Building Software for Law Firms: Insights from Flo Engineering

Welcome to Flo Engineering

Building software for law firms doesn't sound like a hard engineering problem until you're the one doing it. Firms run on processes that have to work every single time: the seasonal cycle of interviews and offers, the review and advancement decisions that shape careers, the reporting that partners and committees rely on to run the business. The data behind all of it is some of the most sensitive a firm holds, and the people who have to approve any system that touches it are, rightly, hard to impress.

That's the environment Flo is built for. This is where we're going to start talking about how we build for it.

A quick introduction

I'm Robert, VP of Engineering at Flo. I have been working in the software industry for over 20 years now. I lead the team responsible for the platform your firm's operations run on, and I spend a lot of my time on the questions that sit between engineering and the rest of the business: how we keep each firm's data isolated and secure, how we evaluate and deploy AI responsibly inside a law firm environment, and how we explain our technical decisions to the CIOs, CISOs, and IT teams who have to sign off on us.

That last part is a big reason we’re launching Flo Engineering: as a place to share how we build, the decisions we make along the way, and the thinking behind them.

Who this is for

If you're a CIO, CISO, or IT leader at a firm evaluating or already using Flo, this is where you'll learn about the technical expertise that is building the platform you rely on. We will cover topics such as how the platform is architected, how we think about tenant isolation between firms, what our review and deployment practices look like, and how we're approaching AI in a product that handles confidential personnel and candidate information.

If you're an engineer, this is where we'll show our work. Architecture decisions and the tradeoffs behind them, post-mortems, tooling we've built, things we tried that didn't pan out, and the occasional deep dive into a problem that turned out to be far more interesting than it looked. Legal operations is a domain most engineers never see up close, and it has more interesting problems in it than you'd expect.

10 years in, 28 engineers, and a very different way of working

Flo has been building for law firms for about 10 years. Today our engineering team is 28 people! The majority of those people all joined within the past year and a half.

The biggest change over the past year is that we have fully adopted AI-first engineering. That's not a slogan. It means AI is a default part of how every engineer here works, from the first sketch of a design through implementation, testing, review, and operations. In the past six months alone, our productivity is up more than 40 percent. We're shipping more, and moving faster, than we ever have.

For the security-minded readers, I want to be clear that faster has not meant looser. Law firms don't get to trade rigor for speed, and neither do the vendors they trust. The guardrails around what ships, how it's reviewed, and how firm data is handled are as much a part of the AI-first story as the speed is, and we'll write about those in detail. We're figuring plenty of this out in real time, and some of the most useful information we share here will be about what surprised us.

Check back often

We'll be publishing regularly, so check back here for new posts as they land. Whether you're evaluating Flo, running it inside your firm, or just curious how a 28-person team ships enterprise software this fast, we're glad you're here.

Robert, VP of Engineering, Flo