Only a very small percentage of venture-backed companies ever reach a public listing, and even the winners can take over a decade to cash out. During that long slog, founders might reprioritize roles, pivot the product, or sell the business on terms that leave option holders with pennies.
“It would almost be naive not to acknowledge that it was a risky move,” said Toulme. “I mean, it’s a startup, it’s a brand new industry, it’s a brand new job. There’s a lot of brand news.”
Yet it is precisely that uncertainty that keeps young attorneys engaged. For lawyers tired of billable-hour quotas — and for a profession finally willing to experiment with the tools it once dismissed — the chance to help design the future of legal practice is beginning to outweigh the security of a corner office.
Whether the bet pays off in millions or fizzles in a shutdown, Toulme and her peers will at least be able to say they tried to build something new, rather than bill another 10th of an hour watching it happen.
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