Tag Archives: Knowledge management

An introduction to legal engineering

June 23, 2026 Manuel Lamiroy Leave a comment

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.

Sources:

Legal IT

Knowledge Management for Lawyers

September 19, 2021 Manuel Lamiroy 1 Comment

In today’s article, we will look at knowledge management for lawyers. The Wikipedia defines Knowledge Management (KM) as “the process of creating, sharing, using, and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieve organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.”

Knowledge is different from information. It consists of information that is verified and that is highly structured, where the pieces of information have their place in a framework, and where attention is paid to the relationship between those pieces of information. One could say that knowledge consists of an architecture of verified information.

The Wikipedia is a good example of a knowledge management solution (KMS). It contains articles with the relevant information, and that information is structured. The information is also verified (by peer review). Apart from the articles on topics, it contains key words or tags, internal and external references, taxonomies, a thesaurus that keeps track of synonyms and ambiguities and uses redirects and disambiguation. It refers to related topics. The topics themselves are grouped in categories, etc. The knowledge is well-structured and can easily be shared and updated.

Often a distinction is made between two different types (or dimensions) of knowledge: there is explicit knowledge and there is tacit (or implicit) knowledge. Explicit knowledge is what we usually think of when we talk about knowledge. It is the knowledge that an individual consciously holds in a form that can easily be communicated to others. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, represents internalised knowledge that an individual may not consciously be aware of. (Lawyers may, e.g., know which judge will be more favourable to a certain case, but may not be able to express exactly all the reasons why that is the case). Tacit knowledge often consists of patterns that have been subconsciously identified but have not yet been expressed. As such, one of the challenges of knowledge management is to make tacit knowledge explicit.

Why should law firms pay attention to knowledge management? Lawyers are knowledge experts. Their knowledge or expertise is their biggest asset. For law firms, this expertise can be their main selling point, and protecting it can be crucial for their survival. You do not want a situation where only one specific lawyer in a law firm knows how to deal with a specific problem. Ideally, the knowledge should be leveraged across the law firm, meaning that it should be available to everybody in the law firm. Making knowledge accessible to law firm members also increases productivity because you have access to solutions that have worked in the past. It also allows new lawyers to acquire the knowledge faster.

Other benefits are that it facilitates innovation and organizational learning. A decent knowledge management solution also makes it easier to manage and grow the intellectual capital and assets of the law firm. It typically also makes it easier to find new solutions for more complex problems as it is easier to draw on past expertise. Keeping track of best practices and past solutions that worked and those that did not work, also reduces the chance of professional liability issues.

Setting up a decent KMS involves different aspects and phases. These include:

knowledge mapping, where you create a map that details who in the law firm has expertise in what areas.
knowledge gathering or submission: once you know where to find the knowledge, it has to be entered into the KMS. For this, one can use push and/or pull strategies. In a push strategy, the people who have the knowledge submit that knowledge themselves. In a pull strategy, the people building and maintaining the KMS ask the experts and enter the information.
knowledge modelling / structuring. We mentioned above that knowledge is structured, that it is consists of an architecture of information. A KMS typically will use indexes, taxonomies, a thesaurus, categories, etc. This is an important aspect that should not be overlooked. It is largely what sets a KMS apart from a documentation system.

Knowledge management comes with its own set of challenges. We already mentioned tacit knowledge. Another challenge is getting people to share their knowledge. Often, people may be reluctant to share their expertise because they think it may make them more expendable. Or they believe it will benefit others more than them. Lawyers – and especially older lawyers – tend to see it as something where the efforts involved are not justified by the benefits. This can be addressed by a double-pronged approach. On the one hand, people should be educated about the benefits and encouraged to share knowledge. On the other hand, the processes of sharing knowledge can be made less tedious and can be integrated in existing practices: brainstorming sessions can be knowledge gathering sessions. Reviews of actions taken in cases, analysing which were more successful than others is another way. Law firms typically also employ interns and young lawyers, where older lawyers have an ethical duty to assist and supervise them. So, these interns and younger lawyers can add knowledge to the KMS each time they ask for advice.

SharePoint as a Knowledge Management system?

Many law firms these days are heavily invested in Microsoft-based solutions and use SharePoint to store their documents. So, could they use SharePoint as their Knowledge Management system? After all, many users are already familiar with it. It is secure and reliable, and all the information is available in a single system.

As it is, SharePoint only offers limited knowledge management functionality. It stores information, and you can perform queries on that information. But it cannot handle large data sets or more advanced queries. At best, one can add metadata, but these tags / key words must be added manually. There is no support for automation. It has limited functionality to filter the search results. Native SharePoint also does not offer any information architecture solutions: it does not have taxonomies or a thesaurus, etc. Its content is not indexed. As it is, SharePoint is more of a document management and documentation system than a knowledge management system.

In recent years, SharePoint has started offering limited wiki functionality, for which it uses wiki templates which must be configured separately. It is a step in the right direction. Realistically speaking, though, if you would like to use SharePoint as a knowledge management system, you will need a third-party add-on that provides all the additional required knowledge management functionality.