The Legal Engineer (and my dad)

The Legal Engineer (and my dad)

My dad would have been 68 today. He was a process engineer for a chemical company and, although I was never that sure of what he did, I know it involved processes, catalysts and speeding things up. I also know that he would have been exceptionally good at it.

When I joined the legal profession, I always assumed that my career was very different to my dad’s and that engineering and law had little in common. I therefore couldn’t help but smile recently when I saw the word “engineer” used a couple of times in a legal context.

The first was in Richard Susskind’s book, Tomorrow’s Lawyers, which I was re-reading as part of a discussion group in our team. In it he sets out several future legal roles, one of which is the “Legal Knowledge Engineer”. For those who want to know more about this and the changing profession, I'd recommend reading this book. 

The second was at a recent Janders Dean Legal Knowledge & Innovation Conference in London. Stuart Barr, Chief Strategy Officer at HighQ, described how a solicitor at one of his clients was building creative solutions using their iSheets technology and was, in his view, a legal engineer.

I started thinking about these uses of the word engineer and new roles that are starting to open up. In our team and in this context, there are some which involve analysing, mapping and improving our processes and representing them in a visual way. There are others which involve making the best use of various technologies and designing and building solutions within platforms such as HighQ to apply across our business.

We’ve been struggling to come up with appropriate titles for these roles which are important and exciting. When I describe them though, I use words such as “designing”, “building”, “improving” and "speeding things up".  We're not going to call the roles legal engineers, but part of me thinks of them that way. And I like that.  

More broadly, I see lots of people who are looking to enter the profession, most of whom are aspiring to obtain traditional roles. I believe though that huge opportunities will be created for those who go down an alternative path. It's not for everyone but, for those that do, as well as legal experience they will gain valuable skills which will be highly sought after. 

Mike

Graham van Terheyden

Retired Interim CIO, IT Director & Consultant

8y

My Dad, too, was an engineer. He was a civil engineer, and, most certainly, made things. I trained as a mathematician and I, too, always assumed that my career was very different to my dad’s. However, after some process engineering and then, when I became a Chartered Engineer and a fellow of the BCS, I realized that engineering is a very broad church. I support the point made by Kenneth: what really matters is the percentage of engineers in the workforce. Indeed, I have come to believe that the world would be a better place if it were run more by engineers rather than politicians, bankers, and, yes, lawyers. Whilst I am at it, we should have more female engineers too.

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The very gifted and fabulous Michelle :)

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Ernst Schnell

Product Champion - Surface Equipment

8y

To muddle things up a bit, I am a trained Chemical Engineer, but as a development measure, I got myself and LLM on the side to avoid drifting to much into the line management lane. I want to share a discussion I have been watching since uni related to what an engineer is. Our faculty felt, and my employers still do, that an engineer is somebody who makes things (incl. ephemeral things like code or chemical reactions) work, but lacks focus on the specifications of the desired product. They have been trying to instill design thinking in my environment, which aims at achieving a desired spec by thinking backwards, rather than engineering from scratch. In that sense a Legal Process Designer might be a better vision to work towards.

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Interesting post Mike. I have always thought of an engineer as someone who finds and applies solutions to problems in the physical world, a person who finds a way to provide clear water to millions for example or a way to bridge a river or a way to travel to the moon, that kind of thing. But it must be said that these days the term Engineer, like the term Designer have become easy titles to transplant into any area of human endeavour, there is no harm I it I suppose and no more real meaning than the phrase dance doctor.

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