看不见数据，如何打造法律智能体——Legora CTO Jacob Lauritzen

People were asking us about Mythos and everything, even though I think realistically a lot of legal work does not require Mythos-level intelligence. Paralegals: gone.

Yeah.

Junior lawyers: gone. I don't need them.

That's actually not what we're seeing. We had one problem where it wouldn't cite properly, and we thought, “Next model release, solved.” It went from 70% to 99%. We did nothing, and it was great.

But if you're doing a $400 million M&A transaction, you're going to want Legora.

We're just going to be 20 engineers for the rest of the company's history, and we're going to beat everyone who's much bigger. We're 100 engineers now, and it feels like we're way too small. But it's something I'm toying with: how much of our product can just be the agent versus all the other stuff?

Okay, we're here in the studio with special guest Jacob Lauritzen, CTO of Legora. Did I get it right, Lauritzen?

That's fine. Yeah.

Lauritzen.

That's okay.

And that's Danish.

I'm not super particular about it. It's Danish, yeah, exactly.

Does it have a special history behind it?

No, “sen” is like “son of.”

Son of Laurits.

So it's just like “son of.” So, son of Laurits—that's my name.

Nice. We've crossed paths here and there. You spoke at AI a few times, and obviously Legora is one of the fastest-growing legal tech companies in history.

Yep.

You said something at the start in our pre-show that I thought was really interesting. You said that your origin is very European, even though obviously you're expanding in New York and SF. What feels different about your culture?

I think at our core, we're probably very humble about what we're doing because we've always been the underdog, from the very beginning. No one believed the smallest startup in a basement in Stockholm was going to outcompete this huge behemoth that was way ahead of us in the US. I think we've always been underdogs, so we've always been very humble. We've always sort of had to fight for our existence.

Something we've had to learn as we've entered the US and spent more time there is to be a little bit bolder and tell the world how great we are, because it doesn't come naturally to some of us.

I want to start by going over your product, because I feel like with a lot of these legal products, they're kind of under wraps. You're not supposed to show them.

Yeah, sure.

If you could just talk about what the product looks like and maybe how you got there—what product iterations got you to where you are today—I think that would be really interesting.

Yeah, absolutely. The way everything started was ChatGPT with a Swedish law search tool in it. That was literally everything. We started with legal research, which is a huge market where lawyers spend a lot of time figuring out what previous cases look like this and what the legal precedent is. What have people done in these situations? That's extremely important.

That has always been part of our product. We started with an agent you could ask questions, and it would query laws. That was the very simple beginning. From there, it's expanded in what the agent can do. It will now draft a lot of stuff really well, edit Word files, move your files around, organize everything, and run really complex analyses.

We've added a bunch more features to it. One of our features is called Tabular Review, which is now a name that's being used in the industry. We're very happy to see Claude for Legal using our terminology for what they're building.

Ooh, we gotta talk about that. We gotta talk about that.

It's essentially a way to bulk extract and bulk review many agreements, which you do in due diligence and when you raise money or whatever. That's part of it. We help lawyers do their work much more efficiently and much better.

Outside of just doing the work, we're also helping orchestrate the work a lot more than we were even a year ago. We have a thing called Lists, which is sort of like Linear for us. We have Intake, which is a way to collaborate with clients, and Portal, which is also a way to collaborate: lawyer to lawyer, client to lawyer, lawyer to agent, maybe agent to agent.

We're spending a lot of time there because, frankly, the way you worked with a lawyer 10 years ago—or maybe even today—is really painful, and there's loads of room to do that in a much better way. Those are, I think, the 2 things: doing the work and orchestrating the work.

When did you start building the agent?

We basically had to switch from the assistant to the agent, as we call it. I guess the agent came about a year ago, somewhere around then.

So this is a rough timeline for people who are trying to understand: YC 2023.

Yes.

And you were a YC founder as well.

It was YC 2024.

YC 2024.

Yeah, I was in YC 2023.

Yeah.

Legora was 2024.

Okay. So this is a little bit before agents were really taking off.

Exactly, yeah.

And then using models obviously changed everything.

Yes.

In one sense, today—we had a preview of the product. Well, we had a private screening.

Private screening, yeah.

We'll put up a video on YouTube. It's mostly like ChatGPT for lawyers.

Yep, yep.

That's a very fair way to put it. The sidebar has a lot of nice custom tools, like Tabular Review and Intake, which I really liked, and a bunch of other things.

Exactly. That's exactly what it is. It's Cowork or ChatGPT, just really, really good for legal work.

And the workflow for in-house corporate lawyers, people looking for upcoming regulations, all these things—we can talk about more of the products there. What models are you guys using underneath?

We're using a bunch of different ones, depending on the task.

Okay. And that's not available for the lawyer to see? You guys pick them yourselves?

For the agent, yeah. We've been back and forth on this, just like everyone else, I think. In the agent, there's a model selector for the primary model, but there are certain tools where we use different models. We try different models in Tabular Review. I think we've found it most effective to subdivide the problem and route as we subdivide the task. But right now, we do have a picker in the agent. I'm not sure if that's always going to stay there, to be honest.

Yeah. I bring a little bit of context to this because I'm an advisor for Cognition. Part of my thesis for what an agent lab is: an agent lab is ideally a domain-specific GPT wrapper.

Yeah.

We're the domain experts. We'll pay attention to you, serve your needs way more than the frontier labs, and give you the best of the frontier labs according to our judgment.

Yeah, we'll abstract away all the—

Our job is to decide for you, because your job is not to dive into all the details.

Exactly. We'll always keep you on the Pareto frontier and make sure it's great all the time, and you don't have to dive into all the details. One thing that speaks exactly to this: if you go to a lawyer and ask them, “You're going to draft this contract based on this precedent. Do you think that's a Sonnet High or an Opus Mid task?”

They won't know.

“Just give me the smartest model.”

Fair.

Exactly. Just make sure it works.

My hourly rate is $1,000 an hour.

Exactly. Just—

Like, what—

Make it work.

So, yes, I originally came in with that. I was like, “Oh, yeah, this is what Devin does differently.” Now we have 5 things in the model picker, including Fable and Opus and Astra. People want to experiment with the fancy new model.

Yep.

Is that the same?

I think so. It’s definitely way less in legal than it is in—

Coding.

—engineering.

Yeah.

But there are definitely people who just want Fable 1 right away, and people were asking us about Mythos and everything, even though I think realistically a lot of legal work doesn’t require Mythos-level intelligence.

Yeah. So, exactly, right? I think basically you’re like, “Okay, we’ll give you the option. You ask for this, but you’re going to run down your credits 10 times faster.”

Yeah. I would have loved—We fought introducing it for a very long time, and then in the end we just kind of caved in and were like, “Okay, if you want this level of control, we’ll give it to you.”

So you think the models are already as good as lawyers need? There’s no need for them to get better?

I think it’s a power distribution. There’s probably 60% of the work we can do really well right now, and from now on it’s a cost and latency thing. But for the rest of the work, especially very complex analysis, we still need more intelligence.

I think there’s also the work expanse. That’s the work we have right now, but the work available to lawyers probably expands with intelligence, I imagine.

Early on, when you guys first started transitioning to the agents—or building the agents—what models were you using? I guess it would’ve been Opus 4.6 or something.

That would’ve been, yeah. Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6 is probably right.

What were the agents not good at then that they’re much better at now, even though it’s only, what, 9 months later?

Subagent delegation was one of them. We’ve gotten it working really well now for fan-out-type retrieval queries. It works extremely well for us now. That was difficult before.

