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Back to Building Legal Agents When You Can't See the Data - Jacob Lauritzen, CTO of Legora, with Jacob Lauritzen.

Are AI Tools Replacing Junior Lawyers?

Jacob Lauritzen says no. Legora is not seeing paralegals and junior lawyers disappear.

The fear he was answering is blunt: the junior work is gone, so a firm does not need those people. His report from customers is the opposite. Firms still need the next generation of lawyers. What changes is who is valuable. A junior lawyer who is actually good can do a lot of good work with the tools, and that person is worth more, not less. The lawyers who are not as good get less cover, so the gap gets wider. He describes the profession as more polarized than it already was.

The document review that used to fill a room of paralegals is not, in this account, a reason to stop hiring. The people who can use the tools become the ones a firm wants more of.

Transcript

Building Legal Agents When You Can't See the Data - Jacob Lauritzen, CTO of Legora ·

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

More from this episode

  1. How Does Legora Test a New AI Model on Legal Work?Jacob Lauritzen says Legora scores a new model on a heatmap of practice areas and tasks, because a release often gets better at some legal work and worse at…
  2. Why Do Law Firms Use a Partnership Model?Jacob Lauritzen says a law firm partnership exists because the only capital law firms have is human capital.
  3. Why Would Law Firms Adopt AI If They Bill by the Hour?Jacob Lauritzen says large firms are adopting AI because the hourly model is already under competitive pressure, not because billing by the hour rewards speed.
  4. How Quickly Do American Customers Move on Legora?Jacob Lauritzen says European customers have been slower to move on Legora, while American customers move quickly and keep the work high on the agenda.
  5. How Does Legora Test AI Agents Without Seeing Client Data?Jacob Lauritzen says Legora tests its agents on stand-in matters and on coarse labels, because the company cannot read a trace of what the agent did for a…
  6. Why Does Legora Have to Run on Azure?Jacob Lauritzen says Legora had to host everything on Azure because client law firms already treated Microsoft as an approved vendor.
  7. How Does Legora Run a Contract Due Diligence?Jacob Lauritzen says Legora Tabular Review is a spreadsheet for due diligence: one row per contract, one column per question, and every cell filled in from…
  8. Do Legora Forward Deployed Engineers See Client Data?Jacob Lauritzen says no. Forward deployed engineers build the system around a client's workflows, and they still do not touch the matter data.
  9. Does Legora Offer Its Whole Product as an API?Jacob Lauritzen says no. Legora is not offering the whole web app as an API.
  10. Why Did Legora Stop Trying to Stay at 20 Engineers?Jacob Lauritzen says staying at 20 engineers would lose the deals. Legora is in fierce competition, and clients ask for more than a tiny team can ship.

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