Slaughter and May is investing in the of next generation of legal delivery, and we are offering the opportunity to join the firm’s growing Innovation team, based in the London office. Our lawyers advise on a broad spectrum of matters, leading on some of the most significant public and private transactions in the market.
Our lawyers are among the brightest legal minds in the world, and technical excellence is central to our success. Generative and agentic AI are becoming part of how the firm practises law, and the firm is building the people skills, processes and capability to put them to work at the highest standard. We are looking for experienced, qualified lawyers who want to work at the frontier of legal AI.
We are recruiting for an experienced Legal Engineer to join the Commercial Department working closely with the fee earners. Embedded in key practice areas, our Legal Engineers will design and build the AI-enabled workflows that lawyers across the firm use, lead the firm's work on AI quality and benchmarking, and lead our engagement programmes across the firm.
Legal Engineers will need to establish credibility with partners, associates, knowledge lawyers and applied AI experts by having excellent legal knowledge and understanding, but also by being fluent in how AI tools operate, both in theory and in practice.
Key Responsibilities
The key responsibilities of this role are set out below and there may be others which are not listed. You may be required on occasion to work outside our normal working hours of 9:30am to 5:30pm.
- Engage with partners, associates, trainees and knowledge lawyers across the relevant practice area to understand how matters are run, identify processes where AI could add real value, and translate that into structured prompts, workflows and playbooks that the firm's AI platforms can execute reliably.
- Go beyond AI-Enabled workflows for today’s work and help us redesign work for AI-First.
- Establish credibility as a hands-on expert on the legal problems the firm is solving with AI, for example drafting and reviewing contractual provisions, analysing filings and briefs or knowledge retrieval, and matter management.
- Design, build and ship workflows on the firm's AI platforms. The role here will be to prototype quickly, test rigorously, harden for reliability, and hand over to knowledge lawyers for ongoing ownership in their practice area. Lead the firm's work on AI quality and benchmarking
- Engage and enable the knowledge lawyer and applied AI expert communities. Run regular sessions to keep them current on product updates and on what the Innovation team is shipping. Spot common solution patterns across practice areas. Deduplicate effort where two practices are building variants of the same thing.
- Partner with knowledge lawyers on practice translation. The knowledge lawyer is the practice-area owner of encoded knowledge. The Legal Engineer is the builder who helps them get it shipped, and the network node that links their work to what is happening elsewhere in the firm.
- Advise on the right technology from our tech stack for the task. Gather feedback and act as the voice of the practice into the firm's product management function. Synthesise input from partners, associates, knowledge lawyers and applied AI experts, and channel it into roadmap decisions and into the firm's relationships with its AI vendors via the product managers
- Work with the wider Innovation team to explore new tools and capabilities.
- Contribute to firm-wide adoption efforts, working with teams across Business Services, including Knowledge and Learning, Technology and Comms.
Candidate Profile
- Qualified lawyer (England and Wales, or equivalent jurisdiction).
- Typically four to seven years’ post-qualification experience at a top-tier firm. More junior candidates with the right profile are encouraged to apply.
- Substantive experience in Transactions and Advisory or in Disputes at a top-tier firm, with the depth to discuss a contract, filing or matter step on the merits with partners in that practice.
- Credibility with partners and associates. The ability to hold a conversation about a contract, a filing or a deal step on the merits, and earn the right to ask how it could be done differently.
- Curiosity about technology & AI and a willingness to get hands on with the tools. No coding background required, but comfort with prompts, evaluations, structured outputs and the realities of how these systems behave is essential. Experience with prompt design, evaluation frameworks, structured outputs (JSON, schemas), or hands‑on tool building (including agentic coding tools such as Claude Code) is a strong plus.
- Direct, recent experience using leading legal AI platforms (for example Harvey, Legora, Claude, M365 Copilot) on real legal tasks, with a view on where they work, where they fail, and what to do about it.
- A track record of having shipped something legal-tech adjacent: a workflow, playbook, evaluation set, internal tool, prompt library, or knowledge product. Designing on paper is not enough.
- Comfort working with product managers, engineers and vendors. Examples include a secondment to a legal-tech vendor or in-house Innovation team, contribution to a tool roll‑out at a previous firm, or product time outside the law.
- Strong structuring instinct. The ability to take a messy, tacit way of working and turn it into something that can be authored, tested and shipped.
- Quality-minded. The discipline to test before shipping, to design rigorous evaluations, and to know when something is not yet good enough.
- Clear, concise communicator. Comfortable in front of partners and equally comfortable working through detail with technologists, product managers, knowledge lawyers and applied AI experts. Translating across disciplines is second nature.
- Bias for action. The role rewards people who would rather ship a v1 and learn than write a paper about what they might build.
- Network instinct. The instinct to spot when something built in one corner of the firm could solve a problem in another, and the energy to make the connection.
We welcome applications irrespective of race, colour, ethnic or national origin, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, religion, belief or marital status.
