# Legora won pilots by letting customers keep what they built

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/legora-won-pilots-by-letting-customers-keep-what-they-built/ 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: 29:04 to 32:32 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/legora-won-pilots-by-letting-customers-keep-what-they-built/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=1744

## Quote

> “So the stickiness is **the use cases and the cadence** and, you know, if you've invested time in building up a workflow that like works for you, why would you want to switch?”
> — [Max Junestrand](https://realalpha.app/builders/max-junestrand/) at [31:26](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=1886) · Uncapped

## Takeaways

1. Legora offered pilots on the customer’s preferred timeline.
2. Customers kept the skills and work practices they developed during a pilot.
3. Adoption and tailored workflows—not technical lock-in—created stickiness.

## About this segment

Max Junestrand and Chetan explain how Legora ran flexible, competitive pilots and left customers’ AI work behind if they didn’t buy. Strong adoption made the product hard to turn off and easier to expand.

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.

[29:16](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=1756) the team was unbiased by how to build a software company and so one of the things that you learned in sass was the way you do pilots is like you would go in do like a time trial pilot where you would like give them access to the application and the minute the trial was done you would turn it off and then they would have to make a purchasing decision a big thing that happened with lagora is they would go put lagora into your organization and whatever you put into lagora they would like leave behind even if you didn't want it and so there was this idea that like hey you adopted ai you did stuff with ai you built some practices but you're not like whatever skills you built or whatever ip you built it's kind of yours and like we can leave that behind it's not a big deal it's like it's your skills it's your things that you've learned and then max

[30:09](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=1809) went around and just gave people like 30-day pilot, 60-day pilot, whatever they wanted. They would run these competitive pilots, right? So they would say, okay, there's a couple of companies on the market. We're going to want to A, B test all of them because it's really hard to pick just, you know, based on the feature set on your website. And in those pilots, I think we did an extraordinarily good job of delivering value. And so when the sort of 30 days were out, Like if we shut it down, it would be a riot, right?

[30:40](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=1840) Like people would roar and they'd be like, we've never seen software adoption like this in a legal organization and we need this and we need it now. And in those pilots, we would demonstrate much better than any other company the value that the product and the service around the product could bring. So we hired all these lawyers who are now called legal engineers. It's a great term, I think. Forward deployed legal engineers.

[31:05](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=1865) I was just going to say, what about FDLE? FDLE. It's right. FDLE. And they're amazing. Like, they're the most tech-savvy lawyers in different organizations who don't want to make partner because, like, you know, that's one type of life. And they want to work in a tech company. And now they get to work with their practice that they're amazing at and technology. And then they get to work with the best legal organizations in the world and, like, driving that change.

[31:28](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=1888) And I would think once you're embedded in these organizations, it's got to be sticky. I think Ligore is very sticky. we've ripped out our competition at many organizations at this point. What creates stickiness? So the stickiness is the use cases and the cadence and, you know, if you've invested time in building up a workflow that like works for you, why would you want to switch? So is it that, is it?

[31:50](https://realalpha.app/v/DdHl7dXVt-w/?t=1910) Is it, it's usage stickiness? It's not data. No, not yet. Not any real technical implementation, which is great because our... Competition has been deployed in a lot of places that sees no real usage or very simple use cases, which means that we can go there, show them, and display clearly in a pilot that we deliver much, much better, and then we can easily swap it. So we actually have a dedicated migration team moving deployments over to Lagora.