1. Evaluating Legal Agents

We have a team that’s just doing evals, and we track all of the models’ performance in different practice areas, which are subgroups of legal, and across different tasks in all of those. We have a big heat map, and we can see them move. Usually, they improve at most things, but there are a lot of model releases where they improve at some things and regress at others.

That happens a lot more than you’d think.

What are some of those tasks? Are you familiar with how you guys are running a lot of the evals? What are the different subsegments you look at?

Yeah. There’s different framing stuff. We have different worlds, like RL environments, essentially. Lawyers work in projects, more or less, so it’s like: “Here’s a 10,000-file data room. You’re doing due diligence. In the end, a great report looks like this. It contains all these red flags, and it doesn’t contain weird stuff. We want it to be concise,” et cetera.

That’s how we’ve built it. There are different tasks. Part of it is drafting a report: does the draft look good? Does it contain all the right stuff? Is the wording sound? Is the analysis sound? There’s also finding the red flags, the analysis before that. We can subdivide it a little bit, and that’s how we run the evals.

Interesting. What does your evals team look like? Do you hire lawyers to do that?

Yes, it’s a mix. We have engineers and lawyers, and it’s one team. There are 3 engineers and 3 lawyers right now, and then we have a pool of what we call legal engineers. They’re people who have worked in Big Law for 3 or 4 years. Typically, they might have a CS degree, and they’re very tech-forward. They come to us because they want to help change the industry.

Are they IT in Big Law, or are they lawyers?

They’re lawyers.

They’re lawyers in Big Law?

They’re lawyers in Big Law.

With CS degrees?

Yes.

Oh my God.

That must be really hard to find.

It’s a Venn diagram. Yeah, exactly. That’s our hardest person to hire for. But they’re also such a force multiplier, because we can pull on them for the eval stuff and for product development. You have a pool of 100 experts who use the product every day and talk to clients every day. They live this and have lived this, and we can pull on them to do evals and help us shape the product. It’s such an advantage.

When did you guys start that team?

Evals grew out of the assistant agent team at some point. Until recently, it honestly wasn’t really worth it, because all the models just got better. It was like, do we want to spend a lot of our time doing really complex evals, or do we just want to build a better harness and lean into the fact that everything’s going to improve? Everything kind of just improved.

Yeah, every 2 or 3 months you get a different tier of model.

It just got solved.

Just pass it through, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

We had one problem where it wouldn’t cite properly, so it was difficult to follow. The next model release solved it. It went from 70% to 99%. We did nothing, and it was great.

Maybe the real work is keeping all the data private, making it taggable and sortable, and adding new features like the tabular view. Is that the—

You mean over and above ChatGPT?

Well, yes. But obviously now you’re also doing evals. I assume your use of open models is increasing.

Yes.

We can talk about that. I don’t know what I’m saying here, apart from: what is the job? The job is maybe not—in the early days, it wasn’t so much about doing evals, because it was mostly exposing model capability to lawyers.

A huge part of it is figuring out what the legal profession looks like in 5 or 10 years with all of this stuff. Coding is maybe a year or 2 ahead, so we can look to that a little bit. But what are the primitives? How do people work? How do you collaborate if it’s not a 200-thread email with V5 Word files going back and forth? What does that look like?

That’s not even necessarily purely AI. It’s about building a much better product experience and making sure you do it with audit logs, data retention, and all those really important things in a regulated industry. Then there’s the AI part: make the work faster and better, and build proactive agents that react to things when they come in, so you don’t have to kick everything off yourself.

A lot of the work is figuring out what we think it’s going to look like in 5 years. If model capabilities keep increasing and the price keeps coming down, what could we do? Can you log in and have a command center where it’s like, “You need to react to these 5 things the agents have been doing lately,” and review and check and improve the system? Maybe that’s where we’re going—or where we are going.

I was going to ask if you could go into that in a little more depth. What is the legal profession going to look like in a few years?

I should preface this by saying I don’t know.

Yeah.

Who knows, really? But I think we can look to coding a lot. I think all lawyers are going to be way more productive than they were before.

They’re gonna be able to do a lot more stuff at a higher quality for a lower cost. I think the profession itself, the work itself, is gonna improve a lot. Lawyers are gonna spend more of their time doing the stuff they became lawyers to do: figuring out the right risk profile, what’s manageable risk, using their judgment and strategic judgment, and working with clients.

They’re gonna do that a lot more, and spend much less time trolling through big documents to find the smoking gun or doing all the menial, super annoying work that a lot of lawyers have been doing.

What do you think is gonna happen to the partnership model? Do you think that stays, or what happens?

I actually gave this a lot of thought just last week.

Yeah.

The partnership model kind of exists because the only type of capital these companies have is human capital. It’s not like us, or a software engineering firm, or a manufacturer, where you have physical assets or some sort of intangible assets that you accrue over time, and they pay dividends to shareholders.

But if you work in an industry like professional services—and it’s the same for consultancies and whatever else—all of your value is in your people, and you can’t really own human capital. You can’t own people; slavery’s abolished. But you can rent them. You can pay them money. So partnerships are essentially a structure where you make the human capital the owners of the company, so that they stay.

Yeah.

Will that change? It doesn’t have to. But what we really want is for law firms to be able to build some sort of intangible, durable capital. You can build a system that learns how you work. A lot of firms think about how there’s the X law firm way of doing things, and we can codify that and build a system.

Whether that’s a self-improving knowledge graph or whatever it is, and precedent files and documents, there’s a way of working that produces a really good output, and that can be their IP. It’s a way to codify human expertise and judgment into a system. That’s something we want to help empower.

Mm.

Does that change the partnership model? The incentives are different in the partnership model. You just have to bring in more clients, and you don’t want to take time away from bringing in clients to codify your information.

Mm.

You get rewarded by “eat what you kill” or by a lockstep model, whatever. That needs to change a little. We need to figure out an incentive structure where partners are incentivized to codify things and build an asset for the company. But right now they aren’t, because as soon as they leave the partnership, they don’t get any dividends from the assets they built.

Yeah.

I think the whole business model—we’ll see.

Yeah, yeah. It’s all in question right now.

My actual other take is more on the bottom end of the industry. The partnership level is the top end.

Yeah. What happened there?

Paralegals are gone.

Yeah.

Right? Junior lawyers are gone.

Mm.

I don’t need them.

Yeah.

That’s actually not what we’re seeing.

Okay.

So, I don’t know. Would you say that we’re seeing that in engineering?

Yeah.

Yeah?

Junior engineers are—

Really kind of cooked.

—kind of cooked.

Yeah.

You kind of have to come out of university fully baked, or else—

Or else you’re not gonna make it.

I feel like I’m being a bit dramatic for comedic purposes. But I know a lot of lawyers who started as paralegals, then went through law school and all these things, right?

Yeah.

And now they’re not needed.

Yeah.

They’re seriously just not needed.

Yeah. Yeah.

It’s interesting what happens to the partnership model, the pyramid. I think generally, you still need the next generation. For engineering, the way I think about it is that a good engineer today is worth a lot more than they were 2 years ago, because they can produce so much more stuff, if they’re good. I think it’s the same thing in legal: they can actually do a lot of really good work if they’re good. So I think it’s more that really good junior lawyers are worth a lot more.

Yeah, it’s—

And—

It’s always been the case, right?

Yeah.

Exactly.

But it’s even more so. It’s polarizing even more.

Yeah.

I’m actually curious about that. The whole law business is basically charging per hour.

Mm.

