Ex-A&O chief Wim Dejonghe bets on Falcon, the AI law firm that wants to bury the billable hour
Wim Dejonghe spent 16 years running Allen & Overy, a firm whose economics were built, like just about every other law firm, on the billable hour but is now backing a startup, Falcon Law, whose founding premise is that the billable hour needs to be ‘buried’.
Falcon, an AI-native law firm based in Ghent and Brussels, launched on 1 October with €1.5 million in pre-seed funding.
It promises lawyer-reviewed commercial contract work for a flat monthly fee, typically turned around within 24 hours.
Dejonghe (pictured) led Allen & Overy as global managing partner from 2008 and global senior partner from 2016 until the 2024 merger that created A&O Shearman. He joins as founding advisor and investor.
Falcon’s own materials call him a founding advisor and several trade outlets have him as a co-founder, or a “non-executive co-founder”. Either way, his name is doing a lot of work on a pre-seed deck.
“AI has changed how quickly legal work can be done, but the traditional model still rewards firms for the time that work takes,” Dejonghe said.
“That tension is very difficult to solve from inside a billable-hour model.” Elsewhere he put it more bluntly, saying the legal sector is “due its neo-bank moment.”
How Falcon Works
Each client starts with a 45-minute intake call and Falcon turns that conversation into a legal “playbook” setting out the client’s risk appetite and commercial red lines.
Clients drop contracts into Slack or Microsoft Teams and Falcon’s AI reviews each one against the playbook and produces a plain-English summary, flagged risks and proposed redlines.
A named, qualified lawyer then reviews the work and signs off before anything goes back.
Falcon pitches itself as a regulated firm with a lawyer accountable for every output. In the words of co-founder Quinten Vandermeulen, it is “not a co-pilot that helps a lawyer go faster” but an autopilot with a lawyer’s name attached.
The Pricing
There are three published plans that include Rise, which costs €1,000 a month for up to six tasks, Climb costing €3,000 for up to 20, Peak at €5,000 for up to 40 and adds a priority lane. Tasks are weighted so there is a review counts as one, a bespoke draft as two. NDAs and documents generated from templates are free and unlimited.
There is no hourly billing and no back-billing. Clients who consistently exceed their band move up a tier the next quarter with billing based on annual plans.
On the entry plan, that works out at roughly €167 per review. Falcon says a traditional firm charges €3,000 to €4,000 for straightforward commercial contract work and takes days or weeks to deliver it.
“We got tired of paying four thousand euros to wait three weeks for a contract we needed signed on Friday,” said CEO Amaury Gérard (on left below).
The Falcon Team
Falcon was founded by Gérard, Vandermeulen and David Nguyen, who spent six years building mobility and HR benefits platform Mbrella before selling it to D’Ieteren at the end of 2025.
Their co-founder and Chief Legal Officer is Rémy Bonnaffé, a former Freshfields lawyer.
The origin story will sound familiar to any scale-up founder. As Mbrella grew, every bigger deal became a slow, expensive paperwork negotiation. Hiring an in-house legal team didn’t appeal, so they built the firm they wished had existed.
Syndicate One led the round, joined by Stelena Capital, Greenpark Investment Partners, RDY Ventures, France’s Source Ventures and a group of business angels. Loop Earplugs has moved from beta to paying client.
Falcon is targeting €1 million in annual recurring revenue in year one, and it estimates its addressable European SME market at €49 billion a year. A second founding advisor, Cedric De Vleesschauwer, runs Warren, which was also one of Falcon’s early design customers.
The firm starts in Belgium and is recruiting “founding lawyers” in London, Paris and Amsterdam, with the UK set as a ‘primary market’.
The Dejonghe Involvement
Since leaving A&O Shearman, Dejonghe has co-founded Dejonghe & Morley with former A&O senior partner David Morley, a consultancy advising law firms and investors on private equity deals. It has already worked on Mourant’s investment from MML.
It’s intriguing that one of the more active brokers of capital into traditional law firms is also backing a startup whose thesis is that traditional law firms can’t reform themselves.
The Structure Issues Falcon
Belgium has historically barred non-lawyers from holding equity in law firms, and Falcon’s legal services are provided through Falcon Law BV.
The company hasn’t publicly explained how its VC-backed, mostly non-lawyer founding team sits alongside that regulated entity. London will raise the same question in the form of SRA authorisation.
Scale is another issue to work through. At €5,000 for 40 tasks, the economics depend on AI doing most of the work and lawyers doing a lot of signing.
The human sign-off is the selling point. It is also the bottleneck that every AI-native firm eventually has to price.
None of this threatens A&O Shearman, which has no interest in a Ghent scale-up’s NDAs. The pressure falls on mid-market firms that live on routine commercial work, and on the first in-house hire a growing company would otherwise make.
The Fixed Fee Challenge
Most large firms now spend heavily on legal AI. Far fewer have changed their pricing, staffing or partner economics to reflect what that AI does.
Falcon’s bet is that the gap can’t be closed from inside the partnership, because, as Bonnaffé puts it, the billable hour “is not just how law firms invoice; it is how they are built.”
Whether a €1.5 million pre-seed can prove that across four jurisdictions is an open question. But when a man who ran one of the world’s largest law firms for 16 years puts his money on the outsiders, the AI pricing debate has become increasingly fascinating.
