Lawyers must bring many skills to the table—knowledge of the law, keen time management, powers of persuasion, and the gift of the gab. But their tech stack is often Microsoft Word.

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Our software-driven world, with all its complexities, is revolutionizing the legal profession and giving rise to what are known as “legal engineers.”

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Roland Vogl is the executive director of CodeX, otherwise known as the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. He first became interested in building systems to solve legal problems when he was a teaching fellow at Stanford, and he went on to cofound CodeX in 2008. The center conducts research in fields like computational law and the automation and mechanization of legal analysis. One of its core projects has to do with computable contracts.

“There’s always going to be this spectrum from bespoke to systematized and standardizable,” says Vogl. “That’s where the legal engineer comes in, helping to figure out which aspect of that can be automated. How far along can we take a client in an automated workflow, and at what point does it need to be escalated to a human decision-maker?”

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“That’s opening a market that lawyers traditionally haven’t pursued, because it’s small amounts and it’s a consumer-facing thing,” says Vogl. “Every case that they lose costs them money, so they use advanced machine learning techniques and data science techniques to assess whether a specific case is a good case.”

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“The law firm side sees the writing on the wall and that technology is about to really transform the way legal services are delivered,” says Vogl.

CodeX also helps train lawyers for the legal roles of the future. “Eighty percent or so need to be more sophisticated users of technology, and we need to catch them early on in their education, maybe in first-year classes,” says Vogl. “Then there’s the 20 percent that are innovators themselves. They can build new systems, and we need to have courses for them, too, to help them develop their ideas.”

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Despite some hyperbole about robolawyers, Vogl doesn’t see human lawyers disappearing any time soon. “As long as there are humans, there will be human transactions, and human disputes, and we need humans to resolve them,” he says. “But the machines can help us take the tedium out, to handle the low-level things, so we can focus on the legal judgment that’s really what lawyers and legal professionals are best at.”

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