Legora's CRO: $3.5M to $200M+ ARR, the Fastest Direct Sales Motion | Patrick Forquer

0:00Patrick Forquer: We were the fastest company ever with a direct sales motion from zero to 100 million. It took Legora 18 months to grow from 1 million to 100 million annual recurring revenue ARR. It took them less than six months to double it. Legora just hit 200 million ARR. What did you see in Legora at$3.5 million that made that dream worth restarting? You know, when I saw Legora, the product, it was that aha moment for me. It was like, oh, this is what enterprise AI can look like. Patrick Forker, CEO of Ligora. Can't imagine how many times that song plays in the office. Yeah, a lot of Eminem here. A lot of ABBA, too.

0:36Patrick Forquer: A lot of ABBA. You know, we love Swedish pop stars. Eminem and ABBA is quite the mix. How did you land on this pilot? Like, was it hard to figure out? Were there any kind of trial and errors along the way? The AI models have developed so much in the past few years, as has the Ligora product today versus six months ago versus 12 months ago versus 24 months ago is dramatically different. And so the first thing is we have to have a really high level of enablement education for our own teams because we ship major features like every few weeks. There's usually some kind of near-death experiences or kind of the learnings along the way.

1:13Take us behind the scenes into some of those moments.

1:28Pat, welcome to GTM Now.

1:31Patrick Forquer: Hey, Sophie. Thanks so much for having me. Yes, very excited to chat to have you here. And you're jumping on a plane to Japan tomorrow, so thank you for taking the time. Oh, of course. Now, you spent seven years at Braze from the early days all the way through to the IPO. So you'd already done the full kind of Braze arc. What did you see in Lagora at$3.5 million that made that journey worth restarting? Well, you know, whenever I'm looking at a new opportunity, I tend to look at three things. And the first thing is, you know, who's your boss going to be? Who's the founder? You know, who's that leader?

2:11Patrick Forquer: And, you know, I always say with Max, he's an alien sent from the future to sell legal AI. And, you know, he's got that charisma. He's got that energy and the presence, but also the vision for the company. So he and I really hit it off right out of the gate. The second thing I look for is a product that I can really get excited about that I think solves a big problem. And when I saw, it was called Leia at the time, you know, when I saw Leia, now Legora, the product, it was that aha moment for me. It was like, oh, this is what enterprise AI can look like. And I got really excited about what they were building and the sort of application layer for lawyers specifically.

2:49Patrick Forquer: When I saw the product, I got very excited about the capability set. Even, you know, this was, you know, two years ago at this point. And then the third thing I look at is who are the investors? Like who's supporting the business? Who's backing it? And we've got, you know, Jayton from Benchmark and Jacob and Logan from Redpoint had led the Series A. And so had a tremendous amount of confidence in the investor set and a ton of support from them as well. So all those three things coming together, I got very excited about the opportunity really quickly. Very cool. Super interesting how you're thinking about the three points.

3:19And speaking of the last point, investors, you know, I interviewed Chathan Pugunta, who led your seat at Benchmark. And he told me that when he met Max, it was super early days, also a couple years ago, and the company was five people still in YC. They hadn't even done demo day yet. And he didn't have a legal background. But one of the things that sold Chathan on Max's vision was the intelligence layer, the bet that he had that the intelligence layer was about to get a lot smarter and that the right to build for lawyers was to actually ride that curve. And at the time, this is like a couple of years ago, right?

3:52That was quite a unique insight. Of course, then you and the team executed beautifully against it. But you still have to make that early bet in a founder. And for Chathan, he's betting on somebody that didn't have a legal background to run a legal company. And for yourself as an operator, same thing. So when you saw Max for the first time, which is that first point that you mentioned, the founder itself, like what about him in particular or what what advice would you have for other people assessing founders? How do you know that founder is the right founder for the business that can take it the distance?

4:21Patrick Forquer: Well, I think one of the advantages I had was that, like you mentioned, having worked at Braze, I got to work for Bill Magnuson and John Hyman for seven years. And, you know, they're incredible leaders. And I learned so much from them during that period. So I sort of had a vision of what good looks like. And obviously, Max is a different guy than Bill and John. But, you know, that sort of founder juice and energy was something that it's sort of, you know, you know it when you see it type of thing. So there's that angle to it. But also when you think more generally about vertical application layer companies like Legora, there's always this blend of deep technical chops, like vertical subject matter expertise.

5:03Patrick Forquer: And you've got to marry those two things together. And what I saw from Max was a very clear vision and extreme competitiveness and energy to solve the problems for lawyers specifically. So even though he wasn't a lawyer, he had a vision for sort of the product and the engineering side of the house that was really compelling. And he was humble enough to know that we need to work collaboratively with our customers, but also hire a bunch of lawyers to work with us so that we can marry that deep level of subject matter expertise with deep level product chops. And when those two things come together, you know, good things can happen at the application layer from a vertical perspective.

5:43Patrick Forquer: So what I saw from Max was just, you know, he was very humble. Like you say, he was not a lawyer, didn't come from a legal background, but he knew that we were embedded with some of the biggest firms in the world. He knew that if we could build for those firms and be collaborative with them and then bring in our own lawyers to sort of help guide that process, that would be a good combination. And that's proven to be the case. I love it. That's fantastic. And that know it when you see it is something that we certainly feel on the investing side, too, with GTM Fund. It's hard to explain. There's certainly a quantitative aspect to it and measurement, but there's also this qualitative layer that is hard to define and pinpoint.