So—

Yeah.

If each project can be done—

It’s faster.

—a lot faster—

Yeah.

—is it gonna be way cheaper?

This was actually a fun story. I was reading Max’s YC application and helping him get into YC, when Leya was called that back in YC. This was my one thing: people have tried this a million times. Legal tech has never been a thing because there’s no incentive for lawyers to be more efficient. Why would they be more efficient? They earn less money. It doesn’t make any sense.

But I think lawyers do want to adopt this because they understand the gravity of the situation. They know the business model and everything is under pressure, and they need to change because the competitive pressure is so high. I think the billing model itself is also gonna change. We’re already seeing that, particularly in the US, where a bunch of stuff is being priced on a project fee and not an hours fee, particularly the lower-end stuff on the spectrum, like small reviews and whatever. Some of it is honestly being done for free—

Mm.

—and some of it is just being priced at a flat rate.

So where is the money being made, then? Because I feel like a lot of what you guys talk about is M&A specifically. Is that where all the money is made?

That’s just a very easy example.

Oh, okay, okay.

Litigation, too. The big work is still there, and it’s very valuable, so lawyers will spend more of their time there. Client relationships are also super important.

Like a CRM?

No, just spending more time with the client.

Oh.

A lot of law firms have historically done stuff for free just to have that relationship with the client.

Yeah, yeah.

So now they can do that, but they don’t have to lose a lot of money doing it.

Wait, I thought I just had to pay the lawyer money to be my friend. Isn’t that the retainer thing?

Yeah.

You’re telling me I can do it for free?

Yeah, you just have to find the right lawyers.

Oh, goddammit. Okay, cool.

Or Legora has to grow much bigger. I don’t know.

Yeah, we’re trying. So you’re saying the strategic work and all these high-value-add things are still there, but our legal fees aren’t going down. You also said paralegals aren’t affected, or they’re just shifting. This is something we also worry about with Cognition.

Yeah.

People worry about the phrasing, like, “We will replace your junior engineer,” because nobody likes that kind of statement. But in actual fact, yes, some part of it does happen. Other junior engineers embrace it and become more productive.

Exactly.

Exactly like you just said.

Yeah.

Is there a new term for this role or job that’s gaining traction with your customers?

You mean the super-AI-pilled junior legal? Nothing I’ve found yet. Maybe we should coin one.

Isn’t it a legal engineer?

Legal engineer? That’s our term, and it’s also now an industry thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

CS JDs.

Exactly. Yeah. And maybe those are the people best positioned to do this kind of stuff.

I think the derogatory term is “meat proxy,” where you just sit in front of the machine and type in something that someone else tells you to type, and then you repeat what the machine tells you to say.

Yeah.

But I do think a very good meat proxy is someone who knows agents very well and knows Legora very well.

Yeah.

And you know, “This is my toolkit.” Every industry has a toolkit.

Yeah.

And I can use my tools to do the thing that you need me to do.

But I guess then you’re not really a proxy, right? You’re actually just doing meaningful work, I suppose.

Yeah.

I’ll talk about Tabular Review, because that’s a thing that happens a lot. I have thousands—

We do up to a million cells, I think.

In a single—

In a… Yeah.

That’s impressive.

Yeah.

We should talk about the table and the windowing.

This. Yeah.

Yeah, I’m working on a big case. I have a million documents. I type it in. Usually, I’ll throw a team of paralegals into a room.

Yes.

Locked in a room.

And they’ll sit there till 4:00 AM. Yeah.

That doesn’t need to happen, right?

Exactly.

Because now they can extract it, and you can go and reprompt everything.

Mm-hmm.

So now I don’t need a paralegal for that. But a good, super-AI-pilled paralegal would do something else, you know?

Yes. Yeah, exactly.

Whatever that is.

Yeah. They can do more stuff, or spend more time on the things they didn’t have time for before.

Or actually sleep. Who knows?

No.

I have a question. You guys bought a company, Kira. Is that how you say it?

Yeah.

And you guys used your own product to do the M&A?

Yes, we do that all the time.

So how did that work?

Dogfooding. It works great. We’re doing that a lot. Our legal team is—I mean, intake has been built with our legal team.

Yeah.

Right now, we have a Slack workflow where everyone floats their stuff in, and they’re like—

Yeah.

“This is annoying.”

Yeah, yeah.

Right? And inefficient. So it’s like, great, we should use Legora for that.

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about what that process looked like?

Yeah, absolutely. We do a lot of the due diligence ourselves because we can do it with Tabular Review and other tools. We still have counsel come in to assess certain risks. For example, there’s payroll. Kira was simple because that was all in Sweden, but we’ve done one in Canada and one in Australia, and there’s payroll in Australia. Do we want someone to look at this more strategically? We’ll still use lawyers for the strategic part, where they can be sparring partners and help us figure out how to structure this the right way. But a lot of the more menial stuff we can do ourselves.

Mm.

A lot of the early things we find—and we’ve had cases where we found something that was a red flag, and then we’ve pulled the brakes.

Can you talk a little bit about any of those?

No, I don’t think so.

2. How Law Firms Adopt AI

All right. Early on, you said your early customers were Swedish law firms. Have you seen a difference between working with Swedish law firms versus American law firms? You guys are mostly working with big law firms, right?

We’re also working with smaller law firms.

Oh, okay.

We definitely started with really, really big law firms, but firms with 50 lawyers use this and get a lot of value too.

So have you seen differences between working with the Swedish ones versus American ones? Maybe even Asian ones?

Yeah. I think the European ones have been a bit slower to move. The American ones are very forward and move really quickly. I think it’s also much higher on the agenda for American companies than European ones. It’s a strategic, super-important thing that they need to do a lot of. American companies, both corporates and law firms, also have a much higher appetite to custom-build stuff. They all want to do that. They’ll say, “Hey, we want to build this huge thing with you guys and structure it in whatever way.”

What—

Whereas Europeans are much more like, “We’ll just take the off-the-shelf and figure it out.”

What’s an example of something they would want to build themselves?

Integrations into their own systems. Some of these customers build their own CRM and their own document management system and all sorts of other things, and they want to build that. Then they want to build triggers, like: you do a review in Salesforce, it goes to this one person for whatever reason, they do something, then it goes into Legora, and then it goes back. That’s the simple end. Then there are some that are extremely ambitious, where it’s a whole new product they want to build with us. We can’t really do that.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s definitely something where American companies really want to build their own more than European ones do.

And the European ones are like, “Hey,” and they give you product suggestions?

Yeah, for sure. We have great collaboration with all of them.

Yeah.

They’ll say, “This sucks, this is great. We want more of this.”

Mm-hmm.

And we’ll just build a product that does that.

Okay. So they don’t see an existential threat to their business, whereas the American ones do?

I don’t know if that’s the reason they want a custom build versus not a custom build. I think they both know that this is extremely important and key to their firm’s success and their corporate success. It’s both extremely important. I think it’s just a different way to achieve it.

Okay. Another question I think you might want to bring up is product metrics. How do you know that we’re actually doing something good here?

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

How do you think about that? I’m assuming that’s also related to evals.

We have the regular product metrics that we care a lot about. Are people spending a lot of time in our product? Do they seem to get a lot of value out of it? Do they renew? Do they come back a lot? We have really good numbers for enterprise software: our DAU over MAU and hours spent per month on the product are extremely high.

We also do online evals to generally try to figure out whether we solve the problem. We use a super-cheap LLM judge to have an online metric, and we can use that when we roll out new things. We can compare feature-flag-wise, okay.

