# Legora kept engineers at the center of product development

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/legora-kept-engineers-at-the-center-of-product-development/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Max Junestrand](https://realalpha.app/builders/max-junestrand/) · Max Junestrand is cofounder and CEO of Legora. · Co-founded and leads Legora, an AI workspace for lawyers, after stints at McKinsey and Ericsson.
- Host: [Jack Altman](https://realalpha.app/people/jack-altman/) · General partner, Benchmark · Co-founded Lattice and ran it until 2023, then started his fund, Alt Capital.
- Show: Uncapped
- Episode: [Building an AI-Native Software Company With Legora CEO Max Junestrand | Ep. 44](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/), Mar 12, 2026
- Moment: 10:41 to 14:06 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/legora-kept-engineers-at-the-center-of-product-development/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=641

## Quote

> “engineering and product has sort of **stayed at the core** of who we are and what we do.”
> — [Max Junestrand](https://realalpha.app/builders/max-junestrand/) at [13:03](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=783) · Uncapped

## Takeaways

1. Legora had very few product managers, with engineers driving product work.
2. Engineers built a custom agent framework when existing tools fell short.
3. Three engineers took ownership of tabular review as a product.

## About this segment

Max Junestrand describes an engineering-led organization with few product managers and engineers owning whole product areas. The structure helped Legora adapt as models and use cases changed.

From “Building an AI-Native Software Company With Legora CEO Max Junestrand | Ep. 44”, Mar 12, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/)

## Transcript

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

[10:53](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=653) somebody that's invested in a lot of software companies like one of the unique things about an ai software company is that it's tactically built differently than a traditional software company and i think it's becoming more known now but when you guys first started and you guys built up this org the way you designed the org made a lot of sense for the product you were building And what you just described, which was like, we need to deeply understand model capabilities.

[11:20](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=680) And then we need to bring that to our customers in a way that's deeply differentiated, which, as you explained to me, meant we need to invest heavily in understanding the models, which then would lead to understanding what to build. But as models got better, your features may not matter in six months. Yes. And so talk about how that led to an organization that was heavily technical, heavily engineering and researcher led.

[11:47](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=707) And for a company as big as you are, you have very few product people. The number of product people you have essentially rounds to zero. You have like leaders. You have a couple of leaders. But that's it. I mean, the founding team, we're three engineers. And so, you know, the most natural hires were let's grab all the smart engineers that we know from college and let's add them into the org. And in the beginning, you know, we had to build our own agent framework because like LangChain and these things that we initially built on, like couldn't get customized to the level that we needed back in 2024.

[12:21](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=741) for. As we understood more about the model capabilities, but also of the problems we wanted to solve, like let's take due diligence as an example. It's really hard to solve a due diligence task in a chat-based format because you need to review hundreds of documents. And hundreds of documents are never going to fit into the context window of a single model call, at least not back then and probably not now either. So we built this new product that we call tabular review, big matrix where you would throw in tens of thousands of documents and you'd throw in all the prompts and it started running all of them in parallel and what we basically did was we just said okay three engineers you're now on tabular review this is your own company run over 10% of the epd org at lagora are xyz founders so our head of engineering jake who joined he was a solo

[13:06](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=786) founder in yc our vp product adrian was also a legal tech founder in yc and happened to be a both gc and a lawyer and so as we've progressed engineering and product has sort of stayed at the core of who we are and what we do. And I also think that everything else is sort of an expression of that. Like we can only market what we actually build. We can only sell what we actually build. And product lead compounds.

[13:31](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=811) I think as you put it in the beginning, we did not show up first. Like Legora was not the first product that many legal teams looked at because there were earlier entrants. So we knew that we had to show up and be best. And if you want to be best, well then you need to invest in product you need to invest in engineering and i think you need to build that culture of like reliability first we actually had a time period in the company for