6:20But you know, 100 percent.

6:22Patrick Forquer: Yeah. And so you made the jump to Legora, AI native company. A lot of other operators are in this position where they're assessing making the jump from an existing company or from a fractional position, whatever position they're in right now, to build AI native. We see it happen all the time now, but there's a lot of people still on the fence. What advice would you give to operators who are similarly looking to assess making that jump to an AI native company just like you did? Look, it's hard. And everything always seems smart in retrospect. But I gave sort of the three criteria of what I look for in a company.

6:56Patrick Forquer: But most of the people that I talk to who are still sort of like, quote, unquote, traditional SaaS companies who are thinking about making the move, there's different reasons people stay. Some of it is, you know, familiarity with the leadership team in a company. Some of it is, you know, oh, well, you know, there's some comp questions or, you know, everyone's afraid to walk away from that next big commission check or things like that. But to me, we're in a really unique time in history where these companies are getting built at a speed and scale that we've never seen before. The opportunities out there are so exciting and there's so much happening, not just in legal AI and sort of AI more generally at the application layer across many different verticals.

7:39Patrick Forquer: And to a certain extent, you've got to just bet on yourself and make the move. I think the biggest blocker for most people is their own sort of fear that they won't be as successful as they have been in their current role. and you really got to have confidence in yourself, have belief that you can translate into this new world, but also the window for building these generational companies at the speed and scale that we're doing, I don't think it's going to last forever. And so I would just encourage everyone to obviously be judicious in your decision-making. I gave some of the criteria that I use, but at the end of the day, you've got to make the leap, got to make it happen.

8:19Patrick Forquer: So have faith in yourself, that you can go in and build in this new environment because it is materially different building in these sort of hyper-growth AI native companies as compared to sort of more legacy SaaS. And there's going to be a skill set that gets developed here over the next few years for these types of companies that's going to be unique and differentiated from other skill sets. And there's a really exciting opportunity to go build that. And that's what I've been doing. And that's what a bunch of my peers have been doing. and honestly having a blast, learning a ton, trying a bunch of different things that maybe I hadn't done previously, but it's always a good learning experience.

8:59Patrick Forquer: And I always say like, unless you're learning and challenging your role, it's probably time to look for something else. If you're feeling really comfortable, it's probably time to go. Great advice. I like that. If you're feeling comfortable, it's time to go. Take us to the early days of Lagora. Like day one, you know, the company is based a couple of time zones away. There's, you know, no U.S. space team. Where did the very first U.S. pipeline come from? Like, what was it like in those early days? It was really fun, honestly. And it was it was building the plane while you're flying it, literally.

9:32Patrick Forquer: So while I was coming on board in the background, I was able to recruit a colleague of mine, Eben, who had been working in the space and had been looking for a new opportunity. So he and I actually started on the same day. So I was able to hire someone before I even started, which is always good. But yeah, a lot of the deals in Pipeline has sort of originated from Max and Robin and our team in Europe working on U.S. opportunities. So they had been sort of passively ramping the U.S. Pipeline in the background. And then obviously when we came in, there was a couple of opportunities in flight. But the nice thing with selling to a vertical application layer and selling it to law firms is you know who the law firms are and you know who the corporate legal departments are.

10:21Patrick Forquer: You don't have to go looking for your ICP. It's pretty simple, right? They're right there. And so we took over some of the deals that Max and the team out of Europe had sort of gotten going from Stockholm. and then we were able to sort of start our own PG. We did a bunch of events, a bunch of marketing campaigns. We did every conference, every dinner, every legal tech meetup, taking a ton of calls, taking a ton of demos in the early days, just Evan, myself, and with some support from our team in Stockholm. And we got going that way and then slowly over time, hired out the initial team, sales folks, post-sales, implementation support, legal engineering.

11:03Patrick Forquer: We hired reb ops. So we hired really quickly and we got to scale very, very fast within the first quarter. And then from there, got an office, stopped working out of my apartment, got a proper office and got the team together. Yeah. I heard the first office was your apartment in Brooklyn. Yes. Yes. Very, very prestigious office, my home office there with my My son, you know, doing a snack duty for me while between calls. So it was a very important task. We've come a long way to this beautiful office we're in now in Union Square. So that's been fun to see. That is fantastic. And help us define, you scaled really fast, you mentioned.

11:44You know, you joined at, correct me if I'm mistaken, but around$3.5 million in revenue. And then what are we at today?

11:50Patrick Forquer: Well, we're well over$100 million today. We have some announcements coming on revenue numbers very soon. So we were the fastest company ever with a direct sales motion from zero to 100 million. So that first year, we exited last year 70 million. We had 100 million at the beginning of this year. And we have a couple more big milestones coming up that we're very excited about. Very exciting. And that is astronomical growth. You scale from 3.5 million to over 100 million AR extremely quickly to even get the title of fastest growing. What were kind of the key, maybe the two biggest go to market strategy decisions and unlocks that you'd say now in hindsight, we're largely responsible for that growth?

