What is Advocacy, and why does it need to exist?
Two names dominate legal tech: Harvey and Legora. Each has carved out a distinct position in the market. But CEO and Co-Founder Téo Doremus has a specific answer for why Advocacy exists and what problem it solves.
"As a transactional attorney, I used to do many deals, and then I used to litigate many deals, and I realized how different transactional lawyers and litigators were. In terms of writing, in terms of posture, the work is fundamentally different. A transactional lawyer is trying to make something happen. Of course you have some level of adversarial, but it's a deviation from the main goal. In litigation, the main goal is to actually go and fight. You disagree on everything. And then you disagree on how you disagree about things that you disagree on."
That fundamental insight shaped Advocacy's architecture from day one. The "atomic unit" at Advocacy is the matter. Everything is nested at the matter level. Users train Advocacy's AI on their specific case.
"Advocacy is a case memory platform. Everything that you do in the app for that particular matter has that context. It's ever evolving. Which allows you to largely reduce the need for prompt engineering and the risk for hallucination, because you're essentially grounding the AI into the case context."
Competitive positioning
Legora focuses on application add-ins, editing, and mobile work—extending the tools lawyers already use. Harvey runs enterprise SaaS: security with Vault, automation workflows, compliance frameworks. Advocacy's focus is different.
"I don't think that Harvey or Legora cannot handle complex cases. They can, especially in transactional. But litigation is very different. The requirements are very different. As a litigator, a lot of it is a moving target. The theories change and shift. The goal is not always super clear. A lot of it is investigative research. That's why I talk more about enhancement than rigid workflows, because workflows presuppose that you know what the output should be. Litigation is a contest over context."
This distinction has implications for product strategy, security architecture, and customer selection.
Legal AI and product strategy
With foundation models like Claude and GPT-4 available, why build a custom platform at all? Téo outlines the reasoning.
"Multiple reasons. One, on the security and safety side, we are single-tenant deployed. Your documents are physically, literally away from others. Two, when you own the entire contextual universe, you can do a lot of things. Yes, you can be on Claude and connect your document manager or Google Drive and then ask it to pull documents and open Word. But now you're involving three tools, three different surfaces of attack. And they don't talk to one another."
The vision is what Téo calls the "digital desk"—case law from Westlaw and LexisNexis, evidence from e-Discovery, your own work-product, all integrated in one place. Before AI, this wasn't possible. Now it is.
"That's Advocacy. That's why people ask, 'Are you e-Discovery? Are you this?' We're the thing that was not possible before AI."
Customer stories
A managing partner reached out after a panel at a law school. They had an e-Discovery problem: defendants communicating through an iPhone app with hundreds of loose voice memos and over a hundred chat threads across multiple languages. The data was fragmented and hard to connect.
Advocacy built audio and video ingestion capabilities, transcribed every voice memo, created the contextual universe, and matched voice messages to chat threads. The results were striking.
"It was actually stunning to see. For example, in one of the first chat threads, the AI identified that in this conversation, two people are talking about kids and how annoying they are, and matched it with this audio that says 'mama, mama, please go, mama.' We were able to pair those voice messages with very high confidence. The firm became a client for virtually everything they do now."
That case became a template for what Advocacy could do and the value it could deliver in high-stakes litigation.
GTM and hiring
Advocacy closed a $3.5M seed round led by Relentless Ventures. The cap table reflects the market they're serving: Relativity (through Rel Labs), law firm venture partners, legal scholars, and litigation firms themselves invested in the company.
"It took us some time to assemble the ideal cap table rather than just raise and announce it. Because you're dealing with lawyers and law firms in a high-trust environment."
Jim Watson leads sales. Téo's COO Isabella is a former litigator. The team is deliberately small and deeply specialized. When Advocacy brought on Watson, it was a signal of intent.
"You don't even have to be an expert to realize that if this guy with his background is already on n8n trying to automate sales, we can work with that."
The hiring philosophy is simple: find people who are already thinking about the problem.
Practitioner-first culture
When a new lawyer or litigator joins Advocacy, they don't start with slide decks or onboarding documents. They walk through a fictitious case step by step—first without AI, then with Advocacy. The engineering team watches.
"It's beautiful what happens. Devs will be working on something like a window or a particular feature, and they no longer have to guess or call us and ask how we would think about this. They know inherently now that litigators want maximum control."
This practice keeps the product grounded in real practitioner needs, not assumptions about what lawyers want.
Personal journey
Téo's path to founding Advocacy was unconventional. Born in Paris, he earned a civil law degree, practiced cross-border M&A in China, pursued an LLM at UC Berkeley, and transitioned to litigation at Robbins Geller. Each step built the knowledge and perspective he needed.
"I never planned to end up here, but in retrospect, every step was preparation for it."
That combination of legal expertise, global experience, and willingness to litigate complex cases is reflected in Advocacy's product and positioning. It's built by someone who knows what lawyers actually need—because he was one.