Before joining Legora, Di had built and shipped across the AI stack: co-founding two Y Combinator-backed startups, building AI-native infrastructure, and working at Meta on search retrieval. But when she met the Legora team during their shared YC Winter 2024 batch, something stood out immediately.

“They weren’t simply pitching a finished product – they were actively building alongside early customers, using that feedback to improve it week by week,,” she says. “Every week they set these incredibly ambitious goals and every week they hit them. Not just on Demo Day, but from the start. The team was humble, thoughtful and fast. There was an appetite to learn, to listen to feedback.”

That energy felt familiar to Di. It reminded her of her own experience building from zero.

“When you’re a founder, you’re forced to learn everything – what the product should do, how to sell it, how to make it real. You have to talk to customers and you have to figure out very quickly what matters to them and what doesn’t.”

For Di, the Forward Deployed Engineer role isn’t a departure from that way of working. It’s the same core motion – talking to users, scoping messy problems, shipping fast – but inside an organisation that’s already scaling.

The role of a Forward Deployed Engineer at Legora

Di works directly with law firms to understand how they operate, identify unsolved problems, prototype new ideas, and guide them into production.

“You’re in the room,” she explains. “You get to see how the work is really done, and you learn directly from the lawyers. Over time, you start spotting the gaps – where things slow down, where processes get messy. And you start to see where the right software can make a big difference.”

The work is collaborative and fast-paced.

 “Sometimes you’re building something that will go into our product roadmap. Other times it’s a one-off fix that helps a customer right now. You have to be technical, but you also have to know how to listen.”

That closeness to the problem, and to the user, is what drew her to the role. “It’s not about reinventing how lawyers work. It’s about understanding existing workflows deeply and figuring out where AI can create leverage.”

Unlike traditional enablement roles, the FDE sits upstream of the product: part researcher, part builder, and part translator between how lawyers work today and what the platform should become next.

From AI founder to legal tech builder

The first startup Di founded was in consumer delivery. The second focused on AI-native infrastructure. Both were built from scratch. She also spent time at Meta, but chose to move on because the work felt too far from first principles.

“I was working on ads,” she says. “It was a mature product. I wanted to be closer to ‘zero to one’.”

That instinct – to go deeper, rather than broader – runs through her career. At YC, she wasn’t just focused on growth. She was paying attention to how companies worked: what made some teams move quickly, and how founders avoided costly mistakes.

“YC is great for that. It gives you both community and discipline. It teaches you how to be ambitious and realistic at the same time.”

She also noticed that a surprising number of former founders were joining Legora.

“I think it’s the culture. It’s optimistic, but grounded. People care. People help each other. And we’re all moving fast.”

Why lawyers are following the developer curve 

Di had considered exploring the legal sector before. Previously, it felt closed off and slow to change. That perception shifted when she saw how Legora had worked with its first law firm partner – and how that collaborative approach had remained central as the company scaled.

“What they were doing was clearly working. And I could see they’d already done the hard part: not just building something, but making it truly useful.”

She also sees a clear parallel between the evolution of legal work and what has already happened in software.

“In software, developers didn’t get replaced by AI. They levelled up. The same thing is happening with lawyers. It’s not about automating judgment. It’s about removing the repetitive work so lawyers can spend more time on strategic thinking.”

That shift doesn’t happen automatically. It requires close collaboration, trust, and a willingness to work through complexity – exactly the conditions the FDE role is designed to support.

Still learning, still building

When asked what she’s learning right now, Di doesn’t hesitate.

“I’m still learning the legal space. I want to understand where the hard problems are, and what’s coming next.”

She brings the same approach to learning that she did to founding companies: experiment, observe, adjust.

“You can read about something all day. But you don’t really get it until you try to build it.”

For Di, that’s the centre of the work: stay close to the problem, keep learning, and build what matters. Being Legora’s first Forward Deployed Engineer isn’t just a title – it’s a signal of where the company is headed, and of the kind of people shaping what comes next.

Not everything is mapped out. That’s the point. The work is real, the stakes are high, and she’s exactly where she wants to be.