What is Legal Engineering?
In the modern legal arena, embracing advanced legal tech solutions has become essential for corporate legal teams and law firms. These technologies not only streamline operations and reduce costs but also allow legal professionals to focus on high-value tasks, ensuring consistent outcomes and increased job satisfaction.
At the heart of this transformation are Legal Engineers, experts who specialize in identifying, developing, and implementing these solutions, thus driving innovation and efficiency within the legal practice.
To accomplish these goals, Legal Engineers are required to handle a wide range of responsibilities that cannot be managed “on the side” by other legal counsels or lawyers.
Legal Engineers typically:
- analyze current processes to identify opportunities for optimization,
- gather requirements for potential solutions and assist GCs or Partners in selecting the right solution (“Make or Buy”),
- build legal tech tools or configure and customize standard software,
- manage project roll-outs and lead the accompanying change management efforts, and
- maintain existing solutions, conduct training sessions, and serve as the go-to person for tech-any related questions.
Therefore, if legal teams or law firms want to take advantage of the exciting advancements in the legal tech field, including Contract Lifecycle Management, Process Automation, and especially Generative AI, they rely heavily on well-trained and experienced Legal Engineers.
What skills are needed for Legal Engineering
When describing a job's skill set, it's more effective to prioritize skills rather than listing them rigidly. If you could imagine the perfect legal engineer, they would probably be experienced full stack developers and project managers, fully certified lawyers, and exceptional communicators, possessing a multitude of other soft skills. Clearly, finding such a person would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
The required skills can be broken down into five categories of core skills:
- Technical Skills
- Process Management
- Agile Project Management
- Legal Knowledge
- Interpersonal Skills
Technical Skills
Technical skills are at the heart of legal engineering. Knowledge and practical experience on the relevant technologies, such as Generative AI, data analysis, APIs, document automation, smart contracts etc. are key to creating, selecting and implementing legal tech solutions.
However, this doesn’t mean legal engineers need to be fully trained software developers. While at least some coding experience and an understanding of basic programming structures is definitely required, legal engineers nowadays can leverage no-code platforms like Microsoft PowerPlatform, BRYTER, Betty Blocks or LawLift to develop complex and powerful applications much faster, more secure and often much better than they could with regular code. The more coding skills legal engineers have, the more tools such as low-code platforms or python scripts can be used to achieve the desired outcomes. But these advanced skills should not come to the expense of the four other core categories.
Process Management
Most legal tech solutions are embedded in legal or business processes (e.g. contract management). In order to not blindly automate current processes insufficiently, but to leverage the full potential of legal tech and create the most effective solutions, a basic knowledge of process management is a key skill for legal engineers. Especially in corporate environments, where legal process are mostly integrated into larger company processes, it is key that legal engineers are able to acknowledge the full end-to-end process beyond the silo of the legal department. Analyzing, visualizing and optimizing processes and deriving the technical requirements from them is the basis for any successful legal tech implementation.
Agile Project Management
Agile project management has, in many instances, devolved into a buzzword that has lost much of its meaning. At the same time, proper agile frameworks like Scrum are too complex to be practically implemented in typical legal tech projects. Therefore, legal engineers must apply a selection of effective and pragmatic project management methods and tools tailored to the size and nature of these projects. Agile practices, such as working in short cycles, building early prototypes, and continuously collecting and integrating stakeholder feedback, are crucial for the success of any legal tech project.
Legal Knowledge
In the beginning, the pioneers of legal engineering were primarily forward-thinking lawyers who independently acquired technical knowledge and programming skills. However, the need for a wider and deeper skill set, along with the rising demand for legal engineers, has led to a more diverse range of professionals entering the field.
One of the key strengths of legal engineers is certainly their domain knowledge, which includes a solid understanding of legal processes and the work of lawyers and legal counsels, as well as a shared professional language. Yet, successfully implementing legal tech solutions usually doesn't require deep expertise in specific legal fields. Instead, legal engineers can leverage the expertise and experience of senior legal experts who serve as core stakeholders in these projects.
Similarly to the technical skills discussed earlier, it can be argued that of course legal engineers benefit from greater legal knowledge. However, this should not be at the expense of the other four skill categories.
Interpersonal Skills
Interpersonal skills are notoriously difficult to define, measure, and even more challenging to develop if a person doesn’t already possess them. Legal tech projects require legal engineers to communicate with managers, partners, legal professionals, clients, and various other stakeholders throughout the business. The ability to listen, understand, empathize, explain, guide, and convince others is crucial. Legal tech projects are as much about cultural change as they are about solving technical problems. Without recognizing the necessity of carefully executed change management, even the best-planned and executed project can fail due to resistance from unprepared and overwhelmed users and stakeholders.
What is “Legal Engineering on Demand”?
As explained above, legal engineers are crucial for executing legal tech projects, yet they are difficult to find due to the specialized skill set required. Moreover, smaller legal teams or law firms may not need a full-time legal engineer, and often lack the budget for one. Instead, they typically require legal engineers on a project-by-project basis. Even larger teams or firms with existing legal engineers frequently encounter capacity issues when handling extensive projects like implementing a Contract Lifecycle Management System. In such scenarios, engaging external legal engineers can be an effective solution.
Legal Engineering on Demand provides the flexibility to scale legal engineering resources according to immediate needs, without requiring a long-term commitment. This approach also allows for selecting legal engineers with the precise skills necessary for specific projects.
Additionally, working with external professionals can introduce fresh perspectives on your challenges. While they must initially learn about your internal processes and working culture, their experience with similar projects and solutions can offer valuable insights and help you avoid common pitfalls.
How can I take advantage of “Legal Engineering on Demand”?
NodeMasters provides "Legal Engineering on Demand" services for both in-house legal teams and law firms across a wide range of technologies. Serving customers across Europe and the US, NodeMasters' experts combine domain knowledge and technical expertise to support with process design, project management and implementation. From ad-hoc support to bridge gaps in resource and knowledge for internal Legal Engineers, through to full service Legal Tech project delivery, NodeMasters offers a range of services to provide tailored support.
