A Day in the Life of a Legal Engineer at Summize

Have you ever wondered what a typical day looks like for a Legal Engineer? Well wonder no more!

From AI prompt engineering to customer training sessions, every day brings a new opportunity to enhance contract processes for our customers. We sat down with just a few of our brilliant Legal Engineers to explore their day-to-day and to tell the story of what the role and career of a Legal Engineer involves.
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What does a Legal Engineer do?

A Legal Engineer specializes in setting up and improving legal tech tools. The role involves building and refining systems to help businesses automate their contract creation, utilize AI for tasks such as contract reviews, and configuring contract management systems to help all areas of their organization streamline their legal work.

If you’ve never heard of a Legal Engineer before, you’re not alone. It’s not a legal role that universities or colleges typically advertise, nor is it a job that many law graduates consider. But for those looking for a dynamic, problem-solving career that blends law and technology, a Legal Engineer role is well suited!

We sat down with just a few of Summize’s Legal Engineers to find out more about the role and what a typical day looks like. Read on to hear from some the team.
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A typical day for a Legal Engineer

Our day kicks off with our legal engineering stand-up. This is where we discuss completed tasks, upcoming deadlines, and any challenges that need addressing. The goal of the stand-up? To make sure everyone is aligned and every task remains on schedule.

The stand-up is also an opportunity to collaborate. If one of us encounters an issue with AI formatting or needs to refine a contract clause, this is the time to flag it, get insights from the team and distribute the workload in the most efficient way.
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Tackling key tasks

With priorities set, it’s time to get to work! Every day is different, but our tasks typically fall into the following categories:

• Clause manager sessions – Reviewing and organizing contract clauses, making sure they’re clear and set up to work with our AI functionality that extracts key details.
• Template creation – Adding smart tags and rules to Microsoft Word documents so that contracts adapt automatically based on different situations.
• AI prompt engineering – Designing AI instructions that find and extract specific contract details without unnecessary extra text.
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How we delegate these tasks is based on the team’s specific skills. Even though all our Legal Engineers are highly proficient in all tasks, we each have our own area of expertise - some of us are experts in AI prompt creation, while others focus on template structuring or handling multilingual contracts.
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Training, collaboration, and problem-solving

Alongside our key tasks we also help train our clients. Through Summize’s Hero Academy, we run 1-1 sessions tailored to different users, from legal teams to procurement managers to sales ops. These training sessions help clients understand the platform’s features, including contract tagging, clause management, and AI-powered contract analytics, so that each of our clients can self-serve and be as efficient as possible.

Throughout the day, collaboration among the team remains key. We always have a strong line of communication, not only with each other but also our Implementation Managers, Customer Success Managers and our Product Team too. We all support each other to find the best solution.
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Reviewing progress and preparing for the next day

As the day draws to a close, we update our planning boards and ensure all immediate priorities have been handled. And that’s it, that’s a day in the life of a Legal Engineer!
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The career of a Legal Engineer

After hearing about the typical day of a Legal Engineer, we wanted to highlight more about the role, how our Legal Engineers began their careers and what the future looks like. Hear from just three of our Legal Engineers – Kate Rowlson, Mary Pedroso and Reece Glennon – to find out more.
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Did you ever see yourself as a Legal engineer and what were the initial career prospects as a law student?

Kate, "Many people would assume that all law students would go on to become solicitors following their degree, but not many would have heard of Legal Engineering as a possible career path.”

Mary, "No - I think that’s the answer from all of us. During my undergraduate degree, I never considered legal tech, and even in my Master's degree in energy law, legal tech wasn’t on my radar. I took a module in AI, but I still wasn’t thinking about a career in tech or legal engineering - I didn’t even know what it was! It’s interesting how new roles keep emerging, and moving forward, there will be even more that people aren’t aware of yet."
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And Reece, what was your experience?

"I think colleges still push the traditional legal career paths - paralegal, solicitor, barrister. Legal departments can still be quite traditional and often hesitant to adopt tech, and that mindset extends to colleges and universities. Education tends to emphasize conventional routes, and legal tech careers aren’t really discussed or considered. At career fairs, its mostly traditional law firms, with little mention of legal tech. It certainly wasn’t brought up during my education."
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Kate, as someone who first took the traditional route - training as a paralegal - what are your thoughts?

"The only thing I’d add is that when you do a law degree - especially when we were at university - you’re conditioned from day one to believe the only paths are barrister or solicitor. Universities focus all their support on those routes. I was convinced I’d become a solicitor, but after working as a paralegal, I realized it wasn’t for me.

Law is very traditional and slow to change. In contrast, legal tech is innovative and progressive. Things are constantly evolving, and using AI daily is incredible - it’s an amazing tool, and we get to learn how to implement it in our work.

Compared to the traditional route, legal tech is the complete opposite. You’re always learning and working on things designed for the future, rather than being stuck in the past."
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Coming back to Reece, what are the opportunities for growth and what are the career prospects as a Legal Engineer?

"None of us thought we'd ever be able to work in the tech industry with a legal background. It's great to have that entry point into tech, and from there, opportunities can open up. In my previous role, I never spoke to customers or had that confidence, but now I interact with our customers daily.

You never know where that could lead, perhaps into a more customer-facing role or something entirely different. There’s no limit to the prospects. I never imagined working in tech with a legal background, but this opportunity has allowed me to learn so much, including AI prompt creation. Who knows? In the future, I might specialize in AI models, which would be really exciting."
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What are the most rewarding aspects of the role?

Reece, "Since we handle the configuration behind the scenes for customers and their use of the product, it’s rewarding when we tackle a challenging task and complete it. Seeing the customer realize how much time it will save them, how much easier their job will be, and how it reduces their stress. That’s definitely one of the most rewarding parts of the job."

Kate, "I think Reece is spot on there and following on from that, something that I find particularly rewarding is when a customer comes to us after a disappointing experience with a previous Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) vendor. It’s not their first time using a CLM tool, but they’ve struggled with an issue their previous provider couldn’t solve. When we find a better way to fix that problem and they tell us how relieved and happy they are, it’s incredibly satisfying.

Getting that kind of feedback is rewarding because it means we’re solving problems they may have been stuck with for a long time, sometimes without even realizing how big of an issue it was until they see the difference."
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And Mary, we’ll come to you to round off on this one.

"Building on Reece’s point about complex tasks, it’s really rewarding when you tackle something complicated, try multiple approaches, and finally crack the code and realizing, ‘Oh, that worked!’ It’s a great feeling, and you learn from it for the next time. You’re always learning, and no two days are the same, which keeps things exciting.”
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Starting a career in legal tech

Just as our Legal Engineers have stated, no two days are the same, and many of the team often didn’t consider a role in legal tech when first looking at their career options.

Legal tech offers a variety of roles for all types of skillsets and professions, especially if you’re interested in being part of an innovative environment and a role that combines problem-solving with technology.

If this sounds of interest to you, take a look at our Careers to learn more about working at Summize, our company values and the open roles currently available.