Most lawyers enter law school with a fairly clear picture of the career paths ahead. For most, their career path can go in one of two directions: they can either join a law firm, where they’ll grind as an Associate until they make Partner one day, or become an In-House Attorney. Both have their pluses and minuses, and are equally well-established pathways. Today, there is a third option: the role of Legal Engineer. The rise of AI-powered legal tech has brought with it a role that previously didn’t exist, and there’s a lot of discussion about what it is and what it means for the legal profession.
Alexis Nicholas, one of Ivo’s Legal Engineers and In-House Attorneys, believes she has seen the future.
“One of the best parts about Legal Engineering at an early-stage company is that it’s such a flexible and changeable role,” she says. Alexis describes her role as having four focus areas:
- Customer Legal Engineer: she builds and rolls out playbooks that encode a company's contract positions and fallbacks; works through customer issues and challenges; assists with how customers can use AI in their legal and contract workflows; and carries out training and implementation sessions.
- Sales Legal Engineer: she demonstrates how Ivo’s product solves day-to-day contracting and legal problems; hosts webinars and AI awareness sessions; and helps educate on integrating AI into legal workflows.
- Product & Engineering Collaboration: she works closely with the engineers and product teams to build our product; builds test cases for new features; gives feedback on model outputs; and directly helps shape the roadmap.
- Legal Counsel Work: she still gets to be “a lawyer” in the traditional sense; reviewing and negotiating Ivo's own SaaS agreements, DPAs, NDAs, and various contractor/vendor agreements.
“The role will, of course, be different at different organizations, and the areas of responsibility will change based on what the business needs,” Alexis notes. “That’s what makes it so interesting and varied.”
Alexis points out that with these four different focus areas, she’s still very busy, but it’s a different, more directly rewarding form of busy than she experienced in traditional legal practice. “It’s the nature of startups,” she says. “Companies at this stage have a ‘do what it takes’ energy, which gives Legal Engineers much more scope to be creative and wear a lot of hats. Of course, there’s an infinite number of things to do, with the potential to keep doing more if you want to. But it’s a choice to be here and build, and I feel the excitement of being able to still be a lawyer and use my legal skills, but in a much more creative and novel way. It’s hugely fulfilling.”
To Alexis, one of the most important aspects of being a Legal Engineer is the energetic and resourceful culture at a startup and the immediate results she can deliver within it. “At a firm, being busy usually meant deep, narrow focus: all your hours spent becoming an expert within one practice area. But at Ivo, being busy means switching between different types of work in the same day: negotiating a contract, working on a product pitch, testing a new feature, joining a customer call, running a demo, prepping a webinar, initiating a new internal workflow; and that variety changes how the hours feel. It's less like grinding through billable hours on similar tasks, and more like constantly learning and being introduced to new directions. It’s more energizing because I can see the direct impact of what I'm doing, rather than working on a specific, siloed matter that your team has been helicoptered-in for.”
Legal Engineering is emblematic of a shift that’s happening in the legal profession: a slow but undeniable change in how the value of a lawyer’s work gets defined. Before AI, and in many legal roles, lawyers are, as Alexis puts it, “just a lawyer,” e.g., working on specific matters that lead to an outcome, whether that’s closing a deal, signing a transaction, or winning a case. The work lawyers do to achieve these outcomes is, albeit hugely important, a small part of a larger whole, generally in one area of specialization, and their relationship to the result for their client is remote at best. In-house attorneys get closer to that outcome, sitting inside the business and seeing decisions play out for their company in real time. But the work itself is still bound by traditional law: contracts, risk, compliance.
But as a Legal Engineer, Alexis gets that same privity to the business, but with a much wider remit, having exposure to types of work she wouldn’t typically get in a traditional legal role — public speaking, sales calls, demos, recruiting, marketing campaigns, product development meetings, and working with software engineers—and certainly not this early into a new position. The value Alexis brings is her judgment and legal knowledge, put to work across product, sales, and customer relationships, not just contracts. “It's a huge amount of learning, responsibility, and work that I'd never get to do as just a traditional lawyer,” Alexis notes. “I don’t see it as leaving the law at all, as not only do I still do legal work, but I’m also still embedded within the practice of law, just in a different way.”
All in all, a Legal Engineer’s role is a combination of legal and technical expertise, with a healthy dash of startup dynamism. And it isn’t going away. “We’re at a very interesting time in the world with AI,” Alexis says. “It feels like this century’s dot-com boom, and being a Legal Engineer is a huge opportunity to be at the heart of it. Legal AI is one of the fastest-growing corners of legal tech, so this hybrid legal-plus-product-plus-technical skill set will continue to be in demand.”
Do you have a legal background? Are you interested in trying out this third legal career path in tech? Check out our open roles!
