Legal operations
Making complex legal work visible, measurable and easier to deliver.
Legal Engineer
Better law
by design.
I’m Jay Smith. I translate legal intent into processes, products and systems that people can actually use.
Working across law + tech
The proposition
The gap between policy and practice is an engineering problem.
Legal teams don’t need more theatre. They need clearer requirements, thoughtful process design and technology that fits how work really happens.
Concept model / 001 From words to work
What I do
Work across the whole system.
From the first ambiguous question to the thing running in production, I connect legal judgement, operational reality and technical delivery.
Product & systems
Turning real user needs into useful tools, integrations and services.
Applied AI
Finding responsible, practical uses for AI in drafting, advice and operations.
About / Career profile
Lawyerly judgement.
Engineering instinct.
I started in law close to the work: preparing documents, moving matters forward and learning how good advice is actually delivered.
That operational perspective became a career spanning legal engineering, legal operations leadership, software development and company building. The thread through all of it is translation—between policy and practice, specialists and users, ambition and execution.
Today I’m a Legal Operations Senior Managing Counsel. Titles describe the seat; Legal Engineer still describes how I think and work.
Career arc Roles held
Legal Operations Senior Managing Counsel
LeadershipHead of Legal Operations
TransformationSenior Legal Operations Manager
OperationsLegal Engineer
EngineeringFounder, SenseCheck Technologies
ProductAcross leading law firms, global organisations and a venture of my own. Different titles, one continuing thread: turning legal judgement into systems people can use.
FT Innovative Lawyers Europe / 2026
One win. Two highly commended.
Remote’s Legal team won the New Skills award for moving from advising to building. Compliance Watchtower and our self-service Legal Help Desk were both Highly Commended.
Continued learning
Useful theory,
put to work.
Qualifications that sharpen how I frame problems, gather requirements and make responsible choices about emerging technology.
Selected work / SenseCheck
Solving trust at a difficult moment.
I founded a product to help estate-planning lawyers verify beneficiaries and bank details with less friction—combining legal domain knowledge, product thinking and delivery.
Read the case study →
Current thinking
Notes from the field.
Legal Ontologies: A Map for Agents
Agents know a great deal about the world in general. A useful legal agent also needs a current map of the business it serves.
Read note →Safe Places to Play
Curiosity becomes useful innovation when people have somewhere secure, capable and real to explore it.
Read note →The Modern Lawyer Builds Systems
Legal expertise can shape systems that deliver thoughtful, commercially grounded advice at scale.
Read note →Bring Receipts, Not Shopping Lists
A stakeholder-management principle for replacing optimistic promises with useful evidence.
Read note →In public
Speaking & publishing.
Conversations and essays where I test ideas, share what I’ve learned and help make legal engineering more legible.