A decade of tech development, spearheaded by legal engineering, has opened up new routes to the summit of the legal profession. Joanna Goodman reports
Social media is flooded with 2016 nostalgia, so it is worth noting that career opportunities for lawyers have expanded massively in the last 10 years. Technology has been the catalyst. In 2016, firms were investing in digital transformation and innovation, and applying AI to routine legal tasks. The general direction was automating and deskilling processes with the aim of doing more with less.
In 2016, a Deloitte report forecast a reduction in legal sector jobs over the following two decades as a result of automation. What it did not predict was the pace and scale of advances in technology – and the diverse skills required to enable firms to build and buy new technology, and support their lawyers, employees and clients through a major transformation of the profession.
'There are legal engineer-type roles where lawyers can share their skillsets and work in a more dynamic and exciting environment'
Michael Kennedy, Addleshaw Goddard
Nowadays, many large and mid-sized firms have lawyers working in AI governance, legal tech and innovation, legal operations (legal ops) and legal engineering.
Michael Kennedy, head of innovation and legal technology R&D at Addleshaw Goddard, observes that associates thinking twice about the partnership route now have many more career options. ‘Traditionally, the choice was between private practice and in-house. Now there are legal engineer-type roles where lawyers can share their skillsets and work in a more dynamic and exciting environment. Some experienced lawyers are going into product advisory roles, some are going into legal engineer roles and some are going into sales/customer success roles,’ he says. While the skills that make a good lawyer – intelligence, hard work and the ability to present well – are generally transferable, law firms lose out on talent because law graduates who do not want to be lawyers and other external candidates do not always think of law firms as places to find alternative ‘non-lawyer’ roles.
Legal engineering
The year 2016 was also when Peter Lee and Drew Winlaw founded Wavelength Law. This was the first regulated legal engineering firm, which was acquired by Simmons & Simmons in 2019 and became Simmons Wavelength. Both founders were second-career lawyers. Lee qualified as a lawyer after a career in the army, while Winlaw had been a master production scheduler. He realised that the process-thinking he had developed in manufacturing could also apply to legal work.
Wavelength Law pioneered legal engineering as a new discipline that bridged the gap between law and technology to improve legal services delivery. While the concept of a legal engineer appeared in Richard Susskind’s 2008 book The End of Lawyers?, Wavelength was first to create the cross-disciplinary role of legal engineer. That role is now recognised globally.
Lee observes that the ‘Simmons acquisition brought legal engineering into a mainstream City firm and normalised multidisciplinary delivery inside that environment. It also created clearer seat and secondment options for trainees and associates who wanted to straddle law, data and design rather than follow a pure advisory track’.
Legal engineers are now employed at law firms, corporate legal departments, and legal tech companies, developing and implementing digital solutions that streamline legal processes and operations for lawyers and their clients. They are almost always former lawyers, as the role requires a good understanding of legal language, and the important elements of legal work, such as confidentiality, privilege, data protection and compliance.
‘They need to be able to communicate with lawyers as peers. Effectively, they are members of the same guild,’ says Winlaw. ‘In fact, some legal tech providers offer legal engineering certifications,’ he adds, referencing Thomson Reuters’ HighQ Platform Certified Legal Engineer accreditation.
From lawyer to legal entrepreneur
As the number of lawtech start-ups is growing exponentially, it is notable that a significant number of founders originated from Big Law. Richard Mabey was a lawyer at Freshfields before co-founding AI-powered contract management platform Juro, which featured in the 2026 Sunday Times 100 fastest-growing UK tech companies.
Mabey acknowledges that his early career shaped his start-up journey. It gave him the discipline and focus needed to thrive in a high-intensity work environment, as well as to identify where he could make a difference. ‘I had entrepreneurial ambitions from a young age but had never hit upon a great idea,’ he relates. ‘It was really my experiences of the inefficiencies in law that gave me the insight behind Juro.’
Gus Neate, who founded WilsonAI – the AI paralegal – in 2024, agrees. Neate started his career at Clifford Chance after switching from engineering to law. ‘I didn’t see the move from private practice as stepping away from law, but as exploring the frontier in how legal services are built and delivered,’ he says. ‘The years in practice taught me how to listen to clients, understand what really matters to them, and make good calls when the path forward isn’t clear – skills that turn out to be just as useful in faster-moving, more experimental settings.’
