In a recent blog, Mary O'Carroll put a name to an in-house team function many of us have been doing and advocating for years: legal engineering.

For those of us working closely with legal teams, this isn't a new concept. It's a long-standing reality. Technology implementation has never been a one-time effort. It has always required ongoing ownership, iteration, and a level of expertise that goes beyond simply selecting and deploying tools.

Value is not unlocked at go-live. It is built over time through ongoing ownership, iteration, and design.

What has changed is not the nature of the work, but the recognition of it. The market is finally catching up and acknowledging that this is a distinct capability — one that deserves a name and, more importantly, dedicated ownership.

What is legal engineering?

At its core, legal engineering is about designing how legal work gets done in a modern environment. It is the discipline of process reengineering: building and continuously refining the systems, workflows, and data structures that sit behind the legal function. It operates at the intersection of legal expertise, technology, process design, and data — and is defined by the ability to make them work together.

This is not the first time legal has gone through a transformation like this.

A decade ago, most legal departments did not have a Legal Operations function. As complexity increased and budgets came under pressure, organizations realized they needed a more structured approach to managing legal work. Legal Ops emerged to bring discipline, visibility, and efficiency to in-house teams.

Today, we are at a similar inflection point, but the challenge has evolved.

Legal Operations helped optimize how work was managed. What we are seeing now is the need to design how that work is executed in a technology-native environment. Legal Ops optimized the system. Legal engineering builds it.

Why implementations keep failing

Despite years of investment in legal technology, many organizations find themselves facing the same frustrations. Platforms are implemented, teams are trained, and expectations are high. But over time, adoption declines, workflows revert to manual processes, and the return on investment becomes increasingly difficult to demonstrate.

Having worked across Big Law, legal tech startups, and consulting, I have seen this pattern repeat itself more times than I can count. The issue is rarely the technology itself. More often, it is the absence of a capability to rethink how teams operate so that technology can deliver on its promise — and the lack of ownership to maintain, evolve, and continuously improve these systems as the organization changes.

In many cases, initiatives don't fail at implementation. They fail the moment implementation is complete.

AI makes this more urgent, not less

There is a growing expectation that AI will transform legal work. And in many ways, it already is. But AI does not operate in isolation. Its effectiveness depends entirely on the quality of the systems around it. It requires structured inputs, clearly defined workflows, and reliable, accessible data.

Without that foundation, AI does not create value. It amplifies inefficiencies.

This is where legal engineering becomes not just relevant, but essential. It is the function that ensures these systems are designed in a way that allows AI to be operationalized, governed, and continuously improved. In that sense, AI does not reduce the need for this capability. It makes it unavoidable.

The role still doesn't formally exist in many organizations

Despite this, in many organizations, this role still does not formally exist. The work is being done, but it is often fragmented — distributed across legal operations, IT, external vendors, or individuals who take it on in addition to their primary responsibilities. What is missing is clear ownership and recognition that this is a discipline in its own right.

From personal experience, while a JD is not a requirement, it can be a meaningful advantage. This role demands a different skill set, but having a legal background — combined with an understanding of how legal services are actually delivered, a process reengineering mindset, and tools like process mapping, fishbone diagrams, and swimlanes — makes it possible to bridge strategy and execution in a way that is difficult to replicate otherwise.

Where legal departments are heading

Legal departments are moving away from being purely service providers toward becoming system-driven operating units. Workflows are increasingly orchestrated across platforms rather than managed through email. Decisions are informed by data rather than static documentation. AI is beginning to take on execution, while human expertise is applied where judgment and context matter most.

In that environment, legal engineering is no longer a supporting function. It becomes part of the core infrastructure of the legal organization.

For some companies, building this capability internally will be the right path. For others, partnering with external experts will be more effective. But in either case, success will depend on the same fundamentals: clear ownership, a defined strategy, and the ability to continuously execute, optimize, and scale.

This is the work we have been focused on for years at Integreon, long before the term "legal engineering" entered the mainstream conversation. Our approach has always centered on helping organizations translate technology investments into sustained, measurable impact — not only implementing solutions, but ensuring they continue to evolve through data-driven insights, cross-functional collaboration, and ongoing workflow optimization, so that legal teams can focus on their core responsibilities.

For years, many of us have been doing this work without a formal title. Now it has one.

As Mary pointed out, every legal department needs a legal engineer. The question is not whether this role will exist, but how quickly organizations will recognize it as a core capability and invest in it accordingly.

Because technology implementation is not the transformation. It is simply the moment the real work begins.