Cooley is bringing AI-powered legal guidance directly into the startup-building process through a new collaboration with Legora and Y Combinator.
The global law firm has launched Cooley GO Lab, an AI-powered workspace designed to help early-stage companies access legal information and context in real time. The platform, powered by Legora, will debut exclusively with Y Combinator’s summer 2026 cohort.
The launch comes as startups face a more complicated operating environment, with AI-driven disruption, tighter venture funding conditions, and growing regulatory scrutiny making early legal and business decisions more consequential.
Built on Legora Portal, a white-labelled workspace for AI-powered workflows and legal knowledge, Cooley GO Lab is intended to embed trusted legal insight directly into company-building workflows. Rather than replacing legal counsel, the platform is designed to help founders better understand legal documents, market terms, and common startup issues before and during the process of working with lawyers.
The platform draws on Cooley’s experience advising high-growth companies and integrates curated Cooley GO content with practitioner-informed legal knowledge. According to the companies, Cooley lawyers will continue to shape and refine the content underlying the tool.
Cooley GO Lab currently includes AI workflows that can analyze documents such as nondisclosure agreements and contractor agreements against market terms, flagging key considerations for review. It also offers a shared AI workspace where companies can upload corporate files and ask questions about their own documents, as well as access to Cooley GO’s startup-focused knowledge base, forms, and templates.
Matthew Bartus, a Cooley partner and global co-chair of the firm’s emerging companies and venture capital practice group, said the launch reflects a “new era” in how legal insights are delivered and applied.
For Legora, the collaboration is also a return to its roots. The legal AI company was itself founded through Y Combinator, where co-founder and CEO Max Junestrand built the earliest version of the platform.
The partnership also highlights a broader shift in legal technology: law firms are increasingly looking beyond internal AI adoption and toward client-facing tools that package firm knowledge into scalable, digital experiences. For firms advising fast-moving startups, that can mean giving founders earlier access to structured legal information while preserving the role of lawyers for judgment, strategy, and complex matters.
Y Combinator General Partner Gustaf Alströmer said early-stage startups are growing faster than ever and need legal information earlier, particularly as AI increases regulatory complexity across industries.
Cooley says the new workspace builds on its long-standing work with startups, boards, management teams, and investors. The firm advises more than 7,000 high-growth private companies globally and has nearly 1,400 lawyers across 19 offices in the United States, Asia, and Europe.
Legora describes itself as an agentic operating system for legal work, supporting lawyers in research, review, and drafting. The company says its platform is used by more than 100,000 legal professionals at more than 1,200 law firms and in-house legal teams across more than 50 markets.
With Cooley GO Lab, the firm is testing a model that may become more common across the legal sector: using AI not only to make lawyers more efficient, but to make firm knowledge more accessible to clients at the moment they need it.