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In 2023, Léa Fleury (E19) co-founded Ordalie, a legal AI for lawyers, in-house counsel and notaries. Three years later, two of them spent within the ESSEC X ESSEC Alumni incubator at Station F, the start-up claims nearly 500 clients and is preparing a new funding round.
“First at a Paris firm, then at Baker McKenzie, I saw a lot of great companies, great contracts and great entrepreneurial stories go by,” Léa Fleury recalls. A lawyer by training and an ESSEC graduate, she cut her teeth in mergers and acquisitions, first at a Paris firm, then as an intern at Baker McKenzie. “I really needed something operational. I've always wanted to build something. At the law firm, I felt a bit as though I was living vicariously, standing on the sidelines.”
She then turned to other roles: a spell in marketing at Chanel, before joining Hermès, then Cartier, as a data analyst. As she explains: “I was lucky enough to have done ESSEC alongside my law degree, so I wasn't locked into law alone.”
“Building something”
Yet she would soon return to law. In 2023, the rapid roll-out of language models gave her the urge to start a business. With Baudouin Arbarétier, who would later become the group’s CTO, she co-founded Ordalie around a simple promise: “a French legal ChatGPT”.
The conversational agent, initially designed for employment law, was later extended to other specialisms.
One Sunday evening in April, her tweet announcing Ordalie’s launch met with a very warm reception. What had been a side project became her day-to-day work.
From Station F, she and her business partner began rolling out their offering. “Nobody had yet dared to take on the market at that time,” she recalls. At the end of 2023, the team released its own open-source model, named Solon. The model is trained in legal syllogism using public legal data and case law.
With continued training, the hallucination rate has fallen and now stands at around 1%. There is one red line the company will not cross, however: “We never train our models on client data. Never,” Léa Fleury insists.
New funding round
In 2026, Ordalie has 17 employees and nearly 500 clients: law firms, the legal departments of large groups and notaries’ offices. Its client references include the French prison service, SNCF Connect and Mondial Relay. “The new platforms are rolling out offerings aimed at law firms. Ordalie focuses more on in-house corporate use cases.”
The start-up, which closed a €1.8 million funding round in June 2025, is now embarking on a new fundraising. The capital should enable Ordalie to expand into the European market and train larger models.
“The goal is to build a 100% sovereign product that doesn’t depend on any American components,” explains Léa Fleury. To that end, Ordalie is aiming to host in France or, at the very least, in Europe.
These requirements enable the start-up to target the market for very large corporations. “Some companies that want to be completely sovereign have sufficient funds to host their own model.”
Discover Ordalie
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