The man who spent sixteen years running Allen & Overy has just bet on a business designed to make that career obsolete.
Wim Dejonghe, the former global senior partner who helped orchestrate the merger that created A&O Shearman, has co-founded Falcon, an AI-native law firm built around flat fees instead of the billable hour. Falcon launched on 1 October out of Ghent and Brussels with €1.5m in pre-seed funding, and its pitch is blunt: the hourly billing model that has run Big Law for a century is, in Dejonghe’s words, “due its neo-bank moment.”
Here is what that means in practice. Falcon charges a flat €1,000 a month to review up to six “high-friction” contracts, the everyday commercial paperwork, supplier terms, service agreements, that traditional firms often quote €3,000 to €4,000 for and take days or weeks to turn around. A client drops a contract into Slack or Microsoft Teams; Falcon’s AI reviews it against that client’s own playbook rather than a generic checklist, flags the risks in plain language, and proposes redlines with every change traceable back to a stated reason. A qualified lawyer signs off before anything goes back, usually the same day.
Dejonghe isn’t running Falcon day to day; he joins as a non-executive co-founder, having stepped back from A&O last year to launch an advisory business, Dejonghe & Morley, with fellow former A&O senior partner David Morley. That advisory firm has already worked on major legal-market deals, including offshore firm Mourant’s investment from private equity house MML earlier this year, so Dejonghe has had a close-up view of where capital is already flowing in the legal sector before putting his own name behind Falcon.
The rest of Falcon’s founding team brings the parts Dejonghe doesn’t: Rémy Bonnaffé, a former Freshfields lawyer, is chief legal officer, and the technical and commercial side comes from the entrepreneurs behind Belgian HR-tech scale-up Mbrella, including chief executive Amaury Gérard. Gérard put the founding grievance simply: “We got tired of paying four thousand euros to wait three weeks for a contract we needed signed on Friday. So we built the law firm we wished existed.”
Falcon is targeting small and medium-sized businesses that Big Law has effectively priced out of using lawyers for routine work, a segment the founders estimate is worth roughly €49bn a year in Europe alone. It builds its own tools on top of general-purpose AI models, including Claude and ChatGPT, rather than claiming to have invented a new kind of intelligence from scratch.
Bonnaffé’s framing of the stakes is the sharpest line to come out of the launch: the billable hour, he says, “is not just how law firms invoice; it is how they are built.” That is a harder problem than swapping a pricing model, since it touches how associates are trained and how partners are paid. Falcon’s answer is to carry none of that legacy structure in the first place, rather than reform it from inside an old partnership.
Dejonghe evidently agrees with his own diagnosis. He just spent sixteen years inside the model he now wants gone, which makes him either the best-qualified person in Europe to kill it, or the most expensive possible advert for why it still has value.
Author: Marcelo Williams
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