Elliot Cobb had a technology background and had worked in data and analytics before joining Deere in 2020 and helping launch its legal operations team. By the time she left the company in March, she heard the industry was using a new term for the work she had been doing helping lawyers to understand their processes, map them out and decide where it made sense to plug in technology, she said.
"I said, I'm going to come here and put myself out as that," Cobb told Law360 Pulse at the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium's annual meeting in May. She gestured to the two titles on her tag: project manager/legal engineer.
The legal engineering title, more commonly seen among technology vendors and at some law firms, is making its way into conversations on some corporate legal teams as they push to build teams that unlock the promise of artificial intelligence tools to more efficiently handle legal work.
While the role tends to refer to developing processes and workflows using legal tech rather than actually writing code, exactly what the job might encompass on those internal teams — and whether "legal engineer" is the right title — is up for discussion.
"I think it's a term of art," said Tony Muto, an in-house attorney who also works on AI adoption for the building tools company Kyocera Senco.
The number of in-house teams that have their own legal engineers — or are actually calling them by that name — is unclear, and several legal department leaders told Law360 Pulse they were unfamiliar with the role.
Elly Meenan, the founder of The Legal Ops Job Board, said she's seeing more roles advertised for legal engineers on in-house teams, but the bigger shift taking place is in the descriptions for legal ops positions. Job candidates are being asked to take on more technical responsibilities and lead AI initiatives, requirements for positions that would have been purely process and project management just two years ago, she said.
"From what I see, the legal engineer is already in-house," she said. "We just haven't seen the title, salary shift yet."
Meenan, a legal engineer for the in-house legal AI platform Wordsmith, described the role as "crying out for a definition." Hers: someone who "can map a process and then build the solution themselves. Both things."
"You map it, you build it, you own it," she said.
Matt Wheatley, chief commercial officer of legal talent company Priori Legal Inc., said he'd recently seen an uptick — though not "a deluge, by any means" — in requests from in-house departments looking for "legal engineers." In one, a large pharmaceutical company sought an employee for their legal operations team to develop workflow, manage application programming interfaces and implement artificial intelligence.
The descriptions, while different, all seemed to seek "people with hybrid expertise to help automate things," Wheatley said.
The fluidity of the role was positioned as a selling point in a job ad for a legal engineer at legal AI platform Legora, which offered to pay up to $325,000 for someone with a legal background for a role that's "part legal ops, part product specialist, part solutions architect, and part client whisperer."
"If you enjoy roles that stay static," the ad says, "this probably isn't it."
Longtime legal operations professional Mary O'Carroll, who now heads consulting company LegalEng — for "legal engineering" — sought to define the role's significance on in-house teams in a recent online post that drew over 100 comments.
Her definition: the person who can reengineer how legal work gets done while using technology as a primary lever. She saw people doing the job at Google, where she headed legal operations for more than a decade starting in 2008, though they weren't called legal engineers. They were "process reengineering specialists who embedded with our lawyers, studied how work actually got done, and redesigned it," she wrote on Substack in a post that she shared to LinkedIn.
While hiring a legal engineer internally would be "a no-brainer investment," O'Carroll told Law360 Pulse, she suspected many companies lacked the budget luxury.
"With these roles that are new and not well understood, it's even more challenging to get that headcount and get it approved," she said.
Prashant Dubey, who co-authored "GenO: The Rise of Legal Operations" with Mike Haven, Meta's head of global operations, said he hadn't observed many companies hiring their own legal engineers when the book was published in mid-2024.
The definition of a legal engineer has changed since then, he said. "The titular designation was there, but what they were doing was something different," he said, noting that many of them were employed by law firms and sometimes working under title terms such as legal innovation.
Companies used to hire administrators to oversee the use of a particular tool or software, he said. But now companies use a bevy of products, many with AI abilities, that need to be connected and communicate between each other using AI agents.
"The role itself has changed," Dubey said, "which probably means the number of legal engineers that corporations will hire will probably go up."
Whether the application of "legal engineer" to in-house spaces is relevant, or necessarily a title worth borrowing, isn't a point of agreement in the industry. Some, like Meenan, think the title perfectly captures the use of technical skills to solve business problems.
Attorney Adina Newman — who worked for the AI platform Harvey, in-house for Con Edison and now runs a legal AI consulting firm that advises both in-house teams and law firms — told Law360 Pulse she thought it would add to confusion to use the term on legal operations teams.
The term originated with tech vendors, and most of the legal engineers are still found at places like Harvey or its competitor Legora, who are hiring attorneys from top firms as legal engineers to build workflows or be part of the sales team, she said. The attorneys she knows who have the title don't even like it, because it's confusing to people and makes it sound like they might not be attorneys at all, she said.
"It's weird because they're not engineers," she said.
--Editing by Nicole Bleier.
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