The Work That’s Left
Laura Massagé practiced law in Luxembourg for five years before an LLM at Duke University School of Law brought her to the US and, eventually, to Covenant. She arrived with five years of practice behind her and, like most European lawyers at the time, little day-to-day exposure to AI, which hadn't yet taken hold in the market there.
From Luxembourg to Covenant
When Laura joined Covenant in September 2024, the legal team was just getting started and rather small. AI wasn't yet part of how European practice operated. "In Europe we just weren't as quick to adopt it back then," she says.
"My background and work experience in Luxembourg turned out to be exactly the foundation I needed here,” Laura says. “What Covenant's platform does isn't replace that kind of legal judgment. It's what allows you to apply it faster and at a level of completeness that traditional practice often doesn’t reach,” she adds.
The whole deal, up front
Covenant is built around a platform that ingests every document in a fund's paperwork and produces a consolidated, plain-language summary of its terms. Clients arrive at their conversations with counsel already holding the full context—the economics, the governance rights, the fee structure across the life of the fund, visible from the start.
"Having that whole-deal view changes how you approach everything," Laura says. "You see the shape of the fund before you dig into any one provision."
For clients, that difference is significant. Instead of working through a document reactively, flagging problems as they surface, they can approach the deal with the full picture already in hand. And it's handled securely: Covenant doesn't train on client data, and each client's information stays within their own portfolio—never shared between clients. From there, the work looks like it would at any firm with memos, side letters, negotiating with the counterparty just faster, at lower cost, and with far more clarity.
The work without AI, like moving through documents provision by provision, tracking cross-references, slowly building up a picture of the fund, is exactly what the platform now handles. With that work taken care of, lawyers get to the technical substance far sooner and become stronger technical lawyers faster because of it.
"I feel like I'm really only doing the fun part of the job anymore," she says. "Once you get how the system works, you're able to do the substantive work right away. People starting at Covenant now, their job is way more interesting than what first-years would do at a traditional firm.”
A different kind of development
The way Laura describes it, the learning curve at Covenant isn’t just about the platform. It’s about how the team operates.
Every week the legal team meets, and it’s a real exchange. Anyone can bring a new AI development they’ve come across, flag something in the process that isn’t working, or suggest a new functionality to build. Seniority doesn’t determine whose voice carries. “If you’ve spotted something, you raise it and it gets taken seriously,” she says.
This attitude extends beyond the legal work too. At offsites and other opportunities, the Covenant founders bring the team into the firm’s strategy — how the company thinks about raising money, how it finds new clients, how the business actually runs. “You don’t usually get that anywhere else,” she says.
What comes next
Laura is candid about not knowing exactly where AI takes the profession. Every month something new arrives. The balance between what the platform handles and what requires a lawyer keeps shifting. She finds that interesting rather than unsettling.
“I’m curious how far that’s going to get,” she says. “It’s already going pretty far.”
What she's clear on is the direction. Working at an AI-powered firm has changed what she expects from the practice itself. "Once you've worked with these tools, going back to practicing without any AI just isn't something I'd want to do," she says."
The investors she works with are getting there too. Confidentiality concerns about AI tools that were constant two years ago are shorter conversations now. Client expectations are shifting and, increasingly, what they expect is counsel that arrives to every engagement already holding the full picture of their fund.