Did it improve, or did it catastrophically decline? One thing that might be interesting—and difficult for our business—is that we can’t look at any traces, basically. We can’t look at any data because it’s all super confidential. That’s extremely frustrating to work with because you basically don’t know what people are doing. It’s like, here’s an agent that can do so many amazing things, and I have no idea what people are actually doing with it.

I would’ve assumed you guys signed some sort of agreement with the law firm, and they were like, “Oh, yeah, sure.”

Yeah.

...with the law firm, and they were like, “Oh, yeah, sure.”

I wish. Yeah, I wish. No, but the thing is, a lot of the data they have isn’t even theirs, right? It’s their clients’—

Oh.

—and it’s super confidential, so we can’t look at it. We have an evals team that’s trying to approximate what we think everyone is doing and build that into eval sets.

Wow.

So that’s just a super annoying kink of the business.

Can you paraphrase? For example, ChatGPT has a `/feedback` thing that directly gives you the full trajectory.

Mm.

But obviously, that’s not possible for you guys.

Mm.

But you could use an LLM to paraphrase the real thing, make a synthetic thing that’s close enough, and change all the names and details, but still—

Yeah.

Yeah.

We can’t— There’s always a range, right? If you paraphrase all the way down to three values and pick one of them, then obviously that’s fine. If you just remove the names, then maybe that’s not fine.

Yeah.

So we generally pick the safest way.

Okay.

We restrict ourselves as much as possible because there should be no risk at all.

Yeah, that’s fair enough.

But there are things where we know the failure modes are probably these 10 or 20, so we can classify it into one of those, and that’s a helpful signal. We can also classify it into the types of tasks and practice areas, and then we have an idea. It’s something we’re always trying to figure out how to do in a smart way.

Also, on the privacy front, I’m assuming even 2 years ago it must’ve been insanely difficult to get law firms to be okay with this.

Yes.

But—

No.

—how do they think about their data being sent over to Anthropic or, you know?

Yeah.

It must be a huge thing.

All of our infrastructure is on Azure, primarily for this reason. When we started, law firms were like, “AWS? No.”

Yeah.

Like, “No way. We don’t trust AWS.”

Law firms don’t trust AWS?

Yeah, yeah.

Why?

It’s different now. But they were like, “Amazon, Google—we can’t trust them with any of our data.” So we basically had to host everything on Microsoft because they already have Microsoft 365.

Oh, so they’re okay with Microsoft but not—

Exactly, because they’d already done the security review for all of their documents and Word and everything else. Microsoft is an approved vendor in their mind, so we had to host everything on Azure. That’s changed over the past few years.

Mm.

Now people understand that they need to get on the cloud and do all this kind of stuff. There were also a lot more people talking about on-prem back then. That’s disappeared completely. People understand that you should just do it in the cloud, that it’s safe, and that it’s probably safer than what you’re doing.

Yeah.

That’s changed a lot, but I think we can—

Yeah, and by the way, it’s only been 3 years, so it’s actually—

Yeah.

It’s a huge shift. It’s great. Good for you guys. I don’t expect the legal industry to have somehow ignored this for the last 10 years.

Yeah. I think we needed the AI kick in the butt for everyone to understand that we need to change our ways a little bit.

Oh, yeah.

...our ways a little bit.

Okay. Okay.

So, open-source models are getting really good now. How are you thinking about that?

Yeah. We’re thinking about just bringing our clients along on the Pareto frontier.

Yeah.

And the map of all the models—what they’re good at, their latency, their cost, their governance, and their regional availability—how do we optimize across all of that? Some open-weight models are great for certain tasks, and then we’ll use them there. Some we’ll post-train, and some we’ll just use the frontier models.

Yeah. You call it model arbitrage. You have different flavors. You did some research on this where you were firmly Anthropic at the start of the year. Grok is improving a lot. Do you want to give an example of a model that wasn’t ranked highly overall, but that you want to shout out as surprisingly good?

Yeah. I don’t think it’s good overall, but one of the early Gemini models is extremely good for certain types of transcription and speaker attribution. We use that for transcription, actually.

Oh, so you have a—

Yeah, where are you guys transcribing?

Like Granola?

We actually probably will build a meeting thing.

Yeah.

But this is just speech-to-speech, speech-to-text, text-to-speech—like any other app that has this. We also transcribe files. If you upload hearings or whatever, we’ll transcribe them, put them into text, and then we can do all of our analysis on them.

No ElevenLabs?

No ElevenLabs, for DPA reasons. I mean data processing agreement, I should say. Our data processing agreement has very few vendors on it because we just need to keep it—

You just need to keep it fresh.

Exactly. We need to keep it—

Tight.

—super tight—

Yeah.

—on where any data goes.

I think that’s one of the benefits of Gemini and OpenAI, where they’re like, “You come to us; we have most of the things that you need.” That’s actually very valuable. It doesn’t have to be state of the art. As long as it’s mostly good enough for all tasks, then who cares?

Yeah.

Like—

Yeah, absolutely. I should also shout out Microsoft’s transcription model.

Ah.

They may want—

Microsoft Transcribe?

Yeah.

Okay.

It’s great.

Okay.

It’s better than the old Gemini, from what I’ve seen.

Yeah. I think usually all of them are in the top two, top three, top four in terms of the Arena scores, and that’s good enough.

Yeah, exactly. You have all the governance, it’s super scalable, and that’s probably good enough.

At this point, are speech-to-text models pretty much good enough that you’re like, “Oh, one word here or there being off is fine”?

No.

It—

No?

No, no.

For sure. I’ve done this a lot.

Particularly in legal, there are some... We had this thing where, I think it was in Australia, there’s a certain name for a person in court, and it would consistently transcribe it as “condom.”

Oh.

Yeah. There are certain things you don’t want there.

I see. Okay.

Usually you run an LLM layer on top of it. Then you extract some keywords, and you run the transcription model again with the keywords. That’s kind of my workflow so far.

Interesting.

But if you’ve done this at any large scale, you’ll pick up tons and tons of transcription errors on any—

Anything.

domain that is not average day-to-day conversation.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. If there’s any sort of jargon in there—

Yeah.

—it’s gonna be tough.

Yeah. I think Whisper and ElevenLabs still transcribe Claude Code as “cloud clo-code.”

Yeah.

And that’s—

Yeah, I’ve actually had that problem.

Very, very common. So that’s how you know there’s a lot more to improve.

Yeah. Absolutely. I do want to cover a little bit on the agent product side. We’ve covered a few of the top-level things, right? We’ve already name-dropped Tabular Review, and we’ve name-dropped Intake. You’ve got some other stuff that we haven’t even touched on yet, but I just want to cover the big two, let’s call it.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Is that fair to say, though? They’re approximately the big two?

Agent and Tabular Review.

Yeah.

And our—

And projects.

Probably, yeah. And our Word add-in is also something, because a lot of people work inside of Word, so our Word add-in is huge, and the Outlook add-in too.

Yeah. I just want to cover the big ones that everyone must know.

Yeah.

So Tabular Review is basically a fan-out across a lot of documents. You can ask the same question across all the documents.

Exactly.

It’s collected in a table, and then you work back and forth.

And then you—

You can—

Yeah.

A million is impressive. What are some other engineering considerations or performance things? What’s hard about this?

Uh—

Really, before we do that, can you walk through the user experience for a lawyer actually using Tabular Review?

Okay, so you want us to do a top-level flow? Yeah.

Yeah, like, what are they doing with Tabular Review?

Yeah.