12:36Patrick Forquer: In general, we come to everything we do with a high degree of customer obsession. Right. And so when people ask me, what's our secret sauce or how are we doing things differently? I think everything we're doing is like extreme focus on delivering value for our customers. So how does that manifest itself in a go to market motion? Well, you know, first thing that we really did was how do we level up, continually level up like our pilot experience? So with, you know, a lot of AI companies like Lagora, you know, we're in a category creation moment. We're not, you know, obviously we have some competitors in the space and we do, you know, replace competitors, you know, at times.

13:17Patrick Forquer: But most of the time when we're selling a deal, it's we're the first sort of product of that kind at the law firm or at the company. And so when you're in a category creator, you're doing a lot of education on what the requirements are, what good looks like. How do we think about adoption and impact, ROI, business assessment and all these different things. So for us, that starts with the pilot experience because all of the firms that have bought us and all of the corporate legal departments that have become customers, most of them have tried before they buy. And so how do we deliver sort of a really elite pilot experience focused on delivering value, focused on education, adoption, and finding those use cases that are going to be a material business unlock for our customers?

14:02Patrick Forquer: And we find if we really focus on that and focus on execution, being highly responsive, be prepared, do what you say you do when you're going to do it, that pilot experience is absolutely critical. The other area where we look at is actually I hired two to one post-sale to pre-sale. So we are heavily, heavily focused on implementation, change management, and then ongoing transformation. And that's something that we want to level that up every month, every quarter. Everything that we do with the customer, we want to focus on delivering impact, delivering value, helping our customers stay ahead of the latest trends in AI.

14:41Patrick Forquer: We have access to all of the latest and greatest models through Legora. But what we can do as a product is so dramatically impactful on the businesses we work with. But everything has to be tailored to how they like to do things like draft, how they do things like legal research, their templates, their style. And so it's about taking the foundation layer of the product and then using our skills, templates, et cetera, to sort of customize the experience to bring together all the knowledge at the firm into a way that makes the biggest impact. So the focus on implementation, change management and ongoing transformation has been absolutely critical because, you know, the technology works.

15:17Patrick Forquer: But unless people are going to go actually implement and use it in a meaningful way, then we're all wasting our time. All the error, our growth doesn't matter unless we absolutely focus on, you know, that relationship on ongoing and transformations is super critical. Mm, super interesting. Let's dig into that a little bit more because, I mean, a role that's continuing to grow in popularity is the forward deployed engineer, which really helps that post-sales process. And you mentioned two to one ratio. How do you overall structure your forward deployed resources at Lagora? We have two different flavors of forward deploy.

15:51Patrick Forquer: Firstly is, of course, we have our team of legal engineers. And our legal engineers are super well known in the market for being extremely high caliber. These are, you know, attorneys who are AI forward, who have different specialty areas. So we have funds attorneys, we have M &A attorneys, we have commercial, you know, in-house attorneys and everything in between litigation, you name it. And so what our legal engineers do is they help our clients, as I mentioned previously, tailor the environment to codify all of their sort of knowledge, documents, context, drafting style, et cetera, into Lagora.

16:29Patrick Forquer: And that's an extremely critical part of our work with our customers is how do we make sure that the environment is designed exactly for how you like to work and the type of project matters and deals that you're working on. So our legal engineers will forward deploy and go sit very often, especially with the big law firms and big corporate legal departments. They'll want our folks to come in and spend a ton of time helping get everything set up from a workflow perspective, making sure the outputs are what they want, et cetera. So that's one end goal. And then, of course, yeah, we have more traditional forward deploy engineer engineers who can go help connect Lagora into the rest of the enterprise ecosystem through things like APIs and MCP servers.

17:13Patrick Forquer: So there's different ways that you do it, but the forward deploy engineering work is heavily informed by the use case design that our legal engineers do. Like, this is a workflow to do X in order to achieve this workflow and do it at a really high level. We need to connect with system Y. And those two teams can then go work together on building out what good looks like from an implementation perspective. Understood. And how long does that process post-sales occur for? Well, we get time to values very quick. I mean, relative to other solutions or even going back to my experience with Braze, like Braze implementations, there's a ton of data migration work.

17:54Patrick Forquer: There's a ton of you have to set up IP warming and you have to register the push tokens with Apple and Google, all these different things. It would take like six months to get a big enterprise deployment going. With our staff, I mean, because we do so much during the pilots and the sort of technical configuration is very quick, our general implementation of like when can you start using Legora, it's like you can start using Legora from the day one of the contract. But the longer implementation of like how do we build the more complex workflows, there's a complexity curve that sort of comes with the adoption framework.

18:31Patrick Forquer: So you might as a crawl, walk, run, right, you might start with something simple today. And then we build into sort of the more deeper complex use cases over time. But it doesn't take long to really see, you know, time to values very quick. It's weeks, not months. And then, you know, over time, our focus is we're going to start with the crawl use cases and then we'll go walk, run, you know, over the next coming months. So we get to an initial ROI very quickly, and then we move up the complexity curve over the next couple of months and then focus on that ongoing transformation, documentation, et cetera.

19:06And time to value this, a really important metric. How do you think that other founders, other operators should think about that metric specifically in their process?

19:15Patrick Forquer: When I talk to founders or other folks who do what I do, I do think that there's a general lack of focus on implementation. The speed and quality of the implementation is the number one leading indicator for NRR, GRR performance of any business. It doesn't matter how good your sales cycle is. It doesn't matter how good the product or the customer success engagement team are. If you do not get people into the product with appropriate enablement and guidance really quickly and at a really high level, it doesn't matter what you do. And so in general, I think people over-index on sales and support and under-index on that very critical mesh period between the two.

