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

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

1h 7m
Transcript

Original podcast

Summary

Written by a model from the transcript; not yet reviewed.

This episode features a discussion with Jacob Lauritzen, the CTO of Legora, about building legal AI agents and software when client data must remain strictly confidential. The conversation explores the product's evolution from a simple search tool using Swedish laws to a comprehensive platform featuring agents, tabular reviews, and document editing. The guest and hosts examine how artificial intelligence is transforming the legal profession, shifting billable hours toward strategic judgment, changing M and A due diligence, and creating new roles such as legal engineers. They also discuss technical challenges like model arbitrage, evaluation teams, privacy constraints on cloud infrastructure, and the strategic advantages of domain-specific agent platforms.

  • Build product primitives like configurable lists that can be leveraged across multiple specialized workflows and internal tools. 41:56
  • Host enterprise applications on trusted cloud infrastructure like Azure to satisfy strict security requirements from regulated industries. 28:56
  • Combine engineers and domain experts into a single evaluation team to track model performance across realistic practice environments. 10:11
  • Test agent workflows on a small subset of rows before executing large-scale bulk extractions across millions of documents. 37:36

Chapters

  1. 0:00
    Podcast Introduction

    Hosts introduce the episode and set the stage for discussing building legal agents.

  2. 1:17
    Legora’s Origin and European Roots

    Jacob explains Legora’s humble beginnings in Stockholm and how the company’s European culture shapes its approach.

  3. 2:14
    Product Evolution from Legal Research to Agents

    The discussion covers Legora’s journey from a simple legal research tool to a full‑featured agent capable of drafting, editing, and orchestrating work.

  4. 3:03
    Feature Deep Dive: Tabular Review and Workflow Orchestration

    Legora’s Tabular Review feature is explained, along with its role in bulk agreement analysis and the broader workflow orchestration tools like lists and intake.

  5. 5:27
    Model Selection and Agent Architecture

    Jacob discusses how Legora chooses underlying LLMs, manages model selection, and handles sub‑agent delegation for complex tasks.

  6. 10:11
    Evaluations and Legal Engineer Team

    The team’s evaluation process, the mix of engineers and lawyers, and the role of legal engineers in product development are highlighted.

  7. 16:00
    Speech‑to‑Text and Transcription Challenges

    Legora’s approach to transcription, the limitations of current models, and the workflow for handling domain‑specific terminology are explored.

  8. 28:56
    Data Privacy, Cloud Choice, and Vendor Trust

    Legora’s decision to host on Azure, the importance of data privacy, and the shift from on‑prem to cloud for law firms are discussed.

  9. 30:29
    Open‑Source Models and Model Arbitrage

    The conversation covers how Legora leverages open‑source models, performs model arbitrage, and balances cost, latency, and governance.

  10. 34:36
    User Experience: Tabular Review and Intake in Practice

    A walkthrough of how lawyers use Tabular Review for due diligence and the Intake Slack bot for task management is provided.

  11. 40:28
    Custom Dashboards and Marketplace Vision

    The guest explains building custom fund‑management dashboards and a marketplace for specialized legal products.

  12. 41:52
    Client‑Specific Workflows and Integration Examples

    Examples of how forward‑deployed engineers build custom integrations and workflows for individual law‑firm clients.

Highlights

  • 2:14

    Starting with Swedish Lawsstory

    Legora began simply as a ChatGPT search tool built for Swedish laws before expanding into drafting, file editing, and complex analyses.

  • 9:07

    Handling Model Regressionsinsight

    Model updates often improve some capabilities while unexpectedly regressing in others, making systematic evaluations across practice areas essential.

  • 19:18

    Shifting Legal Pricing Modelsinsight

    Competitive pressures are causing a shift away from hourly billing toward project fees and flat rates for lower-end legal tasks.

  • 22:06

    Tabular Review for Due Diligencestrategy

    Tabular review allows lawyers to bulk extract information across up to a million cells, transforming due diligence into a spreadsheet format with source citations.

  • 27:07

    Confidentiality Constraints on Datainsight

    Because client data is highly confidential, the company cannot look at user traces, forcing the team to rely heavily on synthetic eval sets.

  • 28:58

    Cloud Adoption by Law Firmsdata

    While law firms initially refused to trust major cloud providers, they now rely on Azure because it is already an approved security vendor for Microsoft 365.

  • 53:21

    Post-Training for Specific Tasksstrategy

    While the company avoids training general frontier models, they use open-weights models for specific bounded tasks like legal research to optimize cost and latency.

Quotes

  • “We had one problem where it wouldn't cite properly. And so like next model release solved, it went from like seventy percent to like ninety nine.”
    Unnamed speaker · 0:12
  • “The partnership model, I don't wanna get into too much of the details, but like the partnership model kind of exists because the only type of capital that these companies have is human capital.”
    Unnamed speaker · 14:25
  • “We can't look at any traces, basically. We can't look at any data because it's all super confidential.”
    Unnamed speaker · 27:07
  • “The spreadsheet form factor has, has a lot of pull in some areas, but somehow hasn't really spread.”
    Unnamed speaker · 36:20
  • “We have a system of, a citation system where we basically check what they're writing has a link.”
    Unnamed speaker · 57:10
  • “I was, I was very strongly the first thing for a very long time. Let's just say no to everything, like keep the engine team.”
    Unnamed speaker · 50:35
  • “We have to build more. And so I think my job is to figure out how do I build a system where we can build a lot, but actually only like where we can, the, the customer feels like we've built so much stuff, but we've actually only built a few things.”
    Unnamed speaker · 51:14

About this episode

Legora can’t read a single trace of what its agent does for a lawyer. The data belongs to the law firm’s clients. How do you build and test an agent when you can’t see its work? Jacob Lauritzen is the CTO of Legora, one of the fastest-growing companies...

Transcript

0:00
1:07:21

15,296 words · 3 speakers

Topics

  • Agent
  • US
  • Legora
  • Tabular Review
  • New York
  • Claude
  • Lists
  • Intake
  • harness
  • embeddings

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