The Glade Blueprint

The Human Engine Behind the AI: How Glade.ai is Built

We talk a lot about the "Artificial" Intelligence we are building at Glade. But we don't talk enough about the humans we are building it for—or the humans building it.

At Glade, we serve law firms. But "The Firm" is an abstract concept. Our true users are the humans inside them: the attorneys, paralegals, case workers, finance staff, and document reviewers who power the legal engine.

These professionals are under intense pressure. Legal work is high-stakes and deeply human, yet it is often crushed by the repetitive.

• Attorneys want to spend time on courtroom advocacy, not managing tasks. A telling (and scary) fact we’ve uncovered is that many modern attorneys haven’t drafted a petition from scratch in ten years—they rely on tools and staff. The software cannot fail them.
• Paralegals want to escape the drudgery of document chasing.
• Finance teams want billing that just happens, without the reconciliation fire drills.

They don’t want another login. They don’t want "AI" for the sake of AI. They want work to simply… get done. They want to operate at the top of their skillset, not the bottom of their inbox.

The Machine Behind the Solution

To solve problems this specific and this critical, you cannot just throw code at the wall. You need a company structure designed to deliver reliability at speed. You need deep empathy combined with elite engineering.

Over the next few weeks, I am peeling back the curtain on how Glade.ai is built. I have asked the leaders of our core tracks to write an essay detailing exactly how their teams think, plan, and work to serve these users.

Here is the team that powers the platform:

1. Product: The Translators

Track Lead: Marcus Garceau

Legal workflows are driven by nuance, judgment, and human context. Software, however, runs on strict binary logic. Marcus and the Product team bridge this gap. They are responsible for "Translation"—taking the complex, real-world pressures of attorneys and paralegals and converting them into precise, fail-safe technical requirements. They ensure we aren't just building features, but solving the actual business problems that keep firms from scaling.

2. Engineering: The Builders

Track Lead: Ted Mao

When an attorney relies on our platform to draft a petition they haven't written manually in a decade, accuracy is not optional. When incumbents have delivered software that works for a decade, Glade has to be 10x better. Ted and the Engineering team are building the infrastructure that turns "artificial" intelligence into "reliable" intelligence. They will discuss how we balance velocity with the extreme stability law firms demand.

3. Design: The Architects of Trust

Track Lead: Will Shown

Our users are tired of screen fatigue. Our Design team is tasked with making complex AI workflows feel invisible. They will share how we design interfaces that surface what matters, so users can apply human judgment where it counts.

4. Customer Support: The Frontline

Track Lead: Juli Shimodaira

We don’t just hand over a login and walk away. Our CS team understands that adoption is a human challenge, not a technical one. They are the feedback loop that keeps us honest to the realities of the paralegals and staff using the tool daily.

5. Sales: The Engine

Track Leads: Coleman Vurbeff

Growth allows us to innovate. Our Sales team focuses on finding partners who need to scale without adding headcountGrowth allows us to innovate. Our Sales team focuses on finding partners who need to scale without adding headcount, and finding firms that want to grow and scale their operations is key. We're onboarding only firms that we believe we will be able to help with our unique AI platform.

6. Finance: The Fuel

Track Leads: Ian Ranahan

Finance is crucial for enabling our long-term growth by providing the necessary resources for investment. As a relatively young company experiencing very healthy revenue growth, we strategically invest in solving difficult problems now to ensure the successful delivery of future products. We will demonstrate how we utilize the latest FP&A SaaS tools to effectively manage this growth and allocate resources to the right initiatives for accelerated expansion.

Why We Are Sharing This

This series is for the law firms that trust us with their business, the investors who back our vision, and the future employees considering joining our ranks. We are grateful for your belief in us, especially to our early customers whose feedback helped guide our platform's vision.

We are growing our team in our Menlo Park, CA office, and this series is intended to connect with YOU! We have open positions in Engineering and Ops. If this space and how we are setup to build for it excites you, please apply.

We want you to see that Glade isn't magic. It’s a machine built by people who care deeply about the work you do.

Stay tuned. In the next few days, Marcus Garceau, Co-Founder & Head of Product at Glade.ai takes over to discuss how we build a Product Roadmap that respects the nuance of the law.