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There’s a new job title floating around in legal circles: legal engineer.

It’s not quite legal ops. Not quite IT. And not quite lawyering either. But it's something that sits between all three and it’s starting to define how modern in-house and law firm teams get work done.

As AI agents enter legal workflows, the bottleneck hovers around its implementation. That’s where legal engineers come in.

They’re the ones wiring systems together, setting up tools, and increasingly, building internal solutions that scale. For legal departments and firms serious about transformation, these hires aren’t optional.

This might just be the next major shift in how legal teams are structured and how work gets done, from reactive legal support to proactive systems thinking.

In this week’s Attorney Intelligence, we’ll explore:

1. What a legal engineer actually does and why this isn’t just a rebrand of legal ops

2. How law firms are investing in internal engineering talent to build new legal infrastructure

3. The growing split between internal and external use cases for legal engineering

4. Why the future of legal work may depend on your ability to build (or work with) systems

Let’s get it into it.

What is a legal engineer, exactly?

The term is fuzzy, and intentionally so. Legal engineers are part technologist, part legal ops, and part process designer.

In a traditional legal ops role, your job might focus on process and tools to make a legal department or law firm more efficient. A legal engineer takes this one step further - looking at the same problems and asking: “How can we automate this, or rebuild the workflow entirely with AI?”

They don’t do the work - they design the systems that do.

Traditionally, legal ops has leaned toward in-house, not in firms. But legal engineering is being done across both.

Companies like Wordsmith are leaning into this rebrand hard, pitching legal engineers as the new AI ops team for law departments. The strategy isn’t to replace lawyers but rather support them by abstracting away the grunt work with smarter tools.

This has real implications, not just for how teams operate today, but for how they evolve in the next five years.

Internal systems, external leverage

Internally, legal engineers are tasked with wiring everything up: connecting tools to the data lake, building internal chatbots, setting up pipelines from document management to reporting dashboards.

Although this isn’t cutting-edge AI research, it’s what makes tools like PointOne actually work inside a company.

Take billing data, for instance. Many firms are experimenting with LLMs that analyze invoice flows to catch guideline violations. Others are using internal data to create BI dashboards or search tools. Some are even building LLM wrappers to interact with siloed repositories.

Legal engineers make this possible, not by inventing new tech, but by gluing together what already exists.

Firms are catching on

Cleary Gottlieb made headlines earlier this year when they acquired Springbok, an engineering team brought in to build internal tools. This was essentially an acquihire with twelve developers now embedded in the firm to help productize legal expertise.

Other firms are experimenting, too. Baker McKenzie has been building tools for clients, not just for their lawyers.

This could be anything from automating jurisdictional research across 200 countries to spinning up AI workflows tailored to specific regulatory problems.

DLA Piper is investing in this direction as well.

It’s early, but the pattern is clear: alongside buying tools, top firms are hiring builders.

Building for clients

Then there’s the client-facing side. This is where the role of a legal engineer turns outward.

Baker McKenzie again offers a glimpse into what’s coming: client asks come in, engineers spin up tools to meet them, often involving AI workflows that couldn’t be done manually.

Think compliance audits across dozens of jurisdictions or automated analysis of complex global policies.

This is consulting, but delivered through systems and code, not slides.

It’s early days, but there’s a version of the future where firms compete not just on brainpower, but on the quality of the tools they can spin up for their clients.

Where this all goes next

Wordsmith’s CEO calls this “the birth of an entirely new role in legal.” That might be a stretch, but only slightly.

If AI agents become a core part of legal workflows, someone has to manage them. That’s what legal engineers are here for.

And like most revolutions in legal, this one starts in-house, spreads to forward-thinking firms, and eventually becomes a skillset expected of every practitioner.

Whether or not the title sticks, the function is here to stay. And if you’re building legal tech or buying it, the difference between success and shelfware might just come down to who’s doing the wiring.

Legal Bytes

Here are the latest updates in legal tech and AI:

Thomson Reuters is launching AI agents via CoCounsel to support tax, audit, and accounting professionals, marking a significant push beyond legal research and into adjacent professional services.

LexisNexis disclosed a data breach that compromised the personal information of over 364,000 individuals, raising concerns about data security in legal tech providers and their downstream vendors.

Midpage raised a $4M seed round to develop AI-powered tools for lawyers, further validating early-stage investor interest in workflow-specific legal AI platforms.