A design partnership with Gevers

A short note.

We are glad to announce that Gevers, a pioneer in intellectual property and one of the largest IP law firms in Europe, has joined LeadLex as a design partner.

Over the next 24 months we will build, together, the growth infrastructure for the modern IP firm.

This is not a pilot. It is a partnership, one in which Gevers' partners, business-development leaders and operations teams shape the product alongside us, in production, on their real pipeline.

We take this seriously. So does Gevers. And we want to say, up front, why.

Four ambitions, one firm

Across the many conversations that led here, the Gevers team was clear on what they wanted the next decade of their firm to look like. We've paraphrased it, but these are their ambitions, in their words.

One. Keep the depth of a specialist IP firm while scaling the reach of a full-service practice.

Two. Give every attorney, not just the rainmakers, a working view of the clients, matters, and opportunities around them, so growth is a firm capability, not a personal talent.

Three. Make the firm's operational layer (intake, docketing, billing, filings, client reporting) fast, legible, and connected enough that senior people can spend more time on client work and less on the plumbing.

Four. Do all of this inside a European, sovereign technology stack that respects the firm's duties on confidentiality, provenance, and data residency.

These ambitions are not new. What is new is that they are now technically achievable, if you build for IP, not for software sales.

Why the current infrastructure doesn't work

The IP industry has outgrown the tools it is running on.

Docketing systems were designed for deadlines, not relationships. Billing systems were designed for invoices, not for growth. Generic CRMs, the Salesforce and HubSpot of the world, were designed for software pipelines where a deal is a signed contract and a renewal is a line item. In an IP firm, a deal is a 20-year relationship, a renewal is a filing in Nagoya, and the pipeline sits in the heads of a few senior partners.

So firms do what firms do: they bolt things together. A CRM for pipeline, a docketing tool for prosecution, Outlook for everything else, a spreadsheet for QBRs, and a very patient BD director to tie it all together. Each tool is competent on its own. Together, they are a tax on every partner's week.

We think the shape of the fix is not another tool.

It is an infrastructure layer that connects the systems the firm already uses, keeps a live record of every client, matter, filing and relationship, and makes that record useful, automatically, in the places partners actually work: their inbox, their calendar, their matter view, their Microsoft Teams.

The shape of that growth infrastructure

LeadLex is a CRM foundation for IP firms — but, more precisely, it is three things that together act as one.

An infrastructure layer. LeadLex connects to the systems a firm already runs on: email, calendar, docketing, IP filings, billing, document management, Microsoft Teams. It keeps every client, matter, deadline and relationship in one live record, updated continuously, so the firm has a single source of truth to work from.

A CRM for IP. Built around the way IP firms actually win and keep clients: origination credits, matter-based revenue, portfolio reviews, renewal cycles, and the eighteen- to thirty-six-month nurture arcs that software CRMs cannot model. It is a CRM that updates itself from the firm's real activity, rather than one more place for partners to type.

Lexi, the firm's AI colleague. Lexi is the AI inside LeadLex. She reads what is already in the firm's systems, keeps the record current, drafts the follow-ups and QBR packs, surfaces what matters this week, and reports to partners in plain language. She does not do legal work. She does the business-of-law work that would otherwise sit on someone's to-do list for a month.

The three legs sit on top of each other. The infrastructure makes the CRM honest. The CRM makes Lexi useful. Lexi makes the whole thing worth opening in the morning.

Why Gevers

A design partnership of this scope needs a firm that is both ambitious and demanding. Gevers is both.

Founded more than a century ago, Gevers is one of the largest and most established IP firms in Europe, with offices across Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France and beyond. The firm's attorneys handle some of the most complex patent, trademark and design portfolios on the continent, for clients that range from early-stage spin-outs to global multinationals.

What drew us to Gevers was not only their scale. It was the clarity with which the firm's leadership described what growth infrastructure for an IP firm should feel like, and the willingness to work on it as a joint build rather than a procurement.

A design partnership only works if both sides are prepared to be honest about what the product gets wrong this quarter. Gevers is prepared to tell us. That matters more than any technical requirement on a slide.