Michael Kennedy, head of innovation and legal technology R&D at Addleshaw Goddard, is more sceptical about the legal tech start-up space as an alternative career pathway for lawyers. ‘Often, lawyers who think they are solving a problem that they suffer with find that there is no market for their solution.’
There is an upside, too, Kennedy says: ‘I also think that some of the lawyers leaving the industry to do this type of work potentially would have left anyway, so these roles are actually keeping them in the legal world and contributing to things moving forward.’
Qualifying into innovation
There are several ways for lawyers to transition into legal engineering, including internal secondments and trainee seats in legal engineering or legal ops. ‘I have supervised a Simmons fourth seat Wavelength trainee on rotation for the last six years,’ says Lee. ‘It is usually a trainee’s final seat, and they then go back into an associate role with an understanding of legal engineering.’
Another route is framework-led upskilling, where lawyers build credibility by owning small automations or AI pilots and demonstrating their impact and business value.
Lee recalls a recently qualified lawyer at Simmons & Simmons whose last training seat was with Simmons Wavelength, making a conscious decision to qualify as a legal engineer rather than an associate solicitor. ‘People who do this tend to be more tech native. Some are citizen developers, who are into vibe coding, and find that they are more interested in improving legal processes than delivering legal advice,’ he says. Simmons Wavelength also runs an AI internship for students, which is always oversubscribed.
Addleshaw Goddard’s Innovation Graduate Scheme offers early-career lawyers a clear career path into legal tech and innovation. ‘A lot of students are very keen on the legal tech route,’ says Kennedy. ‘The two-year scheme is now in its fourth year. We have between eight and 12 people and it is intended to bring people through to legal technologist level in our teams.
‘It is made up of six seats of four months each and gives a broad range of experience across the [innovation] group. We started it because we found it very hard to hire good people at the level we wanted to in the early days. We thought the best way to do this was to grow them ourselves, and it gives us a robust pipeline of talent as well as benefiting the wider industry.’
Lawyers and innovators
At Bird & Bird, global head of legal tech and innovation Hélder Santos brings lawyers with different levels of seniority into his team to connect lawyers and technology, and support tech adoption.
Legal director Jennifer McBride, who has 15 years’ experience advising on technology contracts, is working with fee-earners and technologists on using GenAI to increase efficiency, as well as helping clients understand the firm’s use of GenAI. There are regular secondment opportunities and the group currently includes an apprentice solicitor, an associate secondee and a student doing an MBA in innovation.
'I didn’t want to let go of the legal tech work, but I also missed working with clients, so the firm found a way for me to do both'
Simi Khagram, Bird & Bird
Santos’ global team includes legal tech coordinator Johannes Jung, who works in the firm’s Frankfurt office and is qualified in both law and engineering.
In London, senior associate Simi Khagram, who has been with the firm for over five years, recently moved to a hybrid role, splitting time between commercial law and legal tech, following a two-month secondment to the legal tech and innovation group. ‘I didn’t want to let go of the legal tech work, but I also missed working with clients, so the firm found a way for me to do both,’ she says. ‘I do three days a week of commercial legal work, and two days I do legal tech work, looking at new service providers, testing tools, and building workflows and prompts.
‘The legal tech work definitely informs my legal work, as I’m doing a lot of contracts for clients that are onboarding AI technology. The insights I get from using these tools help me review things like service descriptions. There is client demand for lawyers that are tech-enabled in this way.’
Santos is planning to double the number of secondees in the legal tech and innovation group and create more roles for experienced lawyers who want to change career, including those working at GenAI platforms like Legora and Harvey, who would bring deep tech knowledge to the group.
A reputation for being ahead of the curve (it was the first major firm to deploy Legora) means that Bird & Bird attracts lawyers who are interested in developing and prototyping tech. Santos has created mechanisms to facilitate this.
