Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
00:39:22 · Jacob Lauritzen, Shawn Wang
[00:39:22] S0: It's like a Notion database, and so you can basically configure it for whatever you want, and we, of course, invest a lot into making this super scalable and work really well, and you can have triggers on them, automations on them, and it's like a great glue to glue everything together, because then you can kick off an agent run based on a list if something happens, and then that comes back and populates a field or whatever, adds new documents or whatever it is, and so it's just like you might coordinate a bunch of coding agents with linear or some sort of task management tool, we can do it similarly with lists. And so, like, agents can create lists, and lists can create agents, and Wow. Agents can read lists, and so it's like, the agent swarm comes alive. [00:39:54] S1: Yeah. Do people get excited or overwhelmed by that? You know, like, I I feel like this is basically end user programming. You're... You know, you can let people set up crazy automations. Some people get super obsessed by it, and they become, like, influence... Like, it'd be cool to have like Yeah. Right. Has influencers. Yeah. Is that worth it? Too overcomplicated?
00:40:14 · Jacob Lauritzen
[00:40:14] S0: We need the flexibility, even if we don't actually expose it to the end user. Let's say this was just all internal, then it's a really fast way for us to utilize people like our legal engineers to basically build a lot of products extremely fast. So, like, you can build custom, like, fund management dashboards. You can basically build that on List with, like, your own generative UI, and then you basically have a new product that some people are gonna love, and we can have a marketplace of just a bunch of specialized products that we can scale super quickly, because all of our legal engineers can just build new ones. If they're out with a client, oh, you want your own? Easy. We'll just fix one for you, so it's like a lovable inside Legora a little bit, and if we don't wanna expose it, that's also how we build our own custom feature. So we we made another acquisition in The UK called Wexler, and they're doing fact intelligence, which is for litigation mostly, which is like you upload a million documents for a lawsuit or whatever, and then we extract facts from those with named entities and dates and whatever, and then when you have all the facts, you can basically hold them up against each other and see which ones are corroborated and which ones are, what do call, disagreement. They... You know? And that's extremely powerful, because then you can also transcribe a court hearing, and you can like, oh, he said this thing, but actually, the email over here says that he was not there. And it's like, if you see it live, it's like so fucking cool. Yeah. And that we can also build on this primitive. And so, like, we can build a lot of really cool things on this one primitive, basically. That's how we think about it. It's like we have to be... As we scale the company, we just have to solve so many things, and like, so I think a lot about how do we build a core primitive that we can scale to many different end products and create very customizable experiences.
00:41:52 · Shawn Wang, Jacob Lauritzen, Alessio Fanelli
[00:41:52] S1: Okay. So you have... What what core primitives do you have? Let's just restate for for people. This is a [00:41:57] S0: core one. Projects, basically containers of files, file systems. Yeah. The agent, of course, you can kick that off and run that in very different configurations. [00:42:07] S2: Do you have a name for the agent, by the way? [00:42:09] S0: No. We don't. No. Okay. That is intake. No. Okay. Yeah. No. You mean, like, you called it, like, Leia or if, like, we gave it a name? [00:42:15] S1: No. Yeah. Yeah. [00:42:16] S0: Yeah. Leia would be cool. Yeah. [00:42:18] S1: Yeah. [00:42:18] S0: People used to talk about Leia as, like, an a named entity. Yeah. But, yeah, we we stopped that. [00:42:24] S1: Okay. Maybe I'll bring it back. It might be confusing. [00:42:26] S2: I don't know. [00:42:26] S0: So list, agent. Tabular review. [00:42:28] S1: Tabular review. [00:42:29] S0: Which like we're considering, is that actually an instantiation of... Like, you can take this as far down as you want. Right? But those are probably the big the big ones. Yeah. [00:42:37] S2: Yeah. So I actually wanted to talk a little bit about like, FTEs because this sounds kinda like Yep. That. And I think Max has talked about that a little bit. That, like, okay, when you onboard a new, like, big customer Yeah. You wanna get them value, like, ASAP so that, you know, they stay on Exactly. Stay on Legora. Yep. Yeah. How has that evolved? Like, when did you guys start that forward deployed team?
00:42:37 · Alessio Fanelli, Jacob Lauritzen
[00:42:37] S2: Yeah. So I actually wanted to talk a little bit about like, FTEs because this sounds kinda like Yep. That. And I think Max has talked about that a little bit. That, like, okay, when you onboard a new, like, big customer Yeah. You wanna get them value, like, ASAP so that, you know, they stay on Exactly. Stay on Legora. Yep. Yeah. How has that evolved? Like, when did you guys start that forward deployed team? [00:42:56] S0: So we hired our first forward deployed engineer. That was our first time in New York, also YC founder, nine months ago maybe. I'm not actually sure. [00:43:04] S2: Are they considered legal engineers or no?
00:43:04 · Alessio Fanelli, Jacob Lauritzen
[00:43:04] S2: Are they considered legal engineers or no? [00:43:06] S0: No. Okay. True engineers. But we do... It is something that I think about, it's like, how do we exactly enable that at scale? And I think a really core thing is like, how can we empower our legal engineers? Like, how can we empower our power users and our legal engineers to customize the product in a powerful way? And then, of course, we will still have forward deployed engineers, like, help out, you know, do all the custom integrations and the scoping and figuring out what's possible and feed all of that back into core product development. So that's kind of how I think about it. It's like almost a first line, second line defense, whereas like legal engineers should be able to customize a lot of stuff and build a great experience, and then where they can't, or we need to make core product changes, or custom integrations, or whatever, we have for deployed engineers, who also then cycle in a little bit behind, like, sometimes they'll just work on the product, and sometimes they'll work with clients. [00:43:52] S2: Can you walk through like an example, like, okay, so you just got this new client, like, what's step number one? Like, are you guys like, okay, hey, we have a forward deployed engineer for you guys, they're gonna go build, you know, some kind of product for [00:44:04] S0: you? [00:44:04] S2: Like, does that work?
00:44:04 · Alessio Fanelli, Jacob Lauritzen, Shawn Wang
[00:44:04] S2: Like, does that work? [00:44:05] S0: So, it's very different client to client, right? Yeah. But if it's a big client and they're super engaged, and they, like, want... They have all these streams of things that they would wanna do, or they already have... Typically, they have already tried to build something and it's failed, and they're like, this is what we... This is a problem that we'd like to solve, then we'll we'll basically staff them with legal engineers and a forward deployed engineer potentially, depending on what, you know, their thing is, and then we'll just be like, hey, these guys will come. They'll make you successful. They will sit with all your lawyers and teach them how to use it, and, like, figure out all the workflows that you have right now and and build them into Legora. And some of that will just be a legal engineer, and some of that will require a forward deployed engineer. [00:44:39] S2: What is that separation, I guess? If you could, like, talk about that a little bit. [00:44:43] S0: Legal engineers configure the product as a power user would. They don't write code. Yeah. Yeah. And a forward deployed engineer writes code into production, basically. I guess that's the that's the the [00:44:53] S2: What kind of background do the forward deployed engineers normally have? He said, like, [00:44:57] S0: Founders, regular engineers. Yeah. Old. Yeah. [00:45:00] S1: Yeah. D was your... Yeah, exactly. [00:45:02] S0: D was our first. [00:45:03] S1: Yeah. Two YC companies and worked on Search at Meta. [00:45:05] S0: Yeah. She's awesome. Yeah.