Legal Engineering Attorney

Latham & Watkins LLP • Washington, DC

3d • $220,000 - $250,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

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, 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.

Requirements

• Demonstrated fluency authoring, evaluating, and iterating on prompts for large language models in production legal workflows
• 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
• 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
• 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

Nice To Haves

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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

Benefits

• Generous total compensation package with bonuses awarded in recognition of both individual and firm performance
• Healthcare, life and disability insurance
• A generous 401k plan
• At least 11 paid holidays per year
• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree