“If I Come Across Anyone in Law School, I Tell Them to Figure Something Else Out, Because AI is Coming for Their Jobs.” - Building the Anti-Law Firm With Open Forest
Open Forest co-founders Stuart Connolly and Pourya Saber in Dogpatch Labs
Stuart Connolly, the co-founder of Open Forest, had summited the peak of the legal profession. A qualified barrister, he worked at the biggest names in Irish law for close to a decade, advised the world’s largest asset manager, and completed a tour in the British Virgin Islands with Maples Group. With a CV like that, what career advice does he give?
“If I come across anyone in law school, I tell them that they may want to figure something else out, because AI is coming for their jobs,” he explains. “Humans tend to overestimate the short term impact of new technology while underestimating the long term impact. It’ll take a while for firms to figure out what AI tools are the most effective and how to deploy them, but it will happen. As a career, it has some big challenges ahead.”
Connolly says this in such a cheerful tone that you might think he’s talking about finding a lost fiver in the back pocket of his jeans. For him, this reading of the future has been obvious for a while. Ideas for invigorating the glacial pace of legal work had always bubbled in the back of his mind before he took the leap into the startup world in 2024, initially seeking to sell AI solutions to law firms.
“We started out wanting to build the first AI law firm, but now Open Forest is the compliance engine for micro companies. We help with your legal, tax, and accounting requirements. We handle your incorporation at the moment and help founders get from day zero to year two when you’re fundraising or need to hire a CFO. You don’t need a big law firm on day one. You need us.”
Starting with a wealth of legal knowledge is one thing. Building a complex legaltech startup is another. Connolly was networking at startup events around Dublin when one day he struck gold, not in person but online, when he met cofounder Pourya Saber through the Y-Combinator Co-Founder matching platform.
Pourya Saber pitches at NDRC Accelerator Kick-Off
Saber is a startup veteran who was a participant in the first-ever Entrepreneur First intake in London. A multitalented software engineer, he was working at a YC-backed startup but looking for a new challenge, and a new cofounder:
“I was kissing frogs left, right, and centre before I met Stuart, to be honest. I was interested in implementing AI in slow-moving sectors because I was working in compliance, and people were paying for AI compliance tools even though they were buggy and slow. When we first spoke, I knew that there was an opportunity to build something in the legal space, but I didn’t know how to access those people. What I did know is that Stuart would open those doors.”
Having had an initial conversation and establishing some common ground, Saber sent Connolly a cofounder questionnaire with around one hundred questions, inquiring about everything from salary expectations to working style.
“It’s important that any potential partner understands that it is going to be hard work,” says Saber. “Do you know this is going to be 80–100 hours a week? That you’ll be on a low salary? That you’re going to be going into your savings? It’s a bit like a marriage in a lot of ways.”
Connolly passed the test. The pair soon started chatting with law firms, who were desperate to embrace technology but couldn’t pick a problem to solve.
As the conversations meandered, Connolly was picking up some legal work to keep the lights on, from new startups that needed basic legal and compliance advice, like drafting a founders’ agreement or filing incorporation documents. They began to think that slow-moving legal giants weren’t their end customer after all.
Stuart Connolly, Open Forest co-founders, pitches to hundreds at Investor Demo Day 2025
“When I was a founder, I hated all of the administrative stuff,” says Saber. “Stuart and I saw that there was demand right away with new startups and realised it was a runner. We’ve been lucky to get results early on. If other founders can find a way to get those early wins, it might help them make the leap too.”
If you check out the Open Forest website, they promise to get you from an idea to a company in just five days. By creating Ireland’s fastest and cheapest way to set up a company, they have positioned themselves at the top of the funnel for budding entrepreneurs.
The plan is to grow alongside their customers and steadily add more features that provide value to scaling companies. Saber is particularly proud of a compliance calendar that shows all new customers all of their compliance deadlines for the next three years. “We build the guardrails around compliance so that you literally can't make a mistake,” he explains. “That's the play.”
“Our legal product is so strong that our tech team is now building software that will automate your VAT and HMRC filings,” says Connolly. “After that, we can expand into ISO and SOC2 certification. By the end of 2026, we'll start looking at Canada, New Zealand, and the Commonwealth jurisdictions, all of which have the same limited company structure thanks to the British. Everything we're doing here in Ireland is scalable over there, with some little tweaks.”
The team is aware of accounting and compliance behemoths like Xero or Vanta that will hoover up business from companies with complex demands and larger balance sheets. The tools they are building are lightweight, designed to get new companies up and running by lowering the barrier to entry.
Open Forest co-founders at NDRC Mentoring with Patrick Walsh, CEO Dogpatch Labs
Ireland is where the company is based, but there are over six million SMEs in the UK, Open Forest’s primary market. Over 90% of these are classed as micro-companies, with fewer than ten employees. Around 2,500 new companies are incorporated every day, which is a pretty healthy pool of potential new customers. Connolly’s new challenge is getting into their heads before they incorporate, building enough brand recognition to become your first port of call when legitimising a new company.
“SEO is everything. Now we’re looking at GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) so that Open Forest pops up when you ask ChatGPT how to register your company. We’re starting to see real results.” He smiles “Our momentum has been slow and steady, but it’s been pretty damn steady. We hit over €45,000 in revenue last month (September, 2025). Last month we had over 60 new Irish customers come in organically - they just rolled in the door. Once the flywheel starts in the UK, that number could be multiplied by fifty.”
Connolly is speaking to me in Dublin while Saber joins virtually from London. The pair keep a regular cadence of meetings to stay in touch and barely notice any difference in being a remote team, nor are they bothered by the long hours that early-stage startups require.
“The irony is, the hours in law firms were horrendous. The intensity was brutal but it was well-paid. Now I’m working more hours, it’s more intense, and if you work out what we’re making per hour, it’s below minimum wage,” says Connolly.
But the canary in law’s coalmine doesn’t mind the graft.
“You can bend, or you can break,” he says. “The truth is that I’d rather leave my mark on the legal industry through something I’ve created myself, rather than being a small cog in a giant wheel.”
Pourya Saber and Stuart Connolly post-pitching at Investor Demo Day 2025