Jacob Lauritzen
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Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast · Building Legal Agents When You Can't See the Data - Jacob…
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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.
He used to argue the other way. About half a year in, he put up a slide from the movie 300 and said Legora would be 20 engineers for the rest of its history and would beat much bigger companies. The company has 100 engineers now, and he says that already feels too small. Refusing the extra work would send buyers elsewhere. His job, as he describes it, is to make a few primitives feel like a wide product, so the customer sees a lot while the team did not build a separate system for every request. Legora has also skipped speculative bets. Ther
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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.
A legal engineer and a forward deployed engineer are different jobs. Legal engineers configure Legora the way a power user would. They do not write code. A forward deployed engineer writes code into production: the custom integration, the missing piece of the product, and the change that goes back to the core team. On a large client that has already tried to build something and failed, Legora may staff both. They sit with the lawyers, learn the current workflows, and put those workflows into the product. Some of that is configuration. Some of it need
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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 lawyer.
The files belong to the law firm's clients, not to the firm, so an agreement with the firm still does not open the work. He calls that the frustrating kink in the business: the agent can do many things, and Legora does not know which ones people actually use. A consumer chat product can keep the full trajectory. Legora will not. Paraphrasing a real matter all the way down to a few buckets can be safe. Stripping the names and keeping the document is not safe enough, so the company picks the stricter rule.
What they can see is indi
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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.
When the company was still called Lea, he told the founder that legal tech had never worked for this reason: a firm that finishes faster earns less money. That was his objection to the whole category. What changed is that firms see the size of the shift and expect rivals to move. In the United States, lower-end work is already leaving the hourly rate. Small reviews are priced as a project fee, a flat rate, or, in some cases, done for free. The money, in his account, sits in the strategic work, including litigation, and in the client
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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 u
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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 the rest.
An evals team of three engineers and three lawyers builds those checks. They also pull in legal engineers, lawyers who spent three or four years in big law and often have a computer science degree. Lauritzen calls that mix the hardest hire and a force multiplier: a pool of 100 people who use the product, talk to clients, and can score the work. The tests are built like small matters. One is a 10,000-file data room for a due diligence. A good result names the red flags, leaves out the noise, and stays concise. The team splits t
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Does Legora Offer Its Whole Product as an API?
Jacob Lauritzen says no. Legora is not offering the whole web app as an API. People can build against the interfaces that already exist, and those interfaces stop short of the full product surface.
Legora tried not to ship programming interfaces and went without them for a long time. The company started them about six months ago. The product moved so quickly that keeping old interface versions for a data model that had changed would slow the team down. At 20 engineers, Legora could not carry the upkeep while still shipping fast. The company is bigger now, so the cost is one the team can take on.
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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 the documents.
A lawyer loads the contracts to review, such as all employment contracts and all supply contracts. Ten thousand employment contracts can go in, and each row is one employment contract. The first column might ask for the termination period, and the cells come back as 30 days or whatever the contract says. The next column asks whether there is an IP assignment clause. Later columns ask how much the company has to pay someone if they are fired, and how much that person is getting paid. The same pass fills the entire grid. Dro
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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. Firms would not trust Amazon or Google with any of their data. They had already finished the security review for 365, their documents, and Word, so Microsoft was acceptable and Legora had to run on Azure.
Over the past few years the stance shifted. Firms now understand they need to get on the cloud. Far more people were talking about on-prem earlier, and that demand has disappeared completely. People understand the work just happens in the cloud, where it is safe and probably safer than what firms were already doing. The shift has only been three years. AI ha
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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. American corporates and law firms have a much higher appetite to custom-build. European customers are much more ready to take the product off the shelf.
American customers ask to build a huge thing and structure it their own way. Some already built their own CRM and their own document management system, then want triggers so a review in Salesforce goes to one person, into Legora, and back in. Others are extremely ambitious and want a whole new product, which Legora cannot do. European customers say what fails and what they want more of, and
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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. In professional services, including consultancies, the value sits in the people. A manufacturer or a software firm can hold physical assets or intangible assets that pay dividends to shareholders. A firm cannot own its people, because slavery is abolished. It can pay them, which rents their time. A partnership makes the human capital the owner of the company so the people stay.
He gave the question real thought last week. The partnership does not have to change. What he wants is for lawyers and law firms to build intangible, durable capital. A system can learn how a firm works. The w