And then we can go into that.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A good example is due diligence, where it’s like, “We need to review all employment contracts, all supply contracts,” or whatever. So you put 10,000 employment contracts in there, and then—

Each cell is one employment contract?

Each row is one employment contract.

Okay.

And then for the cells, you ask questions—sorry, per column. The first column might be, “What’s the termination period?” Then it’s going to fill that out for every one: 30 days, or whatever it is. The next question might be, “Is there an IP assignment clause?” The next one might be, “How much do we have to pay them if we fire them?” or “How much are they getting paid?” Then it’s going to fill out the entire thing.

You can also just ask the agent to do this. If you drop 10,000 files into the agent and say, “Do due diligence on this,” it will spin up a Tabular Review, run all of them, wait for it to be done, and then analyze the results. It can highlight red flags: the CEO is getting paid an outrageous amount, or there’s a weird bonus structure. Obviously, we need to look at that. The agent can then draft a memo to send to the client, or it can just do the review and have a lawyer—the user—say, “Okay, let’s look at this. Here are the red flags.” It’s also collaborative, so you can comment for other people to look at, et cetera.

And why did you choose that spreadsheet format?

It’s just a lot better to work in. It’s super easy to get an overview of what’s going on and review it. All the stuff we produce also has citations back to source documents, so you can review it easily. If you want to make sure everything’s right, you can highlight cells that have been reviewed or flagged, and you can comment and collaborate. That’s much easier than any other form factor we’ve tried.

Yeah.

Mm.

I would say that the spreadsheet form factor has a lot of pull in some areas, but somehow hasn’t really spread.

Mm.

I find it very weird. Clay is another one on the GTM side that’s very well known for spreadsheets. You guys—I don’t really know if anyone else does a large spreadsheet AI thing. There was V7, which tried to launch. There’s Sheets. Even in the finance domain, I don’t really have a top name that does spreadsheets.

Does this really well. Yeah, no, I agree. If you have fan-out and you do the exact same thing, extracting stuff, it’s such a great form factor to understand what’s going on.

Do you find that people must export to Excel, or are they happy to live in your spreadsheet?

People are happy to live there.

Do you use AG Grid or your own?

We do use AG Grid.

AG Grid. That seems to be the leading one.

Yeah.

I mean, they’ve done this for, I don’t know, 15 years.

Yeah, yeah, they know how to. Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s a vertical list.

Okay, I’m happy on that spreadsheet angle. I think the only other interesting thing for me engineering-wise is the fan-outs.

Yep.

Engineers are maybe well-equipped to understand the trade-offs. Before you fan this thing out on a million documents, maybe test it on two.

Mm.

Do they do that?

Yeah, they will. Our type of review will actually run the first 10 rows twice.

Just check, right?

Yeah. Does this make sense? Did it show us what we thought it was going to show us? That’s really good. It’s also good for people building this to iterate quickly on the first 10 rows until they’re getting the results they want, and then they can go ahead.

Yeah. I’m happy to move on to the next thing: Intake, which is your Slack bot.

Yeah, yeah.

Everyone has a Slack bot. What’s different about yours?

Ours is just legal-specific. What happens with ours is that it’s not actually— We’ll probably also build one that’s just an interface to the agent, but this one is specifically to kick off an agent that then adds a task to our list. We have this Lists thing, which is like Linear—that’s the closest equivalent. It adds it to a specific intake list. Then lawyers and agents can go into Legora and see the things people are sending to us as a law firm or as a legal team in a big corporation. We can kick off agents for them, collaborate on them, and mark them as done. Then it gets sent back in Slack.

It’s not just kicking off an agent. It’s more of a storefront thing: “Hey, here’s the ticket. I want this thing reviewed. Okay, now here it is. It’s back.” No one needs to change anything, and the legal team just sits in Legora and manages the agents there.

I think the data structure for this kind of thing is really interesting because it’s basically the inbox for all these kinds of queries that can potentially translate into a thing, into something else. Is it hard to integrate all these with the other features, or do you just not worry about it?

No, it’s not. I think we have some primitives that work really well. Lists is a great primitive because it’s extremely flexible. It’s almost like a Notion database.

You could treat it as a Notion database.

It’s like a Notion database, so you can configure it for whatever you want. We invest a lot into making it scalable and work really well. You can have triggers and automations on them, and it’s a great glue to tie everything together. You can kick off an agent run based on a list if something happens, and then it comes back and populates a field, adds new documents, or whatever it is.

And so, just like you might coordinate a bunch of coding agents with Linear or some other task management tool, we can do something similar with Lists. Agents can create lists, and lists can create agents—

Wow.

—and agents can read lists, so it’s like the agent swarm comes alive.

Yeah. Do people get excited or overwhelmed by that? I feel like this is basically end-user programming.

Yeah.

You can let people set up crazy automations. Some people get super obsessed by it, and they become influencers. It’d be cool to have Legora influencers.

Yeah, right. Clay has influencers.

Is that worth it? Too overcomplicated?

We need the flexibility, even if we don’t actually expose it to the end user. Even if this were all internal, it’d be a really fast way for us to use people like our legal engineers to build a lot of products extremely quickly. You can build custom fund management dashboards on Lists with your own generative UI, and then you have a new product that some people are going to love. We can have a marketplace of specialized products that we can scale super quickly, because all our legal engineers can build new ones. If they’re out with a client and hear, “Oh, you want your own? Easy. We’ll just build one for you.”

It’s a little like having Lovable inside Legora. And if we don’t want to expose it, that’s also how we build our own custom features. We made another acquisition in the UK called Wexler. They’re doing fact intelligence, mostly for litigation: you upload a million documents for a lawsuit or whatever, and then we extract facts with named entities, dates, and so on. Once you have all the facts, you can hold them up against each other and see which ones are corroborated and which ones are in disagreement.

Yeah.

That’s extremely powerful, because then you can also transcribe a court hearing and say, “Oh, he said this thing, but actually the email over here says that he wasn’t there.” If you see it live, it’s so cool.

Yeah.

We can build that on this primitive, too. We can build a lot of really cool things on this one primitive. That’s how we think about it, because as we scale the company, we have to solve so many things. I think a lot about how we build a core primitive that we can scale across many different end products and use to create customizable—

Mm.

—experiences.

Okay. So what core primitives do you have? Let’s just restate them for people.

Lists is a core one.

Lists.

Yeah.

Projects.

Super configurable. Projects are basically containers of files—file systems.

Yeah.

The agent, of course, which you can kick off and run in very different configurations.

Do you have a name for the agent, by the way?

No, we don’t.

Just Intake?

No.

Okay.

You mean, like, did we call it Leia or give it a name? No.

Ooh. Leia would be cool.

Yeah.

People used to talk about Leia as a named entity, but we stopped that.

Okay. Maybe I’ll bring it back.

It might be confusing. I don’t know.

So, Lists, Agent, Tabular Review. We’re considering whether that’s actually an instantiation of something. You can take this as far down as you want, right? But those are probably the big ones.

Yeah. I actually wanted to talk a little bit about FTEs, because this sounds kind of like that. I think Max has talked about that a little bit. When you onboard a big customer, you want to get them value ASAP so that they stay on Legora.

Exactly. Yep.

How has that evolved? When did you guys start that forward-deployed team?

We hired our first forward-deployed engineer, our first hire in New York. They were also a YC founder. That was maybe six months ago. I’m not actually sure.

Are they considered legal engineers, or no?

No.

Okay. All right.

