Two System Designers
The two had known each other for years before the conversation that became MAX. They had talked about technology and about law, about what each generation of enterprise software had changed and what it had failed to change, without either of them imagining that the answer would come from a project they would build together.
Each had spent thirty years watching the same architectural problem appear, on opposite sides of enterprise technology — one from the software layer that organises data, the other from the legal practice that organises advice.
What changed was the arrival of generative AI, and the speed at which it began to occupy the legal profession. Both saw the same thing at the same time: the new technology had the raw power, the existing tools had the interface, and yet the work of a lawyer was being asked to bend itself around what the systems could hold.
Neither of them needed to argue the point with the other. The decision to build MAX was not the conclusion of a debate. It was the recognition that two trajectories had been pointing at the same answer for years.
Jean-Michel Cambot
Co-Founder
Jean-Michel invented the semantic layer that became Business Objects, the software category that gave business users direct access to their own enterprise data for the first time, without going through IT. The architectural idea he designed in the early nineties shaped a generation of enterprise software and is still in use across most of the world's large organizations today.
He has spent the thirty years since watching the same pattern reappear at every wave of technology: new infrastructure, the same gap between raw power and the work it is meant to serve. He kept observing, kept watching the gap close in some places and reopen in others, and waited for the moment when the next layer would be both technically possible and worth building.
When generative AI arrived and that gap reopened in legal work, the question was not whether to design the next layer. It was who to build it with.
Olivier Lopez
Co-Founder
Olivier has spent thirty years designing systems. After fifteen years of practice inside leading international firms, handling transactions where the design of an operation determines whether it stands or collapses, he founded Squair in 2019. A law firm conceived not as a firm with new policies, but as a system with new rules: on partner association, on resource allocation, on transparency.
Across all of those years, he was observing the same gap inside legal work. Technology that did not understand the work it was meant to serve, and methodology that lived nowhere outside the heads of senior practitioners. He saw, year after year, that the systems lawyers were asked to operate through were always built by people who had never sat through a closing at two in the morning.
When the architectural answer became technically possible, the question was the same: not whether to build it, but with whom.
The path of least resistance, when building a legal AI product, is to build an interface. A platform. A new application lawyers can open, log into, learn, and adopt. Most current legal AI products have taken this path, and there are good commercial reasons to do so.
MAX went the other way. There is no MAX interface to open. No MAX application to learn. No new place lawyers have to go. MAX lives inside the tools they already use and operates from within. The user does not visit MAX. MAX arrives where the user already is.
What They Decided Not to Build
Good design is not what was added.
It is what no longer needs to be there.
This is, technically, the harder route. Removing the need for the user to notice the system is architecture, not engineering — and it requires building everything that lets the layer be invisible: the orchestration, the memory, the methodology, the governance.
The decision to build MAX this way was not a marketing choice. It was the consequence of thirty years of watching what makes enterprise software endure. Tools that demand attention compete for it, and lose. Layers that disappear into the work outlast the cycles that produced them.
Lawyers do not use MAX.They call on it.