Legal Tech in Silicon Valley: LTC’s Trip Report

Three intensive days, a packed agenda, and a lot of fresh perspective: our Operational Director Moritz Krüsselmann and our Managing Director Alexander Laprell travelled to the Bay Area together with our Academic Director Prof. Dr. Matthias Grabmair to talk to investors, founders, professors, and institutions about the state of Legal Tech and Legal AI in Silicon Valley.

Our headline takeaway: Legal Tech is no longer a niche topic in San Francisco and Stanford — it’s firmly on the agenda of venture capital, academic research, and even Google’s Moonshot Factory.

Bridges Between Munich and the Bay Area

The trip kicked off with a visit to Start2 Group, which supports German startups entering the US market through the German Accelerator program. Right after, the team met Sven Thorsten Potthoff, CEO of the AHK USA – San Francisco (GACC WEST), which likewise helps German companies expand internationally. Anyone considering a US market entry should take a close look at both programs.

Next stop was Vals AI, whose team builds benchmarks that measure the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs across industries such as medicine, finance, and legal. This gives founders and legal teams real transparency on which model actually leads for a given use case — and where a smaller, cheaper model might do just as well. The visit closed with Creandum, one of the leading European SaaS investors with a presence in Silicon Valley, known for investments in Spotify, Klarna, and, more recently, Lovable. Creandum is proof that European VCs don’t need to hide from the likes of A16Z or Sequoia — helped by the fact that Sweden has the highest unicorn density per capita in Europe.

The Data Question: Two Cultures, Two Answers

One theme ran through almost every conversation: the importance of training data for AI development, and the breakneck speed at which the field is moving. While the large AI labs are currently securing every scrap of training data they can get, Alex and Moritz, trained as German lawyers, naturally asked about copyright, data protection, and regulation.

The answer from many conversation partners was blunt: if other regions are training without the same constraints, the real question isn’t whether to take on risk, but whether you win the global AI race. A clear cultural difference emerged: Europeans tend to ask about risk first; in Silicon Valley, people ask about opportunity first: build now, ask questions later. Whether this model serves Europe well, or whether a bit more Silicon Valley spirit would do us good, remains an open and worthwhile question.

Incubators, Equity, and a Legal Moonshot

The university incubators were next on the list and Stanford and Berkeley couldn’t be more different. StartX (Stanford) works similarly to the TUM Venture Labs: no direct funding, no equity taken, with the focus on network, coaching, and mentoring; at least one founder should have a Stanford affiliation or a recommendation from the alumni network. Berkeley SkyDeck thinks more globally and is, in principle, open to German startups without any Berkeley connection: though in exchange for USD 200k in seed capital, it does take a corresponding equity stake. Applications are open twice a year, and a share of successful investment returns flows back to the university.

The team then visited X, the Moonshot Factory at Google. Failure is factored in at X and is part of the philosophy: while Waymo’s cars are on the road worldwide today, Google Glass, for example, arrived too early as a consumer product and was ultimately discontinued. A special thanks goes to Alexander Zoellner for the tour and for supporting the TUM Venture Labs. Particularly relevant for Legal Tech: in late February, X published its “Moonshot for Specialized Professional Intelligence,” aiming to develop domain-specific AI for lawyers, doctors, and finance professionals who work with large volumes of sensitive, private documents. A clear signal that even Google’s Moonshot Factory has the legal market in its sights.

Stanford: Research, Networking, and an Announcement for Legal Tech Talent

No Bay Area trip would be complete without a stop at Stanford. There, the team first met Daniel Ho, Director of the Stanford RegLab (Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab), which develops data science and machine learning projects for government agencies in close collaboration with public authorities. Next came a conversation with Dr. Megan Ma and Julian Nyarko about their work at the LIFT Lab (Legal Innovation through Frontier Technology), which researches how AI will change the way lawyers work. The visit closed with the team of CodeX, The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, led by Roland Vogl. Roland’s own career shows how closely research and startups feed into each other in the US: he is not only a Law Professor at Stanford but also an investor and advisor to numerous AI and Legal Tech startups.

A particularly warm closing note was the get-together with the Stanford German Student Association, where the team could introduce the work of the TUM Venture Labs and LTC and reconnect with familiar faces from the UnternehmerTUM network. A special thank-you goes to Lenard Strahringer for organizing the evening, and to Jack Fuchs, whose California ID saved the drinks delivery.

One more announcement for Legal Tech talent: in cooperation with Stanford, LTC plans to offer a scholarship for master’s students starting in fall 2026. Anyone interested should sign up for our LTC Talent Pool to stay up to date.

A warm thank-you to everyone in San Francisco, Stanford, and Berkeley who took the time to speak with us — the insights from three days in the Bay Area will keep shaping our work for Germany’s Legal Tech ecosystem for a long time to come.

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