They’re true engineers. But I do think about how we enable that at scale. A really core thing is: how can we empower our legal engineers? How can we empower our power users and legal engineers to customize the product in a powerful way?

Of course, we’ll still have forward-deployed engineers helping out with custom integrations, scoping and figuring out what’s possible, and feeding all of that back into core product development. That’s how I think about it. It’s almost a first-line, second-line defense—

Yeah.

—where legal engineers should be able to customize a lot of things and build a great experience. Where they can’t, or where we need to make core product changes or custom integrations, we have forward-deployed engineers who cycle in a little behind them. Sometimes they’ll just work on the product, and sometimes they’ll work—

Yeah.

—with clients.

Can you walk through an example? You’ve just got this new client. What’s step number one? Do you say, “Okay, we have a forward-deployed engineer for you. They’re going to build some kind of product for you”? How does that work?

It’s very different from client to client.

Yeah.

If it’s a big client and they’re super engaged, they have all these dreams of things they want to do. Typically, they’ll have already tried to build something and failed, and they’ll say, “This is a problem we’d like to solve.” Then we’ll staff them with legal engineers and potentially a forward-deployed engineer, depending on what they need. We’ll say, “These people will come and make you successful. They’ll sit with your lawyers, teach them how to use it, figure out your current workflows, and build them into Legora.” Some of that will just involve a legal engineer, and some of it will require a forward-deployed engineer.

What’s the separation, if you could talk about that a little bit?

Legal engineers configure the product as a power user would.

Okay.

They don’t write code.

Yeah, yeah.

A forward-deployed engineer writes code into production, basically. I guess that’s the—

Yeah. What kind of background do forward-deployed engineers normally have?

Regular engineers.

You said YC founder.

Yeah. Founders, regular engineers. They’re all—

You have, like—

Yeah.

Dee was your—

Yeah, exactly.

—was the one with two YC companies and worked on search at Meta.

Dee was our first, yeah.

Okay. That’s a high bar.

She’s awesome. She was the first boots on the ground in the US.

What are some examples of workflows or things these people are building for clients? Are there a couple of use cases that all the law firms say, “This is the first thing our FDEs are going to do when they go in”?

It’s very different.

Okay.

There are some core workflows everyone has that we can just build in Legora. That could be anything from how we handle certain types of NDAs. You activate it, and it’s more like skill-building for agents.

For most of the FDEs, it’s more that there’s something we can’t do yet: we need more flexibility in some of the primitives, or we have a really complex system we need to integrate with. Then they’ll go out and build the integration against our APIs, and maybe expand our APIs to make it work.

How does the legal structure work there? You said you guys can’t even work on deals.

Mm.

... yourselves can’t even work on deals.

Yes.

So, how do they work on client projects?

You mean the law firms? How do they work on client projects?

Sorry.

How do your FDs—

Yeah.

... work on client projects if they’re not—

They don’t touch the data, still.

Oh, okay.

They’ll just build the system.

Okay.

But they’ll also be onboarded like an employee sometimes. They might get a laptop and everything, if they need to.

Like, at the law firm?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, wow.

If they need to.

Interesting.

That doesn’t happen very often, because usually they just build an integration and it kind of works. But they can, if they need to.

And you only onboard FDs into a customer, I’m assuming, if they’re a certain size.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay.

It needs to make sense.

Yeah.

Because our FDs can also work on the core product, right? So it’s a constant prioritization thing.

Oh.

Is there a rule? I guess, does every—Palantir famously had four days you spend on site.

Mm.

One day you come back and—

Yeah.

... contribute back to products. Anything like that?

No, we don’t—

Nothing like that?

To be fully honest with you guys, it’s still early days in a lot of this. Yeah.

I mean, where do you see it headed over the next year?

I do think it’s going to be more like Palantir, maybe not exactly. I think we’ll have a larger, constantly circulating group of FDs who might sit with a client for two months or whatever to build out one thing, and then they go to the next one, et cetera. I do imagine us rolling in with legal engineers and forward-deployed engineers to work on specific projects.

Hmm. Oh.

Yeah. The API business is actually interesting, like you said.

Mm.

Because that’s another role you can have, where you’re the CTO or maintainer of the Legora platform.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

We’ll offer everything we have in the Legora web app—

Yep.

... as an API, and then you can use whatever. Is that a promise you make, or—

That’s not something we’re promising now.

Yeah.

Um—

We do have APIs you can build against—

Yeah.

... but not the entire surface of the product. That’s the curious thing: is that the strategy?

Hmm.

Obviously, some people will love it because—

Yeah.

... I don’t have to learn a new tool. I can just use the existing tool I have.

Yeah.

Right? And then I just—

Yeah.

... install Legora, for example, with the Word document stuff.

Hmm.

Other than that, I do think you have to maintain it. Exactly. That’s been my thing, and that’s why we’ve tried not to do it. We haven’t had APIs. I mean, we started our APIs about six months ago. We fought it for a very long time, mostly because we move so quickly in the product, and I don’t want to be slowed down by having to maintain all the API versions for a data model that we’ve changed. Now we’re bigger and things are different, so it’s a cost we can take on. But when we were 20 engineers, we moved so quickly that we couldn’t do this.

I’ve toyed with this. It’s generally good for all companies to have a platform team and a product team. You have one product team, but you can easily spin up a second one as long as the platform isn’t too tied to a product.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

A very simple example is a web app and a mobile app, right? Or a web app, a mobile app, MCP, and other integrations. Then your FDEs are just one more client to the overall platform anyway.

Yes. And I think even the agent, you can think about it this way. There’s a harness team that runs the agent, and then you can build a product around it with skills, automations, and whatever else.

Yeah.

Um—

This is very famously the Amazon Web Services mandate. Bezos was like—

Everything’s an API.

... “Guys, no more backdoor access. You only offer other teams the same APIs you offer customers.”

Mm.

If you don’t have it, you build it.

Yep.

And then the customers also get it.

Yeah. I think that’s also changing a little bit. A lot of APIs now—one thing we’re toying with is whether the agent can be the API. I know it sounds weird, but for some of this stuff, what they actually want to do is trigger certain things to happen. For some of it, you could just trigger the agent and ask it to do the thing. I’m not saying we’re doing this, but it’s something I’m toying with: could you just trigger the agent to do this? Obviously, it’s way less efficient than having an API that you always hit. But I’m toying with how much of our product can just be the agent versus all the other stuff.

Well, you know, unbounded execution, costs, and latency—

Yeah. That’s the—

Is that the only drawback?

Yeah, and then determinism. Maybe one or two times out of a hundred, it’s going to do something whack that we didn’t want it to do.

We’re going to get into harnesses and model fine-tuning in a bit, but I think there’s a product question about restraint—about what you don’t do. You could do all that, and obviously there’s a prioritization issue. Are you at the point of saying no to most things and only doing a small number of things, or do you want to do more things and just need to hire 100 people?

I was very strongly in favor of the first thing for a very long time. Let’s just say no to everything and keep the engineering team small. I’ve said this before, but in one of our presentations, after I’d been at Legora for half a year, I put up this slide of the 300 Spartans from the movie, and I was like, “We’re just going to be 20 engineers for the rest of the company’s history, and we’re going to beat everyone who’s much bigger.” We’re 100 engineers now, and it feels like we’re way too small. I want to do that, but in the real world, we’re in fierce competition. People want so much stuff. I could be a puritan and say, “No, we have to stay 20 people, and we can only build whatever,” but then we lose, and people go elsewhere. So we have to build more. My job is to figure out how to build a system where we can build a lot, but the customer feels like we’ve built so much stuff when we’ve actually only built a few things. That’s how I think about my job right now.

