Legal engineers configure workflows while FDEs write code

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 42:39

   talk a little bit about like ftes because this sounds kind of like that and i think max has talked about that a little bit that like okay when you onboard a new like big customer you want to get them value like asap so that you know they stay on stay on lagora yeah yeah how has that evolved like when did you guys start that forward deploy team? So we hired our first forward deployment engineer. That was our first time in New York, also YC founder, nine months ago maybe? I'm not actually sure.

2. 43:04

   Are they considered legal engineers or no? No. Okay. True engineers. But we do, it is something that I think about is 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 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 to help out, do all the custom integrations and the scoping and figuring out what's possible and feed all of that back into core product development.

3. 43:33

   So that's kind of how I think about it. It's like almost a first-line, second-line defense where it's 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 forward-deployed engineers who also then cycle in a little bit behind sometimes they'll just work on the product and sometimes they'll work with clients. Can you walk through like an example like okay so you just got 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 you like how does that work so it's very different client to client right but um if it's a big client and they're super engaged and they like want they have

4. 44:10

   all these streams of things that they would want to 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 basically staff them with legal engineers and a forward-deployed engineer, potentially, depending on what their thing is. And then we'll just be like, hey, these guys will come.

5. 44:27

   They'll make you successful. They will sit with all your lawyers and teach them how to use it and figure out all the workflows that you have right now 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. What is that separation, I guess, if you could talk about that a little bit? Legal engineers configure the product as a power user would.

6. 44:47

   They don't write code. and a forward deployed engineer writes code into production, basically. I guess that's the... What kind of background did the forward deployed engineers normally have? You said YC founders. Yeah, founders, regular engineers. You're old. Yeah, D was your... Yeah, exactly. D was our first. Two YC companies and worked on search and meta. Yeah, she's awesome. Yeah, yeah. Okay, that's a high bar.

7. 45:09

   She's great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, first boost on the ground in the US. Yeah, sorry. So what are some examples of, I don't know, workflows or things that these people are building for the clients? Do you guys have like, oh, these are like, there's a couple of use cases that like all the law firms are like, this is the first thing that our FDs are going to do when they go in. It's very different.

8. 45:30

   Some core workflows everyone have and we can just build in Lagor and that could be anything from like, this is how we handle these types of NDAs or whatever. And then it's just like you activate it and it's more like skill building really for at least. And most of the FDs, that's more like, there's something that we can't do yet. Like we need some more flexibility in some of the primitives or whatever it might be.

9. 45:50

   Or we just have this really complex system that we need to integrate into. And then they'll go out there and they'll build the integration against our APIs and maybe expand our APIs or whatever to make that work. And how does the like legal structure work there? Because you said you guys yourselves can't even work on deals. Yes. Yeah. So like how do they work on client projects? You mean the law firms, how do they work on client projects?

10. 46:12

    Sorry, how do your FDs work on client projects So they don't touch the data still. So they'll just build the system. But they will also be onboarded like an employee sometimes. So they might get a laptop and everything. Like to the offer? Yeah, yeah. If they need to. Oh, wow. Interesting. That doesn't happen very often because usually they'll just build an integration and it kind of works. But yeah, they can if they need to.

11. 46:31

    And you only onboard FTEs into a customer, I'm assuming, if they're a certain size. Yeah. It needs to make sense. Because our FTEs can also work on core product, right? So it's a constant prioritization thing. is there a rule like I guess does