The traditional picture of a lawyer is somebody who gives advice. In the past this was from behind a desk or long letter and, in more recent times, an email attachment (on the reminder to re-send the email with said attachment).
A client or colleague from another department brings them a problem. The lawyer gathers the facts, applies the law and returns with an answer: careful, nuanced and grounded in what the business is actually trying to achieve. Wonderful!
That work remains at the heart of the role. But now I think modern lawyers also have an obligation to shape how that advice reaches people.
Good advice can shape a conversation. A well-designed system can help it reach an entire organisation.
Lawyers are the subject matter experts (I mean they paid for the privelege). They know what good advice looks like—and, just as importantly, what superficially plausible advice (cough cough - looking at you AI) gets wrong. They understand that legal judgement rarely lives in a single rule. It is shaped by context, appetite, precedent, timing, proportionality and commercial reality.
That expertise is the raw material for a legal advice system.
The lawyer helps make the judgement visible. What facts change the answer? Which position is acceptable? Where can the business proceed without intervention? What must be escalated? Which exceptions matter, and why?
Once those things can be articulated, they can begin to be designed into something repeatable and relevant at the point in time the request was made.
Lawyers
Define what good advice looks like, including the nuance, risk and commercial judgement that make it useful.
Legal Engineers
Translate that expertise into bespoke workflows, decision logic, data, interfaces and controls.
Legal Operations
Operationalises the system: embedding it into real work, driving adoption and improving it through feedback.
Legal Engineers may build those systems inside a legal team, close to the lawyers and business they serve. Or they may work for a vendor, turning common legal problems into products that many legal teams can configure and use (after a procurement cycle and negotiating whether we are on seat-pricing or all you can eat with sensible caps).
The difficult part sits in preserving the quality of the legal judgement while changing how that judgement reaches people. Code and technology matter; although, alas, they are only two ingredients in that work.
Then Legal Operations makes the system real - “click here, fill out this, press this button”. It connects the workflow to the way work enters the function, clarifies ownership, supports users, measures what happens and creates the feedback loop that allows the service to improve.
For me, this expands the lawyer’s role. Their expertise can be used more deliberately and can travel further.
Some matters will always require direct, bespoke advice. That is good. It’s the highest value of human interaction, especially when coupled with empathy - which unironically is probably all that’s left after AGI arrives (if it’s not already here). Repeated patterns give lawyers another opportunity: their judgement can shape the playbook, the questions, the thresholds and the safe paths through a problem, saving everyone from reconstructing the same answer each time.
The modern lawyer is still an adviser and they are also one of the necessary architects of how advice gets delivered.