20:01Patrick Forquer: And doing that at an elite level, it's different for every product and every industry. And there's different things that you – how we do things here is different that you might not do things in another company. But in general, like finding the golden path there and focusing on, you know, getting to value as quickly as possible, documenting that, sharing that information, et cetera, like up and broadly within an organization is incredibly important. And it's something I don't think people spend enough time focusing on. Super interesting. And then the Ford deployed part, you know, you invest a ton, two to one post sales kind of ratio in the Ford deployed sense.

20:39How should other people think about Ford deployed? Because what we hear at least is a lot of people are interested, a lot of people are deploying these kind of resources, but it's so variable because every customer experience can be extremely different based on their use cases. How should people be thinking about, is it right for them to bring on forward deployed engineers? And if so, like, what does that calculation look like because there's so much variability of what customers want?

21:06Patrick Forquer: Forward deploy is a term that gets thrown around a lot, right? And it means different things to different companies. I mean, obviously, everyone's sort of, you know, looking at the Palantir model and thinking that they need to do their version of the Palantir model. But like I said, actually, for us, it's less around. It's not that the forward-to-point engineering work isn't critical like it is, but it also has more to do with like the education piece that's being done with our legal engineers. You can't get to the more complex like workflows and use cases unless you start with the foundations.

21:40Patrick Forquer: And so when I talk to other folks who work in other sort of vertical application layer companies, everyone has a different point of view on like what Ford Deploy looks like. To me, it's more around how do you find the best and highest use of your products? What's the path to that? Everyone knows the metrics for their own product of like, well, if they do these three things or if they use these three products, we know that they'll start using the tool on a daily, weekly, active basis. So mostly it's around like understanding the data from your own product of like, who are your best users? Who's getting the most value out of your tool?

22:20Patrick Forquer: What are they doing that's leading to that? Like, how are you capturing those things like vis-a-vis MPS or other feedback loops? And then what do you need to do from a services perspective to get people to that point? And for some products, that's pretty easy. And there's a lot of like PLG type motions you can put in place in the product to help guide users to those specific behaviors. Others, they're more enterprise, it's more, it's more bespoke. And you have to do more, you know, with people basically, as opposed to doing more in PLG. but understanding what the metrics are that you're trying to get to from a product perspective of like, we want people to do these things in the product and we know that they do these things in the first, you know, 24 hours or a week or whatever, that they're going to have like X percent, you know, uplift and adoption metrics, use your own data to make your own decisions and then decide, are you going to push people up the curve with the products, up the curve with people?

23:14Patrick Forquer: What's the interoperability between those two things? What does good look like? And then you build, you work backwards from there. Again, it all starts with the customer and like how their usage patterns, how the usage behavior sort of tracks. And then you're just going to build the services model around like getting folks to adopt the parts of the platform that deliver the most value for the customer. Super tactical. Thank you for that breakdown. And your pilots are truly fascinating. You know, I talked to Chathan. He called them, or at least the pilot design. Chathan called the pilot design the most tactical thing that Lagora does.

23:47does because he said whatever the customer builds during the pilot, the IP, the integrations, the workload, documentation, it's theirs to keep. So if they walk, fine. They've learned to use AI, which is a plus. It's kind of the opposite of a traditional pilot for a lot of companies because typically a company will switch the license off the second the contract evaporates or anything like that. So it's quite a customer forward pilot that you have where you really are looking out for like you said, the customer. How did you land on this pilot? Like, was it hard to figure out? Were there any kind of trial and errors along the way?

24:25Patrick Forquer: We haven't done everything perfectly. And, you know, we take feedback really, really well from our customers. But it does come from like that point of view of like customer obsession, but also customer education. Because like I said, we're usually the first product of our kind, like going into these accounts. And generally, like the AI models have developed so much in the past few years, as has the Legora product, like the Legora product today versus six months ago versus 12 months ago versus, you know, 24 months ago is dramatically different. And so the first thing is we have to have a really high level of enablement education for our own teams, because we ship major features like every few weeks.

25:08Patrick Forquer: So one thing that people notice when they do a pilot with us, let's say they do a two or four-week pilot, they're going to see a new feature release of some very exciting functionality come into the product during that period. And so then we have to go show them to do use case discovery around those new features and capabilities and how does that impact the outcomes that we're trying to deliver. But for me, it's more around the education, customer obsessions. Everything comes back to, are we prepared for every conversation to go in and show our customers something that's going to make a big impact on their business, really help them deliver for their customers internally and externally and do something where they're going to want to build that muscle memory around an initial set of use cases and then work collaboratively with us to do more.

25:54Patrick Forquer: And we're always pushing ourselves and our customers of like, how can we do more, deliver more? Because we know if we're delivering for them, then they're delivering for their clients. So it's a really basic premise. It's not that sexy, but we want to help our customers win. And the first thing is like, from a cultural perspective, when you join Legora, we make that very clear. Our cultural standards are LFG, lean in, fight for excellence and grow together. And in particular, on the lean in perspective, we really want to lean in with our customers and we want to fight for excellence in our delivery model.