Yeah. I mean, primitives, right?

No, exactly. I think that’s really powerful.

Do you test new products, just to see if there’s any pull? Then do you decide, “No, let’s just focus on our main thing”?

We haven’t made—I mean, we’ve made certain strategic bets, but we haven’t tried anything we don’t already have a lot of confidence in. Mostly because we have a mountain of demand: “We want all of these things.” It hasn’t really made sense for us to say, “Hey, maybe this thing could work,” because so many people are asking for the other things. So we mostly build those. Sometimes we’ll disagree with clients and say, “Actually, I think this thing over here will make a lot of sense strategically,” and then we’ll try to build that anyway.

Strategically for you?

Yeah, exactly.

So what are those things?

Or the industry. One of those things was the agent, actually. No one was asking for, “I want the assistant I’m using to have more agency and do things without me asking it.” No one ever did, but we were just like, “This is definitely where the industry is going. This is going to empower you to do so much cool stuff.”

Collaboration was another one. We thought the industry was moving toward collaborating inside the place where you’re working, which is Legora, rather than in emails and text messages. So, yeah, there are a few of those.

And then once you say, “Okay, yeah, we want you guys to use agents,” I’m assuming it’s going to take a lot for people internally at the law firm to actually learn how to do that.

Mm-hmm.

And so that’s—

Yep.

—where you say, “Hey, FDEs, go in there and teach them what they can do”?

Yeah, legal engineers, mostly—

Oh, legal engineers.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, that makes sense.

Some people call them forward-deployed legal engineers, if you want, but that’s essentially what they are. Then they go in and help structure their workflows around the capabilities of the agent.

You guys said previously—I think Max said this—but that early on, specifically, you weren’t fine-tuning your own models. Is that still the case?

Yeah. We haven’t fine-tuned any models up until now. I think that in the past few months, open-weight models have become extremely capable, so we’ll do it for certain tasks where we think there’s a huge delta between what a frontier model can do in terms of cost and latency and what we think a post-trained model can do.

Legal research is a great example. It’s a fan-out retrieval problem, and you can make a really effective model for those queries very quickly and cheaply, with low latency.

So you’re post-training them specifically to be better at searching—

Very specific, bounded tasks. Yeah, exactly.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. We’re not trying to train our own foundation model to be the main agent. I don’t think that’s something we’ll win at, versus Anthropic, most likely.

Yeah. There’s still a lot of search and retrieval research, or RAG research, to do that’s maybe less glamorous. It’s not even always model training; sometimes it’s just architecture and pipelines. You did a case study with TurboPuffer, but do you do late interaction?

Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

You do that?

We actually don’t do that.

Right.

But you’re completely right. There’s one guy on the team, Song, who really cares about search. He comes to me all the time and says, “We should do these things. There are these new embedding models, and we can do ColBERT and late interaction.” He actually talked to the TurboPuffer team to get them to build multi-vector support so we could do these types of things.

But there’s loads of low-hanging fruit, generally, even before models. And even in the harness, if you just want to create a better output for our clients, there’s so much stuff we can do that has an immediate impact before training models.

Yeah.

What makes a good harness for the legal industry, I guess? I’m assuming you guys are making your own custom harness.

Yeah, of course.

So, yeah.

The way we edit files is important. The way we do analysis is important. The way you do legal research is all baked into it. You might have a problem come up, or see something, and then it knows how to do the legal research to figure out what the answer is and what the precedent is. That’s all very important. And then, of course, there’s all the governance stuff around it as well.

Yeah, it seems like search is probably the most important tool you’re customizing, because if you can’t pull down the right information—

Yeah, and then you’re—

Yeah, yeah.

—you’re screwed.

You’re screwed.

Yeah. I think it’s search—

You guys are searching a lot of documents—

—and analysis.

Yeah.

Yeah. It’s search, analysis, and drafting, probably. Drafting huge contracts is actually not super trivial.

What about it isn’t trivial?

If you’re drafting a huge contract from scratch, you have to find precedents. How did we do this previously? Do we need this type of clause or not?

A specific law firm—how did they do it previously?

Yes, yeah. I am the law firm, and I’m about to draft a huge whatever. An NDA is very simple, but there are contracts that are way more complex, and then you need to find the right precedent first. Lawyers don’t just sit and start typing stuff.

They figure out which clauses they’ve used in similar deals, and “similar” can mean a lot of different things, as I’m sure you know in search. It could be the same industry, the same type of company, or whatever. You need to identify the right precedent. You might have multiple documents and then try to figure out which part to take from which document. That’s actually nontrivial. So it’s essentially also a search problem.

Which model’s best at drafting?

I was told I was far from this yesterday, but Fable and Opus are definitely extremely chatty. I’m sure you guys have noticed this. They’re very verbose.

So that’s not good.

That’s generally not good, no.

Okay.

Astra is pretty good at writing—

I noticed Astra is pretty good at writing.

Yeah, Astra is pretty good at writing.

And is it promptable?

It’s much more concise. We can do certain things, but I think the chattiness and verbosity are actually a little bit difficult for us to address.

Wow.

Let’s see, but the next model from Anthropic will probably be much better at this. Astra is actually very concise.

Yeah, yeah.

And I assume they all have a Slack channel with you, and you’re telling them this, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Like, this is—

Yeah, we talk about it.

—this is not news to them.

No, no, they know this.

All right.

The other thing I really care about is hallucination.

Mm.

Do they make stuff up? We have a citation system where we basically check that what they’re writing has a link. The user has a link they can click, and it highlights with a bounding box in the PDF where the information was taken from. We can make sure that what it says is always citable somewhere, even multiple layers down. If the agent writes something based on a tabular review, it can cite the cell or the row in the tabular view. You can click multiple layers down and validate it all the way up.

Yeah.

Are you finding that lawyers are verifying that these citations are correct or not?

No.

Initially, some of them were.

It’s kind of like law review, but now are you actually doing it?

Yeah, exactly. It’s the same thing.

People ship hallucinated links to the Supreme Court, and they don’t care.

That happens, yeah. I think it’s like coding. You have engineers who just don’t give a shit and send agents, and you have people who sit and read every comma. It’s the same distribution overall.

There’s just so much. How can one human do that, right?

Yeah, but I think they probably just, like we know in code review, know what to look for.

Like, what is the system or whatever? I think they also know, “Okay, this is the thing that’s important. Let me double-check these things.”

Yeah.

Then these sound reasonable, so it’s probably fine.

Okay. Interesting.

Just like if you receive something from a junior lawyer, it’s the same thing you do, right? You think, “I should double-check this,” and then this probably is fine.

Any other elements of legal reasoning—or, what’s the legal frontier that models aren’t good enough at yet, that you want from the next generation of models?

Nothing I can think of specifically right now. Long-document reasoning is still difficult.

Long, like million-token contracts or something?

Yeah, exactly. You have a huge contract, and you’re making edits across it. That’s difficult for a model to do today.

You have to remember that you changed all these things up here, and that the definitions changed, the ordering changed, and whatever else.

So the simplest approach would be one-shot: you feed everything in, then get a one-shot output.

Yes.

You don’t do that. You break it up into chunks and orchestrate edits.

Yeah, exactly.

This is one of those fun things about being part of this industry, right? Our Word add-in has gone through MapReduce, and we’ve changed. There was one big one, and there was one big one in multiple sites. We keep changing the scaffolding we build around the models as they change.

