In US legal drama Suits, junior associates would spend long nights in a basement room leafing through boxes of documents, barely getting any food or sleep, sometimes for days. That’s not exaggerated television drama but a usual Monday at many Indian law firms. Young lawyers routinely spend nights stitching together due-diligence reports, scrubbing boilerplate clauses, or comparing contracts that differ only by a comma.
That grinding backdrop is where Lucio’s founders, Vasu Aggarwal and Darsan Guruvayurappan, located their opportunity. The two met by accident on their first day at law school after being assigned to the same hostel room by a random draw (they have stayed roommates ever since).
By their final year, they had watched a steady procession of seniors enter the profession with enthusiasm, only to burn out within a few years. The problem wasn’t the practice of law; it was the volume of repetitive work that consumed most of a young lawyer’s day.
In late 2022, as generative AI tools began capturing attention, the pair started building their own alternative out of their hostel room: Software that could take over the most routine parts of legal work. The early version automated template drafting. The next iterations tackled document review, due diligence and discovery—tasks that law firms typically solve by assigning more bodies to the problem. The duo launched a scrappy prototype in 2023 under the name EasyDraft, rebranded as Lucio in early 2024 and shifted fully into enterprise AI for legal teams.
Lucio today works with more than 250 clients worldwide, including large Indian firms. In the past year, the founders have expanded into the US, UK, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America—markets where the demand for legal automation, and the pressure on associate time, are even greater. The US has become their biggest focus, not just because of its large pool of lawyers but because, by their reading of industry data, American lawyers report some of the highest levels of job dissatisfaction.
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Lucio’s tools embed themselves in the applications lawyers already use—Microsoft Word, PDFs, spreadsheets—and run multi-step AI processes behind the scenes to extract data, review documents and generate revisions.
The platform attempts to curb hallucinations through layered verification and citations that point lawyers to the exact clauses underpinning each output.
Lucio has raised about $5 million in what it characterises as a seed round. A considerably larger raise is planned in the coming months to bolster R&D and expand further.
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For now, the founders measure progress not in revenue disclosures—they declined to share numbers—but in adoption. They want Lucio to become the default layer of automation inside a lawyer’s workflow. What keeps them going, they say, is calls like the one they got from a lawyer recently who said he finished an assignment given to him late into the night in an hour, something that would otherwise have taken him six.
Trilegal, which has a tie-up with Lucio, concurs, saying the experience has been very positive. “Our associates use Lucio extensively for research, drafting support, document review, and creating chronologies. Practice groups such as capital markets, real estate, and our infrastructure teams rely on it heavily, especially for handling large volumes of documents,” says Nikhil Narendran, partner-technology, media and telecom, Trilegal.
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He says by freeing up time, Lucio helps teams at the law firm focus more on legal analysis, strategy, and client-facing work, where the productivity and efficiency gains are most visible.
Himani is an Associate Editor at Forbes India where she writes about startups shaking things up, legacy firms seeking fresh grounds, and sectors in the middle of big transformations. Always curious ab