26:28Patrick Forquer: And so when we don't get that right, our customers definitely let us know, you know, lawyers, they're not shy. They'll let you know if you're doing a good job or not a good job. And so we always take that feedback loop and And we have changed. Our pilot process now has developed so much. We have so much more data. We have so many more strategic ways in which we can uncover value for our customers. And we've really, really taken that to heart. And we have an amazing team focused on that every day. That's incredible. Well, I would say the meaning of your LFG acronym was a little bit different than my mind jumped to initially when you said it.

27:02But I love the meaning. And the more data you have from the forward deployed side, right? the more you can inform that process. That completely makes sense. Now, you went a crazy scaling journey. We talked a lot about the good things that you did around the pilots, the forward deployed side, all of these go-to-market moves and plays that you did that helped unlock that growth. Tell us kind of the underside, because usually when you have that kind of growth, particularly that explosive growth, there's usually some kind of near-death experiences or kind of the learnings along the way. Take us behind the scenes into some of those moments.

27:37Patrick Forquer: You know, people always ask me, like, what's breaking, you know, or like, what have you learned or what's been super hard? I think for us, it's more basic stuff around, you know, at the end of last year, for example, we did basically a full sales, go-to-market tech stack overhaul, right? We implemented Salesforce. We implemented Gong. We implemented a bunch of new AI systems and other things that we were using, a new, like, operating model. And so anytime you're going through anyone who's ever been on a CRM migration, as an example, or any type of technology change, as we were just talking about, you know, there's always bumps in the road and things that, you know, operational effectiveness, how do we do things like pipeline hygiene in the right way, forecast consistency, all that stuff.

28:24Patrick Forquer: we've had to really elevate and evolve. And, you know, when I started, we had very low, you know, very low adoption of like our CRM and we weren't really, you know, our tech stack wasn't all speaking together. We didn't have enough automation going. And so as we were scaling, that was causing that, you know, cause a lot of enablement, change management issues along the way. We've, you know, we've mostly gotten through it, but there was definitely some bumps in the road as we sort of evolved our reporting structure, operating model, sales tech stack and all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, inevitable with that kind of growth, too, I'm sure.

28:57Definitely. And let's talk a little bit about from the scaling journey, your brand plays, because you've had some really interesting ones, especially one recently. But let's start with the first, I would say, big splash, which was, you know, Lagor ran a brand campaign with Jude Law. And many companies are considering running these big kind of brand campaigns. So for anyone considering, like, was this Jude Law campaign worth it for you?

29:23Patrick Forquer: 100%. How come? Well, look, anytime you do a brand campaign, I'll just say this, like everyone's worried that what if like someone does, and you know, not everyone liked the Jude Law campaign. It did about 100%. But the biggest issue that we had was people didn't know who we were, in particular in the States. Our win rates, our funnel is all extremely high. And so for us, it's just, can we get into a pilot? And when we get into a pilot, our conversion rates are incredibly high. And for us, there was too many deals where we just weren't playing because people didn't know who we are. And I can tell you that our brand recognition, our top of funnel, our ability to get into deals we wouldn't have been into otherwise, all of that came from the Jude Law campaign.

30:09Patrick Forquer: It had overwhelmingly positive feedback. And yeah, it, of course, wasn't for everyone. Certain people didn't like it, but that's not the point. People are like, oh, you guys are too distracted by these big campaigns. It's like, you know, we have a marketing team who's doing the marketing stuff. Everyone else is focused on delivering, on building, and executing for our customers. And as long as we're getting into the opportunities, like, that's all we really wanted. And it was 100 % worth it. And, you know, I'd do it again. How are you kind of thinking about ROI from that? Are you tangibly translating it to revenue or more so top of funnel?

30:41Patrick Forquer: There's a couple of different ways. Like we have a brand measurement index and we also have a top of funnel ROI in terms of the amount of pipeline we generate from that, both of which were incredibly impactful and we feel good about. That's awesome. And now you've got a very recent exciting brand announcement with Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees. How do we land on this? Because presumably more people know about Lagora now. Why did you decide to go big with this big brand campaign now? Well, first of all, you know, we're New York tech company here in the States. It's like we're in New York City.

31:13Patrick Forquer: We're really focused on, you know, being the best and biggest tech company here in the city. And if you want to do that, there's no better partner to work with than the Yankees and Aaron Judge. Obviously, also Judge, you know, related to legal work in a fun way. But he's an amazing player. He's doing things at a really elite level. The Yankees are the type of brand that I think we would all aspire to have. And so getting the opportunity to work with the Yankees, work with Aaron Judge was a dream. And like you say, but you say that we're really well known now, but we're not as well known as we want to be.

31:50Patrick Forquer: We have really high goals. We have really high standards for expectations around our awareness. And we weren't there yet. And there's no better partner to work with on something like that than the Yankees and Aaron Judge. So we were super thrilled to do that campaign. I thought it came out incredibly well. Our partnership with the Yankees has been amazing. It's really fun. I have a seven-year-old son who plays baseball. And when we watch the Yankees game, to see the Legora sign, you know, is super cool. And we've seen great results and great feedback from that as well. So we feel amazing about the results that we're seeing there.

