Magnar, the legaltech founded by Andrés Arellano, Nicolás López and Andrés Rodríguez, is building something unprecedented in the Latin American legal ecosystem: a network of law firms that are, at the same time, clients and investors. The process began in December 2025, when Carey, one of the largest studios in Chile, signed a check for US$500,000 without Magnar looking for it.
“The proposal to become investors was theirs, and it seems quite lucid and bold to me,” says Andrés Arellano.
Months later, Beccar Varela of Argentina followed the same path within the US$8 million Serie A. Today, the process extends to the main firms in each country where Magnar operates.
The logic behind the model is one of perfectly aligned incentives: the studio that invests has a double interest in the product working well, it provides permanent feedback and influences the roadmap, and these improvements benefit the entire industry.
“When you have large and well-known clients that already gives support, but when they are also investors, the support is even greater. It generates a lot of trust,” says Andrés Arellano.
The office operating system
Magnar aims to build the operating system for law firms: a set of integrated solutions that encompass legal research, file analysis, document drafting and internal knowledge management.
The platform processes documents in seconds, has an indexed legal database built by a team of 60 people including engineers and lawyers, and operates with local teams in each country. In Chile it already works with most of the top 10 companies in the market, including studios that are direct competitors, which according to the CEO shows that Carey’s participation as an investor does not generate exclusivity or perceived conflict.
“Trust is one of the slowest things to build, and with this we can skip several steps,” says Andrés Arellano.
To guarantee that local roots, Magnar is founded natively in each new jurisdiction: in Brazil as a Brazilian company, in Mexico as a Mexican company, in Costa Rica as a Costa Rican company.
Training lawyers in the age of AI
One of the most delicate debates that Andrés Arellano raises is that of the future of young lawyers: the tasks with which they learned the trade are today those that AI solves. Their answer is that Magnar can be educational in itself, and that is why the company is building Magnar Campus, a program of alliances with universities in the region so that students learn to work with these tools from initial training.
What distinguishes the firms that really integrate AI from those that only have it installed, according to Andrés Arellano, is not the budget or the technology: “There are very few firms that today have that conviction and do it. The comparative advantage that they then extract is what will make the difference in the long term.”
For the CEO, the future of law firms involves incorporating engineering and technology profiles as business partners, not as support, in an industry that has historically been almost exclusively lawyers.
