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Legal IT

An introduction to legal engineering

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AI, smart technologies, and cloud computing are everywhere around us. The reach of Big Tech is unprecedented. We are now living in a software-driven world. And this new world needs a new type of lawyer and changes the way law firms do business. Legal engineering plays a crucial role in this process. This is the first of two articles that deal with lawyers and legal engineering. This article focuses on the questions, “What is legal engineering?”, “What do legal engineers do?”, “Are legal engineers the same as legal knowledge engineers?”, and “Why does legal engineering matter?”. In the next article, we will look at whether lawyers must now become legal engineers.

What is legal engineering?

We have in the past discussed legal knowledge management and legal design. Legal engineering has to do with both. It is where law, technology, and design thinking meet. It is a fairly new discipline that applies engineering principles like systematic analysis, structured problem-solving, and process optimisation, to legal challenges. Legal engineers treat law as a system that can be designed, built, and improved.

The term started getting used in the early 2010s, when law firms and corporate legal teams faced a growing amount of data, new legal technologies, and increasing demands to work more efficiently. So, the concept borrowed ideas from related areas like legal informatics and computational law. But it also added a more practical, hands-on approach focused on building solutions.

By now, legal engineering has become a serious academic and professional field. Prominent law schools, like Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, for example, have developed programmes that blend legal study with design thinking, data science, and software development.

What do legal engineers do?

Legal engineers act as a bridge between practicing lawyers (who understand the legal context but may lack tech skills) and software developers (who understand the code but not the legal practice). They build tools for lawyers that take the repetitive, low value work out of the day-to-day legal practice

So, on the one hand, they need enough legal literacy to understand risk, compliance requirements, and the nuance of contractual language. On the other hand, they also need enough technical fluency to translate those requirements into functional systems. Many come from a law background and learn to code; others come from computer science or engineering and acquire legal knowledge on the job.

Some examples: a legal engineer may spend their day drafting smart contracts that automatically execute terms on a blockchain. Or they may build document automation systems that generate standard agreements in seconds. They may be designing workflows that route legal tasks to the right resource – human or machine – at the right time. They also work on contract analytics platforms that use natural language processing to extract and compare key clauses across thousands of documents.

Legal engineer must have skills from several disciplines. Agile project management helps teams improve legal products through quick, repeated rounds of testing and adjustment. Process mapping helps identify where delays or problems occur in how legal work moves through an organization. Data analytics helps reveal patterns in things like court case outcomes, contract terms, or regulatory filings. Artificial intelligence – especially machine learning and large language models – is playing an increasingly important role: it supports tasks that range from reviewing documents during due diligence to predicting how a legal case might turn out.

Are legal engineers the same as legal knowledge engineers?

Now, in the past, when it came to legal AI, often the term of legal knowledge engineers was used. So, the obvious question is whether legal knowledge engineers and legal engineers are the same thing?

The answer is that to a large extent, they are. But there are some differences. The term Legal knowledge engineer is older and often a more precise term, while legal engineer is a broader, newer umbrella term that’s gained popularity in legal tech marketing.

What do they have in common? Both roles involve translating legal rules, processes, and reasoning into structured logic that can be encoded in software. (We mentioned the examples of document automation systems, expert systems, decision trees, contract analysis tools, etc. above). For either role, one typically needs a hybrid skill set combining legal training (or deep legal domain knowledge) with the technical skills mentioned before. Sometimes actual programming skills are required.

How are they different? The term Legal knowledge engineer tends to emphasize the knowledge management and knowledge representation side. It deals with capturing expert reasoning, building decision trees, codifying “if X then Y” legal logic, often within knowledge management (KM) teams at large law firms.

The term Legal engineer is sometimes used more broadly to cover a wider range of legal innovation work. This includes process improvement, legal design, automation tooling, sometimes project management or even legal ops functions.

Why does legal engineering matter?

So, why does legal engineering suddenly matter? Legal services have long been criticised for being inaccessible, slow, and lacking transparency. Legal engineering tries to offer a response to these criticisms. By automating repeatable legal tasks, it frees lawyers to focus on the actual legal reasoning and judgment. And by lowering the cost of routine legal services, it has the potential to expand access to justice. That is why it that has attracted significant attention from governments, NGOs, and legal aid organisations.

For law firms and other legal service providers, the efficiency gains are substantial. We have given the example on several occasions by now: a company processing thousands of contracts per year can dramatically reduce cycle times and legal spend through well-engineered systems, while simultaneously improving consistency and reducing risk.

In the next article, we discuss whether lawyers now must become legal engineers.

 

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