32:25Patrick Forquer: And, you know, again, would definitely do it again. Super cool. And how special to be able to bring your seven-year-old to the game, too, and see Legora there. Yeah. He thinks I know Aaron Judge. That's the only problem with that campaign. He's like, oh, you work with Aaron Judge. I'm like, well, I haven't met him. Maybe one day. We need a signed jersey for yourself. I know. I got to figure that out. I got to talk to our marketing team and figure that out. But overall, it's been great. They've been an amazing partner. And so we're thrilled with it. Amazing. And when you are signing these big kind of brand campaigns, whether it was the first one, this Aaron Judge one, are you anticipating a certain ROIX on that?

33:05Like from the due law, for example, based on the results of that, do you have an expectation from this one?

33:12Patrick Forquer: Yeah, we have goals for all the brand campaigns we do. We have goals around top of funnel, our brand awareness index and things like that. They've all delivered. So we've felt really strongly about the outcomes. Are you able to share any numbers? I'm not, no. That's fair. Totally fair. They've been really good. Yes. Good. Yes. That's what we need to know. When we have some stuff to share publicly, we will. But I can just tell you that it's been great. And from a sales perspective, again, all we want is we want the opportunity to go big and get into the rooms that we're not in. And we've been able to do that.

33:47Patrick Forquer: Incredible. Well, for anyone watching the Yankees games, you'll see LaGora out there. Yeah, go Yankees. Go Yankees. All right, Pat, let's talk specifically about vertical go-to-market because you've run vertical go-to-market multiple times. What is your biggest piece of advice to operators and founders that are building in vertical specifically? There's probably two things that I would index on. One is everyone has a different perspective on how much experience you need in a particular vertical to be effective in that vertical. Meaning like, are you a lawyer? Have you worked in legal tech for a long time?

34:21Patrick Forquer: And what's the right mix of legal tech slash lawyers versus sort of general tech technologists? And for us, it's about marrying the two together in a really effective way because we have our biggest team within my organization is our legal engineering team, as I mentioned. They're hyper-focused on educating our customers and helping our clients adopt AI into their sort of internal workflows and building really cool agentic long horizon tasks that Lugora is increasingly completing work on behalf of our customers. So we have our legal engineering team, but we also have our sales folks. We also have post-sales support, ongoing customer engagement, implementation change management.

35:06Patrick Forquer: Not everyone can have a legal background. And so mostly that index is towards enablement, right? So we have a lot of folks who join with deep, deep legal and legal tech expertise who we then have to go teach about, maybe do some education on AI or technology or implementation change management. And then we have folks who really go deep on sales, implementation, change management, AI transformation, things like that, who maybe know less about how a law firm operates or how a corporate legal team operates. And so we do a lot of enablement education on that. And so there's this sort of like bi-directional enablement program that you have to have depending on sort of where you're indexing.

35:46Patrick Forquer: But we hire folks who have a really high slope, who are super intelligent, who are going to work their butts off to get up to speed on wherever they might have gaps. And it's about the marriage of deep subject matter expertise with sort of like the operational excellence that comes with people that know how to run technology companies and bringing those two things together. and we found the right balance there. So finding the right balance in marriage there is super critical. And a lot of it comes down to enable an education of like how you bring people into the business. So you can hire people who fit in with like the cultural values that you have, but also can go execute at a high level credibly in the market with our customers.

36:29That is by far one of the most common questions that actually comes up, at least from the investment side for early stage vertical companies is, who do you look to hire? Someone with relevant sales depth and experience or someone with domain expertise. And it sounds like you've struck quite the ratio. What about the early days for any founders that are building in the vertical space? Should they think about that first hire being domain expertise or sales expertise?

36:55Patrick Forquer: I think it depends on what you have in-house already, right? So if you're like, you know, with our founding team being engineers, we really quickly brought in legal folks with deep legal background. to sort of help that marriage around, you know, in addition to collaborating with our customers, how do we think about servicing these companies? How do we think about educating, you know, lawyers and AI and all these different things? And you have to have that sort of deep level of engineering expertise, which we then, our first hires, like Robin Mo and others who came in, they came from like a firm background that could sort of help them.

37:28Patrick Forquer: Whereas if you're a founder who's coming from industry, you might need help on transformation or engineering, then you're looking to bring in sort of folks who might specialize in another area. So I think it's more about finding the balance based on what you have in-house today and then sort of going to market with that sort of joint story of deep subject matter expertise married with deep technical chops. And we look for folks to sort of index in one of those areas who can slope into the other. That makes sense. Okay, brilliant. And do you have a specific ratio that you hold for that balance right now or does it vary?

38:04Patrick Forquer: It varies. But I mean, we're hiring legal engineering as our biggest team outside of engineering. And so our general perspective is if we've got deep levels of engineering talent, deep levels of legal engineering, you know, the sales and implementation stuff, we tend to hire, you know, for folks with that background in those areas. And then we overlay that with engineering and legal engineering talent. And that sort of helps us bring together the right mix. Very cool. And, you know, it takes incredible, incredible operators to scale the velocity that you did. What does a great AE at LaCora do that you haven't really seen at other companies before?

38:43Patrick Forquer: Well, firstly, is they have to have deep sort of value selling framework and understanding of how to deliver value for our customers. Again, going back to that sort of customer obsession, we want folks who are going to be super focused on ramping really quickly, super focused on staying up to date and engaged on the product. Like we can't hire people that don't know how to demo. We can't hire people that don't understand AI or use AI deeply. We screen for how folks are using AI in their go-to-market strategy today. Like everyone at the Gora, including myself, super AI pilled. We use AI all the time across every step of what we're doing.