He explains: ‘For example, in Denmark people can work two to three days a week with us, and in London we have a specific budget for prototyping new solutions.’ There is no clear career path and opportunities in legal tech and innovation tend to be on a case-by-case basis. However, as the firm sees more GCs attending legal tech sessions, it makes sense for the legal tech and innovation team to include more senior lawyers.
Leaders and future leaders
'We are working with data to give clients insights into their business, and we need lawyers because you’ve got to interpret what the data means in the context of each client’s business'
Stuart Whittle, Weightmans
Weightmans’ innovation heads both started out as lawyers and are partners in the firm. Stuart Whittle, chief technology and innovation officer, and Dr Catriona Wolfenden, director of product and innovation, are both lawyers turned innovators.
Whittle first got involved in the IT function in 2004, having completed an MSc in IT. At the time, more law firm IT leaders were former lawyers. ‘Now, there are rightly fewer lawyers leading IT in large firms, because the role requires experience of running large IT organisations, but on the innovation side, there is a real benefit to having been a lawyer, because you have to understand your subject matter,’ he says.
Wolfenden was a lawyer who had moved into knowledge management in the personal injury practice, where there were opportunities for technology and big data to transform processes. A lawyer heads the Weightmans data services team, which has lawyers working on data governance. Whittle explains: ‘We are working with data to give clients insights into their business, and we need lawyers because you’ve got to interpret what the data means in the context of each client’s business.’
Most of Wolfenden’s product innovation team have law degrees, but not all of them are practising lawyers. And like Simmons Wavelength, Weightmans recently had an apprentice qualify into the product innovation team.
'Technical issues, processes and client expectations change over time, so we need people in innovation who are at the coal face'
Dr Catriona Wolfenden, Weightmans
While apprentices and trainees are encouraged to take up seats in product and innovation, Wolfenden tends to take on two or three apprentices to work as a group, because the job involves a different mindset from traditional legal work.
As the trainees qualify into various practice groups, they continue to spread the innovation message. ‘The idea was to deliberately take people at the beginning of their careers who are comfortable with technology and give them an understanding of how the business functions, and what our capabilities are, so that they join the firm with an innovation mindset,’ says Whittle. ‘It is not altruistic. We have these people for six years and we invest heavily in their training because they are taking our business into the future.’
To that end, Weightmans offers career progression for legal engineers, from junior legal engineers, who are recruited for skill and aptitude, through to senior engineer, innovation manager or R&D (research and development) manager. Wolfenden anticipates introducing a similar career structure for legal technologists.
Wolfenden’s product and innovation team also includes commercial and sales roles. ‘These are roles that you don’t see within traditional law firms. I introduced them so that we can take the innovation process through from the initial idea to selling the products,’ she explains. ‘Our old managing partner used to call it a start-up within a law firm, because we can sell and license software to clients.’
Like Santos at Bird & Bird, Wolfenden emphasises the importance of hybrid roles where lawyers spend 60% of their day on product and innovation work, and 40% practising law. ‘While legal understanding remains relevant, technical issues, processes and client expectations change over time, so we need people in innovation who are at the coal face, handling files, running teams and managing client relationships. And they take the knowledge and experience they get in the product and innovation department back to their day job.’
While this article has focused on career opportunities for innovative lawyers to shape the future of the profession, the speed of AI adoption in law firms and among their corporate clients has led to other emerging career paths, notably in AI governance. ‘How can we ensure that AI is being used safely, responsibly and ethically, in line with the law, and more broadly?’ asks Lee, also highlighting the potential security and compliance risks associated with lawyers vibe coding tailored AI applications. ‘People using AI models to develop their own solutions need to be cognisant that they cannot use legal documents to test those solutions,’ he says.
Although legal tech entrepreneurs are having a moment, it is the intrapreneur lawyers who are really driving change in the profession. Juro CEO Richard Mabey acknowledges that ‘the opportunities today for entrepreneurial lawyers go far beyond starting companies. Legal operations and legal engineering are thriving and I think these roles are a great place to be right now. If you can get creative and build systems with AI, you can have an enormous impact.’
He reflects: ‘It takes vision, persistence and iteration to change entrenched behaviours. Often, the real entrepreneurs in legal are not people like me founding companies. They are the people in in-house legal teams and law firms who dare to challenge the status quo.’
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