Should Your Next Legal Hire be a Legal Engineer?

What you'll learn

• What a legal engineer is, and the different ways people use the term

• Why one person rarely covers the whole role

• Where to get the skills wheel and hiring test (free PDF)

I was advising an in-house legal team about whether they needed a legal operations person, project manager, and/or legal engineer. They had a list of workflows they wanted to fix. But they don't have time to fix them. So the logic was easy: hire someone who can.

Before we could get started, I wanted to know how they defined “legal engineer”. I’ve outlined what I believe a legal engineer is, and how you can assess, and hire for the role in the AI Field Guide. Below are some excerpts to get you started.

What is a legal engineer?

A legal engineer is someone who understands legal and compliance work, redesigns how it flows, and uses technology to make it run better.

The term gets used three ways. An engineer who has worked with legal teams. A lawyer who knows how to use technology. Or a whole set of skills and ways of thinking - I am using it in this way - a newly defined term that is evolving in real-time.

What skills does a legal engineer need?

I am a visual thinker. So, picture a wheel with nine wedges.

Three are ways of thinking: computational, design and systems. Computational and systems sound like the same thing. They aren't, and a person who has only one of them fails in a very specific way.

Six are skills. Two of them are fluencies. The other four decide whether the thing gets built, delivered, and/or used.

For an in-house team, here's the catch. One person likely won't cover all of it.

Some of the wheel a legal ops hire already has. Some of it is rare. And one piece can't sit with the builder at all. If nobody owns it, the best workflow in the world doesn't get used.

How do you hire a legal engineer?

Don't hire on a title. Ask candidates to demo something they have built, then listen for specifics in how they answer.

I also wrote a seven-question test for candidates to ask during their demo and how they relate back to the skills and ways of thinking in the legal engineer wheel.

If you're a GC deciding on this hire, or you're advising a team that is, start there.

Sign up for emails below and I'll send you the PDF, plus the Superstar Paralegal skill. The full walkthrough, including what a strong answer sounds like for each question, is in the Field Guide.

Quick answers

Does a legal engineer have to be a lawyer?
No. Legal fluency matters, enough to tell a required control from a habit, but the role doesn't require a law degree or an engineering one.

How is a legal engineer different from legal operations?
A legal ops background is a strong starting point. The difference is carrying a workflow from diagnosis to building a functional solution, and keeping it running.

Should an in-house team hire a legal engineer full time?
Not always. If the team has little time to support a builder, one to three days a week can work.