39:21Patrick Forquer: And we are increasingly have a very long list of like required automations that are always on with the AI tools that we use. So I need actually people that want to build and do really cool stuff with AI tools. We give you access to anything that you need access to. We have all the governance frameworks in place. And we want people to go and run and execute at a really high level. So if you start from a perspective of selling value, focusing on the customer, and then you overlay incredibly smart, hardworking people that know how to build with AI and are independent and can sort of push the ball and push the speed of what we're doing.

39:59Patrick Forquer: As I say, the other thing is like, our output per head has to be really high. And we're in a competitive dynamic where our team has to be better than every other team. And so our productivity per head, number of opportunities per head, you know, win rates, everything that we're looking at from a data perspective has to be incredibly high. And we look for, you know, people that are going to come in and build with a really high slope and stay up to speed with the product. Because that's the other thing, you know, traditional SaaS, you go into the annual kickoff, you learn the demo, you learn the, you know, discovery framework.

40:33Patrick Forquer: And then maybe you have like a rev on that, like at the midpoint. Our product changes dramatically every month. So you've got to stay way ahead on the product. You've got to be a deep level of product expertise. We can't hire people that don't know how to demo, don't know how to tailor a conversation, don't know how to sort of ramp into legal expertise. Like if you're like, oh, I'm going to bring in someone else. It's like, no, like you need to know that. Right. You have to have the agency. You have to have the responsibility and accountability that you're going to take complete control of everything that you're doing with the customer and have a deep level of subject matter expertise.

41:06Patrick Forquer: We have really high standards for what we look for. And so people that are used to having other people do their work for them or have other people build for them, it's like, no, you got to do that here. But the flip side is you'll never be busier and never have more opportunities to work on. And you'll never work with a more talent-dense group of people than we have here. Our team is elite. I think we have the best team in the business. And we have a really high standard for excellence. So if that's not and everyone works hard, travels a lot, builds a lot, does a lot on their own, we need you to take that responsibility and agency and ownership.

41:41Patrick Forquer: And that's not for everyone. How do you screen for AI capabilities in the process? A couple of different ways, but we do have a case interview where people are expected to demonstrate AI acumen through various things we ask them to do in that case. But we also dig into what they're doing with AI in the interview process. And you can figure out pretty quickly with some pretty basic question sequences of who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't. Interesting. Okay. And if it's just like, oh, like, you know, I made an account plan with AI. It's like, or like I did like a meeting minute.

42:18Patrick Forquer: I like summarize my like gong meeting minutes, did MedPick automation. I'm like, that's not what we're looking for. I mean, that's like pretty basic 101. There's a lot of basic 101 stuff happening out there. And we want people that are doing 201, 301, you know, doctorate level stuff. That's an example of 201, 301. Well, there's a couple of different ways. we would look at something more advanced. For example, we have a ramp dashboard that we use to look at a number of different factors as people are ramping into the business. So there's a bunch of automation we have set up around reporting, number of meetings, meeting quality, scoring things like demo quality, scoring things like discovery quality, scoring follow-up and follow-through.

43:03Patrick Forquer: It's like, are you doing what you said you're going to do when you're going to do it? How are we looking at pipeline progression? And we've automated all that. with AI into a dashboard. So it's not just like, are we looking at this particular call? It's like we have used AI to bring together a bunch of different metrics into a single pane of glass where we can then have a multi-data point point of view on how our reps are doing from a ramping perspective. And then there's things that reps are building around, like if you record a meeting, does that meeting automatically get updated into the account plan?

43:39Patrick Forquer: Does that update the Slack channel? Does that update the Salesforce opportunity? Do you then have an account brain of like learnings and account maps to get updated as a behalf of that? You should not have to copy and paste anything as a general rule. You should not have to have handover documents of any kind as a general rule. All of that should be automated and shared in a way that doesn't mean you're taking your brain and giving it over to AI. In fact, it means the opposite. It's like you're automating a lot of the rote stuff that you would have had to have done otherwise, and then taking more time to be strategic and thoughtful about how you then approach that account or that opportunity.

44:16Makes sense. A very waterfalled approach.

44:19Patrick Forquer: Yeah. Well, thank you for those examples. And for Lagorre, specifically in a sales process, how do you handle competitive objections? Because the landscape is, for everyone, just becoming incredibly crowded. Yeah. I mean, we have a new competitor or some sort of new competitive dynamic every day. And so firstly, we have an amazing team, an enablement team led by Justin. And then we have Clara who runs our competitive Intel team. So we have some really, really strong talent internally on folks who just are able to react, build, and deploy competitive content basically in real time as these things come out.

44:55Patrick Forquer: This is not something where XYZ competitor releases a new feature and then we get the enablement out like the next week. We need it out like that day. you know we need it out that day or within 24 hours of that new thing and so there's a again there's a high degree of of accountability that we need from the field to to we'll produce the content so you have it and we'll make it available in video content or you know put out in slack or however we we can but we need the team to go internalize that because we have different competitors in different markets uh there's different you know competitive dynamics and different, even within different features.

