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The New Hot Job in Law Doesn’t Require a J.D.

Big law firms, legal tech vendors, and in-house legal departments at companies like Microsoft and Nvidia are all hiring legal engineers, a new position for lawyers with A.I. skills.

Ankita Puri practiced law for more than a decade before becoming a legal engineer at the technology company Legora.

By Sarah Kessler, NY Times

Oct. 31, 2026

In 2018, when Daniel Himmel first moved from practicing law to a job that today might be called legal engineering, it felt like a big career risk.

“I was nervous,” he said. “I thought, what is my career going to look like? Where do I go from here?”

He doesn’t feel that way anymore. As the head of legal engineering for North America at the legal tech company Legora, Himmel has hired about 70 people over the past year. They’re part of a global team of about 200 legal engineers the company has built since 2024. “We’re hiring hundreds, and competitors are hiring them, and our clients are hiring them,” he said. “It’s a true profession.”

And it’s one of the hottest jobs in the rapidly changing world of law. As artificial intelligence is becoming a bigger part of legal work, technology vendors like Legora, law firms, and in-house legal teams are all looking for people who understand both law and technology well enough to rewrite work flows and teach others how to use A.I. tools.

Often, they’re called “legal engineers.” But they are also sometimes described as “knowledge and innovation counsels,” “innovation attorneys,” or “legal applications engineers.”

Exactly what the job entails varies from company to company, as does the salary: The law firm Latham & Watkins is hiring “legal engineering attorneys” in at least five cities, with a salary range of $220,000 to $250,000. An “A.I. innovation adviser” at Kirkland & Ellis can make between $153,000 and $220,000 a year, according to the company’s job listing, while Gibson Dunn is advertising a salary for a “legal technology & AI Attorney” between $250,000 to $300,000.

In-house legal teams have posted similar jobs. The chip maker Nvidia is hiring a “legal operations engineer” for $124,00 to $195,500 a year, and Microsoft wants a “principal legal engineer” at a salary between $147,000 and $278,900, according to job postings.

A.I. companies that make tools for law firms, including OpenAI, Thomson Reuters, and Google, are also hiring legal engineers.

Parameters of the job, which has expanded in both prevalence and scope in recent years, are still being defined. “If you were to just put it into an equation, it’s law plus technology plus business process,” said Irene Liu, the executive director of the A.I. initiative at Stanford Law School, which in September began promoting a two-week in-residence executive program called Legal Engineering Academy.

The program isn’t accepting applications yet, but about 1,400 senior leaders have signed up to be notified when it is — about half are part of in-house legal teams, and about 20 percent are law firm partners and senior attorneys, according to the school.

In the first six months of this year, almost 50 lawyers left the 200 largest law firms in the United States to move to A.I. companies, including 15 who moved into jobs with legal engineering titles, according to Firm Prospects, a platform for legal recruiters. (The collapse of the venerable law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges this week was another sign of the change sweeping through the industry.)

At A.I. companies, legal engineers sometimes help build tech for lawyers, but more typically help clients integrate the product into work flows, run trials and onboard employees. The legal A.I. giant Harvey has grown its team of legal engineers who do this type of work from 180 people to 215 people within the last two weeks (it advertises a salary range of $220,000 to $320,000 a year). All of them are former practicing lawyers.

Legal engineers employed by law firms often do similar work-flow design and educational work, but with a wider focus.

Ropes & Gray hired the first of its five legal engineers, whom it calls practice innovation attorneys, at the end of last year. “In the old days, there was technology and there was law. And as long as my email worked, I didn’t have to talk to people who dealt with the technology,” said Howard Glazer, a longtime partner at the firm who became its head of practice A.I. about a year ago. “But now we actually provide our service and provide our product using the tools.”

“‘Legal engineer’ kind of makes it sound like someone made it up,” he added. “But it’s not. It’s a role which the current environment just screams for.”

The law firm Latham & Watkins now has more than 100 people dedicated to its A.I. initiatives, it confirmed to DealBook. Some of them work on building proprietary technology, while others focus on A.I.-enabled work flows, encouraging lawyers to adopt them and other areas.

Virtually no schools offer formal training programs for legal engineers, though some have added classes. Many legal engineers are former practicing lawyers who taught themselves A.I. skills or learned on the job. Some have backgrounds in legal operations, paralegal work or consulting. Fewer are former software engineers who then went to law school — “the unicorn,” one hiring manager said.

Ankita Puri became a senior legal engineer at Legora after working in commercial litigation at a law firm, and then as the chief legal officer of a financial institution. She said she appreciates the greater diversity of work and more frequent interaction with clients that has come with the transition.

“It’s not so much going from actively practicing law to not,” she said. “I think it’s more embracing this generational shift in the legal industry.”

Mary O’Carroll, the C.E.O. of LegalEng Consulting Group, which works with in-house legal teams, has been an executive in legal operations for more than 20 years, including for 13 years at Google. She, too, sees the rise of legal engineers as part of a shift in the industry.

“You don’t necessarily need a giant pyramid of lawyers anymore,” she said. “People who have this kind of skill set don’t have to have a J.D., and they don’t have to be software engineers, but there’s business process re-engineering, or this M.B.A. type skill, that I think is really necessary.”

The position fits into what some see as a category of job becoming more essential in the A.I. era: Those that use specific expertise to design A.I. systems. LinkedIn job postings for “marketing engineer,” for example, increased 29 percent from 2024 to 2025 after relatively little growth in prior years, according to the company.

“What’s notable is that these titles are showing up well beyond traditional engineering. We are seeing them across functions like operations, product, business development, and even design,” Kory Kantenga, the head of economics at LinkedIn, said in a statement.

The lingering question is whether this type of job stays in hot demand. “It’s absolutely growing,” said Glazer of Ropes & Gray. “The question in my mind is going to be, you know, how long will it last? Is it a transition position?”

O’Carroll said she didn’t see the pace of change easing up, and that legal engineers will be needed to maintain systems and adapt to shifting technology and work.

Byong Kim, who became chief data & A.I. officer at the law firm Seyfarth Shaw last year after working in technology there for 13 years, said he thinks every law firm and every law department is looking to understand how to use A.I. more effectively right now.

“Long-term wise, I think we’re still trying to play out how this is all going to work out as technology gets better,” he said. “It’s still too early to say what the actual answer is, but I will say it’s a very interesting time for me. I don’t think I’ve ever been as busy.”