Yes. I’d say I’ve recently shifted from MapReduce to throwing everything into context. I do a lot of news reporting, obviously, because of what I do.

The entire thing. Yeah.

And now it’s—

Because now they’re—

—it’s better.

They’re good at it now.

Yeah, exactly. But it’s also different. We had this problem with search, where you’re searching for certain things in huge contracts. You can use MapReduce, but if you’re summarizing something, it might lose important nuance between the chunks, essentially if you just summarize the individual parts.

We’ve been dealing with this problem. We can do 2 types of search. We can also do the other kind, where you need to have reasoning in the different steps in between. I’m trying to think of a really good example. There are some documents where they talk about something at length over, let’s say, 2 pages, and each individual chunk isn’t necessarily relevant to the search term or what they’re trying to figure out. But together, it’s extremely relevant. These are some of the non-trivial problems.

And it must be hard, like you said earlier, to actually make the models better at that, because you can’t even look at the contracts, right? These are real contracts.

Exactly.

So do you ever ask them, “Can you make example contracts that are similar to your real ones?”

We do, yeah. We can receive feedback from them, if they’re willing to engage.

Get the company—

Yeah, exactly. Or they’ll say, “This is super important to us, and it’s not working well.” Then we’ll say, “Okay, great. Can you anonymize the documents?” And then, whatever the problem is, if we can recreate it, we can fix it.

One version of this is that you buy a law firm, which some people are considering.

Yes, but there’s some stuff around whether their data is actually their data or the client’s data. So if the clients are all gone, then maybe it’s fine. I actually don’t know.

Interesting.

But, yes, it’s a way to get a lot of data.

Yeah. People like Google are buying Spirit Airlines.

Google, exactly. Yeah.

Right? And, like—

Say what?

Yeah, they bought—

Yeah, they bought the—yeah, for like $10 million or whatever.

Oh, the data.

Yeah.

If you have a failed company, you still have your Slack. You can sell your Slack. I think there’s a YC company that buys your failed company.

Yes, there is.

Yeah, because it’s just like, “Oh, I just want real—”

Yeah, people—

“—people doing work.”

Exactly.

And then just pull stuff out.

Exactly. The problem with buying a law firm’s data is that you get all the inputs, the real inputs, which is great. The outputs are a little more difficult, because you just get their end result, and it’s difficult to figure out how they got there. You basically have to reverse-engineer it. In our product, when we get real traces from real use cases, it’s extremely high-value. But if we just get an output and don’t know if it’s good or bad, or how it was created, it’s a little difficult.

We’re going to wrap up soon. The last thing I’ll point people to is that there’s also a lot of alpha left on embeddings. If you’re doing a RAG-heavy workload and you’re just looking at MTEB and taking the top model, you’re leaving a lot on the table. You should look at Voyage or some of the custom embeddings. You’ve looked into this.

Yeah, absolutely.

Basically, don’t take default embeddings. Even if they’re OpenAI embeddings or Gemini embeddings, customize your embeddings.

Yeah.

Right? You support that?

Yes. I think that’s right. The only thing is you need to make sure they’re multilingual. We serve so many languages, so that’s going to be one of the problems.

I mean, Europe is king of this.

Yeah, exactly.

Is Mistral helpful there?

No.

Ooh.

Not yet. They just raised a ton of money, right? So maybe.

Yeah.

Let’s see.

You guys better be Europe’s champions.

They also raised a ton of money a year ago. I don’t know. I think we need way more model companies out of Europe.

Yes.

3. The Next Two Years Of Law

I just wanted to ask what predictions you have for the law industry over the next year.

We asked a little bit about that earlier. I’ll modify it to your second question: In 2 years, will lawyers do their work inside Legora, or will they use other tools like Claude or ChatGPT and call Legora, like through an API function?

Yeah, yeah. I think both. It really depends. If you’re a big enterprise, you might have Claude or Copilot, and then you’ll… I think it’s similar to how I use Linear through Claude, but I still go to Linear. I think enterprise will do that. I think law firms will just use Legora because it’s simpler and better.

It kind of reminds me of OpenEvidence for medicine. You’re basically that for law.

Exactly.

In coding, it’s gotten to a point where the labs will cut you off for competing with them. This has happened twice.

Yeah.

Do you think that will happen in law?

No, I don’t think so.

Yeah.

I think—

Because they’re releasing legal-services products.

Yeah, they are. We obviously talk to them a lot, but it’s also like, “Hey, are you going to…” What’s—

Your sales reps will say no. They don’t make the call.

Exactly. That’s not their call to make.

Right? And they often don’t even know what’s actually going on. I don’t think that’s the case. They have so much stuff to capture in knowledge work, or in enterprise knowledge work generally, that legal has to be part of that, just like data analytics has to—yeah.

—and sales and marketing and finance. They have to do things that are good there, but they’re never going to go as deep as we are. If Claude takes small corporate clients and they do some of their legal work via Claude, that’s great. That’s fine. But if you’re doing a $400 million M&A transaction, you’re going to want Legora.

I had kind of an unrelated question. I’m curious: are you guys going to law schools and getting them to teach Legora in classes?

Mm-hmm.

How does that work? Are you guys doing that?

Mm.

Like, are you seeing law schools changing their curriculums a lot, or not really?

I don’t know. I wouldn’t know, actually.

Yeah. Interesting.

I would actually do it—

I have to—

—a different way. You should do scholarships for law school for CS majors, for engineers. We’ll cover your—

After you’ve done CS—

Yes. CS plus some software experience, and we’ll put you in law school.

Yeah.

We’ll cover it.

Or you could do the master’s-plus-JD programs.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of people didn’t do CS as undergrads, so then they do a master’s just to get caught up.

Yes.

Mm.

Yeah. I don’t see that as often.

I don’t—

Yeah.

Yeah.

People do JD/MBA. That’s a thing.

Yeah.

But JD/CS, I haven’t seen it.

Yeah, it happens.

Yeah. Overall, super impressive progress. Congrats on all your success. Are you still going to keep up the pace?

Absolutely.

Yeah. And I think you’re hiring in San Francisco, New York—

We’re hiring in New York, Stockholm, and London for engineering.

Yeah.

For all other roles, we’re hiring everywhere.

How many people do you have in New York right now?

About 100.

Okay. And how many are you planning to have in New York?

In New York?

Yeah.

Generally?

Let’s just say generally for engineering.

A lot.

As many as you can?

I know. It’s aggressive, yeah.

Cool.

I mean, that’s the home of corporate law, as far as—

It is, yeah.

—as M&A is concerned.

New York is—

So, yeah, I’m looking forward to you buying a law firm and becoming—

Yes.

Yeah. It’s super exciting. I think every industry, especially the top doctors, lawyers, and coders, they all have to have two or three agent labs that just—

Yes, I agree.

—and sort of dominate the space.

Yeah.

So you guys have a great market. Good.

Yeah, I think so.

And I think it’s only going to get much bigger as law changes and becomes more available to more people.

Yeah. We’re already way over, but the problems you work on are very much frontier knowledge work.

Yes.

You know?

Yeah.

Unless you’re literally doing science—Navier–Stokes and science—most work basically converges to legal.

Yeah.

Yeah. It’s all legal in the end.

Yeah. Hiring, finance, everything—I just have to consult my lawyer.

Yeah, I know. Which is why I think it’s a really exciting thing to work on, because modern society runs, in some way, on legal.

Yeah. Yeah.

Cool.

All right. That’s it.

All right.

Thank you.

Cool. Thank you.

Thanks.