What the partnership is

Over the next twenty-four months, LeadLex and Gevers will deploy the full growth infrastructure stack across the firm, in stages, on real workflows, with real partners.

The programme runs in three phases.

Phase one: the record. Connect LeadLex to Gevers' email, calendar, docketing, filings and billing systems. Build the live client-and-matter record that every subsequent capability rests on. Give every attorney at Gevers a working view of the clients and matters around them, from day one.

Phase two: the CRM and Lexi. Turn the live record into working BD. Pipeline, origination credit, QBR preparation, follow-up drafting, portfolio-review prompting, cross-office visibility. Lexi starts carrying the operational load: the follow-ups that would otherwise fall through, the reports that would otherwise be written by hand, the prep packs that would otherwise take a Friday afternoon.

Phase three: the firm's own operating layer. The deeper build. Case management, matter workflows, client reporting, and the integrations with the systems that make an IP firm run day to day. By the end of the twenty-four months, LeadLex and Gevers will have co-designed what growth infrastructure for a European IP firm actually looks like, in production, at scale.

Throughout, Gevers' partners, BD leaders and operations teams will sit alongside the LeadLex product team. The firm's feedback goes directly into the roadmap. Features Gevers helps design become the features every future IP firm on LeadLex benefits from.

A design partner, not a pilot customer

We want to be careful with the word 'design partner', because it is being used too loosely in the market. For us, it means three things.

One. Gevers has committed to the full deployment, not a sandboxed trial. The infrastructure will carry real matters, real clients and real revenue.

Two. Gevers' input shapes the product, not the project plan. If the firm's partners tell us that a feature we built is wrong for the way IP works, we rebuild the feature. The partnership is senior enough, on both sides, for that to be a real possibility, not a courtesy.

Three. The partnership is public. We are announcing it today because we think the industry benefits from knowing that a firm of Gevers' stature is prepared to build growth infrastructure in the open, with a European software partner, over a serious time horizon.

Design partners are rare. We intend to onboard one firm at a time. Gevers is the first, and the standard the partnership sets is the standard every subsequent firm will be held to.

Trust by architecture

Both LeadLex and Gevers are European firms. Both work with highly confidential client information. Both are responsible to clients, regulators and professional bodies for how that information is handled.

So the partnership is built on an architecture that treats trust as the primary requirement, not a feature.

• EU-sovereign. Primary infrastructure in Frankfurt. GDPR-native. European law governs every data-processing relationship, every subprocessor, every integration.
• No model training on client data. Lexi learns from each firm's own data, within that firm's own environment, to serve that firm. Nothing is used to train shared models.
• DPA on every plan. A data-processing agreement is signed at the start of the partnership and sits over everything that follows.
• Confidentiality-first integrations. LeadLex reads from the firm's existing systems only where the firm has granted access, logs what it reads, and shows the firm, at any time, exactly what Lexi has done.

This is the floor of a modern growth infrastructure for an IP firm. It should not be the ceiling. Over the next twenty-four months, Gevers will push us further on provenance, audit, segmentation and client-level controls, and the product will be better for it.

What comes next

Two threads that start today and run through the partnership.

Case management. As the firm's live record becomes the backbone, LeadLex will extend into the matter-management workflows that sit on top of it: intake, matter opening, billing hand-off, client reporting. Not to replace the specialist tools in the firm's stack, but to connect them, so a partner opening a matter in one place does not have to re-enter it in three.

Microsoft Teams. Many IP firms, Gevers among them, run on Microsoft 365 and Teams. LeadLex is building the Teams surface: matter channels that stay in sync with the live record, Lexi available where partners already chat, QBR packs and client updates ready to post without leaving the thread. The goal is that the firm's growth infrastructure meets attorneys inside the tools they already use, rather than asking them to log in to one more thing.

More, on both, in the weeks ahead.

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A design partnership of this length is a bet by both parties on the next decade of IP. Gevers has made the bet. So have we.

We are grateful to the firm's leadership for the trust, and to the Gevers teams who will carry the work day to day. The next twenty-four months will be ambitious, demanding, and, we believe, quietly consequential for how IP firms grow.

Welcome to LeadLex, Gevers. Let's build.

— The LeadLex team.