Co-founding a legal-tech platform
CLIENT
SUMMARY
ROLE
- Former co-founder
- Head of Engineering
About
Legica (formerly Legis) was a legal-tech platform I co-founded in 2023. I led engineering across product research, architecture, and building the team's engineering practice from an empty repository.
The core technical problem was retrieval over dense legal corpora, where documents cross-reference each other constantly and a flat similarity search loses the thread. The pipeline ran vector search and graph traversal in parallel — Milvus for semantic similarity, Neo4j for the citation and amendment graph — then merged and re-ranked the two result sets before they reached the model. That combination answered questions a single retrieval strategy could not.
It taught me more than any project that went smoothly, mostly by way of mistakes I would not repeat. We invested in depth of retrieval quality before we had established which questions practitioners would actually pay to have answered, and I badly under-estimated how much of a founder's week goes to work that is not engineering. I sequence differently now: the smallest thing that tests the riskiest assumption, put in front of real users, before the architecture gets interesting.