45:30Patrick Forquer: And you've got to be able to set traps and handle competitive objections in a really tight way. But that changes all the time. So the biggest thing is like, we're really good at producing content, and essentially real time as the market develops. And then our field teams have to ingest that and then go, you know, handle that on the fly in the field. So this is something that I do all the time, because I get asked about new stuff that comes out, you know, that same day, and you've got to have a perspective and point of view. Yeah. And I think you've almost got like an eight mile framework around it, if I'm not mistaken.

46:03Patrick Forquer: Yeah. Yeah. The eight mile framework is something that Harry, our U.S. sales leader, came up with. But essentially, it's the M &M model from eight mile where, you know, would you get into, especially if you're getting into negotiation around commercials or, you know, late stage legal negotiation, things like that. You know, we we have to be really transparent. This is what we're going to do. This is what our competition is going to do. Here's why that's different and better. And here's the impact on you and your business and how we're going to partner together. But to me, transparency is always the best medicine.

46:40Patrick Forquer: And if you if you like are going into any negotiation, you've got to be really clear out about what's important to you, what's important to your client and how you know your competitor is going to act. And so if you're really clear around what they can expect from you and what they're going to get from you, and then also how the competition is going to play certain things, then it just helps you get ahead of like any FUD or other tactics that we sort of know are coming. and I think it's always good to just take a very, you know, business-like approach that's very transparent around, you know, just laying it all out and then, you know, working collaboratively with your customer to get through the negotiation and get through good space.

47:19Yeah. So you actually kind of lay out what your competition's going to say to your customer just transparently.

47:27Patrick Forquer: Transparently. I can't imagine how many times that song plays in the office. Yeah. A lot of Eminem here. A lot of Eminem. A lot of ABBA too. A lot of ABBA. We love Swedish pop stars. So it's a diverse mix on the playlist here. Eminem and ABBA is quite the mix. I love it. Well, Pat, this has been fantastic. Really appreciate the time. I've got a couple last questions for you here. Help me finish these sentences. So first sentence is the thing nobody tells you about leadership is? The thing no one tells you about leadership is that it's not about you, right? And I think in particular for new leaders, like you're used to being sort of the star, right?

48:10Patrick Forquer: You're the star AE, you know, you're closing all the big deals, you get all the Slack shout outs every time a big deal closes, then you go to manage a team and no one talks, you know, you're out of the limelight, you're out of the fray. Your job as a leader is to make sure that your team is as dialed as possible, is educated on the product and the company, is producing at a really high level, but they're also progressing in their career. They're hitting their goals. They're learning and getting better. They're coming to work and to customer meetings with the right sort of intentionality and attitude and the right culture.

48:46Patrick Forquer: You're working in the right environment. So the thing no one tells you about being a leader is it's not about you. It's about your team. If you focus on making your team successful, if you focus on helping your people grow, develop, and get better, if you help your team hit their goals, take that next step in their career or be ready to take that next step, then you'll be successful as a leader. So I don't think about myself as a leader. I just I obsess about delivering for my team. And that's been a successful formula for me. Sounds like the same framework you have for customer obsession. Just transferred over internally.

49:16Patrick Forquer: Exactly. Super cool. OK, next sentence is the most underrated piece of go to market advice is. I think it's around being intentional with what you're doing. I think a lot of people get into go to market like me when I was, you know, early in my career. People, oh, you know, you're outgoing or you're, you know, you should be in sales because X. And it's not really usually a career path that people go in, you know, in university, like where I went to college. It wasn't like in the career framework track or things like that. You sort of get into it through these weird reasons. And you're like, oh, I'm just sort of doing this thing.

49:51Patrick Forquer: And it's like, for me, I wish I had been more intentional about treating it like a profession. being a pro, like being elite. I want to get better at this. I want to do this step in my career. I want to get to this level, do this thing. I want to be able to sell this kind of deal, work for this kind of company. Being really thoughtful and structured and intentional with your time is super, super critical because a lot of people get into it sort of haphazardly and then they just think sort of myopically about the next step. Oh, I'm a BDR. I want to be an AE. I want to I'm an A. I want to be a director, but not being as thoughtful or intentional around your own development path, your own personal board.

50:30Patrick Forquer: Who's helping you? How are you getting better? What kind of company do you want to work out? What kind of leader do you want to be? What kind of A.E. do you want to be? What kind of individual contributor? Like, what's your superpower? Where do you flex? Right. Where do you bat at? What do you need to get better? And I think if more people were more intentional around building their own development plans and taking ownership of their own story, as opposed to just sort of like going through and going into the next thing, the people would be more successful. I think it's the best time ever to be in sales.

50:59Patrick Forquer: And, you know, I just encourage everyone to, you know, create your own plan, be super intentional about what you're doing and really focus on building strength on strength where you have a natural ability and then elevating those things where you're struggling or need to improve and then surround yourself with people who are elite and are going to help you along the way. If you do that, I think you'll be, you know, be successful. Incredible. Incredible advice. And Pat, where can people find you online if they want to follow along with you and with LaGuardia, other than the Yankee Stadium? Yeah, yeah.

51:28Patrick Forquer: Find me at Yankee Stadium. No, just find me on LinkedIn. That's where I post most often. That's my only real social media for the stuff. And yeah, LinkedIn. Send me a note. Say hi. And thanks so much for having me, Sophie. Absolutely. Thank you.