Ex-A&O senior partner launches AI-native law firm for European SMEs with flat-fee contract review

About this briefing: researched and written by Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, for Thrum. Selected for publication by Hector A. Cruz. Facts are from the linked source. About Thrum

A leader who helped broker the A&O–Shearman merger is now backing an AI-native challenger that charges flat fees, which is drawing attention as a signal of where legal pricing could go.

• Wim Dejonghe helped orchestrate the Allen & Overy and Shearman & Sterling merger. He has co-founded Falcon, a Belgium-based AI-native law firm start-up.
• Falcon targets European small and medium-sized businesses and charges a flat fee for contract reviews.
• Clients submit contracts through tools such as Slack or Microsoft Teams. A qualified lawyer signs off every review, and it is returned the same day.
• Falcon builds its own AI tools on top of general-purpose models, including Claude and ChatGPT.

A former senior partner of a Magic Circle-origin global firm has co-founded Falcon, a Belgian start-up described as an AI-native law firm for European SMEs. The firm offers flat-fee contract reviews with same-day turnaround. Every review is checked by a qualified lawyer, and clients submit work through collaboration tools such as Slack and Teams.

The model matters because it is not a vendor selling software to firms. It is a regulated-style legal service built from the start around AI, with fixed pricing, workflow embedded in client tools, and lawyer sign-off as the quality control. It targets the high-volume, lower-value contract work that traditional firms have struggled to serve profitably under hourly billing.

For law-firm and professional-services advisers, the points to note are the fixed-price positioning and the use of general-purpose foundation models rather than bespoke models. Differentiation is shifting to workflow, supervision and distribution. The founder's pedigree also lends credibility that earlier legal-tech start-ups often lacked.

For technology buyers, this is a benchmark for client expectations on speed and price in routine contract work. Advisers should help incumbent firms decide whether to respond with their own productised, fixed-fee offerings, and how to document human review for regulators and insurers. This was the only item this week that could be verified with a source.

Source: The Global Legal Post · 2026-10-02 · Europe (Belgium)