Rise of the Legal Engineer: Working at the intersection of Law and Technology

It has been a belief that lawyers would be replaced by AI since AI adoption among lawyers jumped from 19% to 79% between 2023 and 2024. However, AI won’t replace lawyers, but lawyers who use AI will replace lawyers who don’t.

With the advent of AI, new roles, such as legal engineer, have emerged. Yes, it is an actual designation that has the job of working at the intersection of law and technology. Richard Susskind predicted the requirement of this job in his book, The End of Lawyers? as he realized that law firms would inevitably face a gap between traditional legal practice and technology, creating an urgent need for specialists who possess both legal domain knowledge and technological prowess to design more efficient systems. To meet this demand, legal engineers have emerged as key players. These professionals combine legal knowledge with technology and process design, enabling them to streamline operations, automate routine tasks, and innovate from within firms. But what exactly is the role of a legal engineer? They help legal teams build, implement, and troubleshoot tech solutions that streamline workflows, automate routine tasks, and enhance service delivery.

Responsibilities of a Legal Engineer:

• Automating legal workflows: Building legal workflows for tasks such as contract review, compliance checks, and client intake processes. Following the Covid-19 outbreak, Hogan Lovells’ legal engineers were tasked with implementing technology owned by the firm to review force majeure clauses in contracts. It allowed legal engineers to quickly identify outbreak-triggered contract clauses, which they cleaned and passed to lawyers for client advisory.

  
  

• Implementing legal technology: Researching and integrating tools such as contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems. Further, analyzing legal processes to identify their inefficiencies and redesigning them to be more user-friendly. They help with identifying opportunities, which will help them in streamlining inefficient processes and supporting other teams in building technology to achieve this. Further, they tested and introduced new technology that allows a system-oriented approach to the legal challenges faced.

• Unique Perspective: Their expertise in both law and technology enables them to bring a different perspective when it comes to problem-solving. They make it simpler for other lawyers to improve their workflows since they are able to understand the issues faced by them. They are able to communicate technical solutions to both legal professionals and developers.

Qualifications To Become a Legal Engineer:

"The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways." — Robert Greene

This couldn’t hold true for the qualification to become a legal engineer. They aren’t traditional legal professionals, as they don't provide legal advice, so it isn’t necessary for them to have a law degree.

Legal engineers aren’t traditional legal professionals, they don’t give legal advice, and they don’t necessarily have law degrees. For this role, there is essentially a strong requirement of a candidate who could combine technical skills, legal knowledge, and soft skills. So, what degree is required to become a legal engineer? They come from distinct backgrounds such as product management, computer science, IT, and the most common background, law. However, they must possess the ability of developing solutions to complex problems.

Future Prospects

This field is set to grow rapidly beyond workflow automation into areas like machine learning, natural language processing, and robotic process automation, which will involve cross-functional collaboration to build integrated, strategic legal systems. It will lead to a situation wherein they will work with data scientists and prompt architects to build institutional AI systems. Globally, even law schools have realized the integration of law and technology; thereby, they have started to add dedicated tech clinics, automation courses, and legal tech modules.

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This article has been authored by Uddhav Gupta, LegalTech Fellow at the Indian LegalTech Network and a student at Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur.