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

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 in legal tech history. The team started in a Stockholm basement with ChatGPT, Swedish law, and a search tool. Today, a lawyer can use Legora to draft and edit Word documents, review 10,000 contracts in a single table, or run due diligence. The agent also coordinates work between lawyers, clients, and other agents. When Legora made its own acquisitions, the team used it for diligence. What we talked about • Why Legora resisted adding a model picker for years, and why it finally added one • Jacob’s estimate that models already do about 60% of legal work well, and why the rest takes a smarter model • How three engineers and three lawyers build test environments modeled on customers’ work, much like the “worlds” used in reinforcement learning • A citation problem where the model got it right 70% of the time, then 99% after one release. Legora didn’t have to change anything. • Why Legora runs everything on Azure and why it doesn’t use ElevenLabs • Tabular Review, the million-cell spreadsheet the industry copied down to the name • How intake works, how agents create lists, and how a list can start another agent • What legal engineers and forward-deployed engineers each do, and who gets to write code • The 300 Spartans slide Jacob used to argue that 20 engineers would be enough forever. Now there are 100, and he still feels short-handed. • Why Jacob finds Fable and Opus too chatty for drafting and likes Astra’s concise writing • Why drafting a long contract is a search problem • Whether model labs will cut off legal tools the way they cut off coding tools • What happens to law firm partnerships, the billable hour, and jobs for junior lawyers Legora is hiring engineers in New York, Stockholm, and London. Chapters 0:00 Cold open 0:40 Meet Jacob Lauritzen, CTO of Legora 1:05 Starting out as underdogs in a Stockholm basement 1:54 How Legora grew from ChatGPT with Swedish law into a legal agent 4:12 The switch from assistant to agent 5:23 Which models Legora uses and why it added a model picker 7:48 Are today’s models good enough for lawyers? 8:20 What agents couldn’t do nine months ago 9:18 Testing the agent in simulated worlds and a 10,000-file data room 10:07 The evals team and Legora’s 100 legal engineers 11:0