Legal Engineering Attorney

Latham & Watkins; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

401k plan

11 holidays per year and 23 days PTO

Well-being programs

Professional development

Employee discounts

Affinity groups

Job summary

Latham & Watkins is seeking a Legal Engineering Attorney to join the Technology & Information Services team. This role designs AI-native systems that translate elite legal expertise into reliable, repeatable, machine-executable outputs, including prompts, schemas, evaluation suites, playbooks, and end-to-end workflows.

The position involves decomposing complex transactional and litigation workflows into discrete, measurable tasks with defined inputs, outputs, and quality criteria, suitable for

Qualifications

• J.D. from an accredited law school.
• Bachelor’s degree, in law, computer science, information systems, or a related field, preferably.
• Minimum of three (3) years of substantive legal practice experience at a law firm or in-house legal department, with ownership of complex transactional or advisory matters.
• Minimum of two (2) years of full-time experience as a Legal Engineer, Legal Knowledge Engineer, Legal Workflow Engineer, Innovation Attorney, or comparable role focused on operationalizing legal expertise into AI-driven systems and workflows.
• Experience at a legal AI company, law firm innovation team, alternative legal services provider, or software company building tools for lawyers.
• Hands-on experience with AI platforms designing or evaluating law-related workflows or agents.

Responsibilities

• Re-engineer existing manual workflows for AI-first execution, determining work allocation, review gates, and handling of exceptions.
• Translate practice group playbooks, checklists, negotiation positions, and house style into structured artifacts for AI systems.
• Codify tacit knowledge of senior practitioners into machine-readable form.
• Author schema specifications and JSON Schemas for deal types, clause libraries, document attributes, and matter metadata.
• Curate exemplar matters and precedents for few-shot prompting and evaluation.
• Protect and maintain highly sensitive information within firm data.

Skills

Prompting for LLMs

Structured data formats

Evaluation rubrics

Quality measurement

Legal AI familiarity

Education

J.D. from an accredited law school

Bachelor’s degree in law, computer science, information systems, or related field

Tools

JSON

JSON Schema

YAML

Markdown

Job description

About Latham & Watkins

Latham & Watkins is one of the world’s leading global law firms advising the businesses and institutions that drive the global economy. We are the market leaders in major financial and business centers around the world. Our investment in people, commitment to innovation, and focus on the future empower you to build an incredible career and thrive as an exceptional professional in a supportive culture. If you aspire to be the best, and work with the best, this is where you belong.

About The Role

The Legal Engineering Attorney is an integral part of Latham’s Technology & Information Services team. This role will be responsible for designing the AI‑native systems that translate elite legal expertise into reliable, repeatable, machine‑executable outputs, including prompts, schemas, evaluation suites, playbooks, and end‑to‑end workflows, while decomposing complex transactional and litigation workflows into discrete, measurable tasks with defined inputs, outputs, decision points, and quality criteria suitable for AI execution. This role will be located in either our New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles offices. Please note that this role may be eligible for a flexible working schedule that allows for a hybrid and in‑office presence.

Responsibilities & Qualifications

Other key responsibilities include:

• Re‑engineering existing manual workflows for AI‑first execution, determining the appropriate allocation of work, placement of review gates, and handling of exceptions
• Translating practice group playbooks, checklists, negotiation positions, and house style into structured artifacts, including prompts, schemas, decision trees, and rule sets that production AI systems can execute against
• Codifying the tacit knowledge of senior practitioners, including fallback positions, market terms, negotiation flexibility, and drafting conventions, in machine‑readable form
• Authoring schema specifications and JSON Schemas for deal types, clause libraries, document attributes, and matter metadata, ensuring they are extensible, validated, and aligned with firm practice
• Curating exemplar matters, precedents, and work product into reference packs that drive few‑shot prompting, fine‑tuning, and evaluation
• Protecting and maintaining any highly sensitive, confidential, privileged, financial, and/or proprietary information that Latham & Watkins retains

We’d love to hear from you if you:

• Possess demonstrated fluency authoring, evaluating, and iterating on prompts for large language models in production legal workflows
• Demonstrate working proficiency reading and writing structured data formats, including JSON, JSON Schema, YAML, and Markdown, with the ability to understand schemas, enumerations, and conditional logic independently
• Exhibit practical experience designing evaluation rubrics and conducting structured quality measurement of AI outputs, including the use of golden datasets, head‑to‑head comparisons, and error taxonomies

And have:

• A J.D. from an accredited law school
• A bachelor’s degree, in law, computer science, information systems, or a related field, preferably
• A minimum of three (3) years of substantive legal practice experience at a law firm or in‑house legal department, with ownership of complex transactional or advisory matters
• A minimum of two (2) years of full‑time experience as a Legal Engineer, Legal Knowledge Engineer, Legal Workflow Engineer, Innovation Attorney, or comparable role focused on operationalizing legal expertise into AI‑driven systems and workflows
• Experience at a legal AI company, law firm innovation team, alternative legal services provider, or software company building tools for lawyers, preferably
• Hands‑on experience with AI platforms designing or evaluating law‑related workflows or agents, preferably

Benefits & Additional Information

Successful candidates will not only be provided with an outstanding career opportunity and welcoming environment, but will also be provided with a generous total compensation package with bonuses awarded in recognition of both individual and firm performance. Eligible employees can participate in Latham’s comprehensive benefit program which includes:

• Healthcare, life and disability insurance
• A generous 401k plan
• At least 11 paid holidays per year, and a PTO program that accrues 23 days during the first year of employment and grows with tenure
• Well‑being programs (e.g. mental health services, mindfulness and resiliency, medical resources, well‑being events, and more)
• Professional development programs
• Employee discounts
• Affinity groups, networks, and coalitions for lawyers and staff

Latham & Watkins is an equal opportunity employer. The Firm prohibits discrimination against any employee or applicant for employment on the basis of race (including, but not limited to, hair texture and protective hairstyles), color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status (including veterans of the Vietnam era), gender expression, marital status, or any other characteristic or condition protected by applicable statute.

Latham & Watkins LLP will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the City of Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance (FCIHO).

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability. An employer that violates this law may be subject to fines and/or a private right of action for $500 in statutory damages “for each such violation,” among other things.

Pay Range

USD $220,000.00 - USD $250,000.00 /Yr.