The Opportunity
About the Team
Strategic Applications is a revenue‑generating legal technology team within Digital Legal Delivery. The team designs, builds, and delivers technology‑enabled legal solutions directly on client matters. It operates commercially with the majority of its work charged to client matters and directly tied to live legal processes.
The team's primary focus is the corporate and transactions side of the business. Typical work includes M&A transaction management, due diligence workflow automation, contract lifecycle management, and technology‑enabled advisory on complex corporate mandates. The team also supports a wider range of legal disciplines, including compliance, volume claims, and regulatory work.
Because the team's output is chargeable and integral to live legal processes, the standard of delivery—both technical and commercial—is the highest. Errors, delays, or poorly scoped solutions directly impact client outcomes and fee recovery.
Role Overview
The Solutions Architect is a client‑facing role responsible for designing and delivering the technical architecture that powers the Strategic Applications team's client solutions. This role sits at the intersection of legal process, technology, and commercial delivery.
A defining expectation is that solution design begins with the client’s need, not the firm’s technology stack. The architect must interrogate the client’s legal and commercial objectives and work backwards to a proportionate, robust and deliverable solution within the constraints of a live legal matter.
Key Responsibilities
Solution Architecture & Design
- Develop high‑level and detailed architectures aligned to enterprise standards, proportionate to the client mandate and deliverable within a chargeable engagement.
- Define end‑to‑end design across document management, workflow, AI, knowledge and data systems, starting from legal workflow.
- Design scalable integration patterns using APIs, webhooks, workflow orchestration, and agent/automation frameworks.
- Produce clear architecture documentation: process maps, sequence diagrams, data flow diagrams and technical specifications.
- Map legal workflows end‑to‑end before committing to a solution, ensuring the design reflects actual practice.
Systems Integration & Technical Delivery
- Design and build API integrations between core legal technology platforms and connected systems, including DMS, HR, finance and knowledge management systems.
- Integrate core legal technology platforms including:
- SharePoint / SharePoint Online
- Microsoft Power Platform
- HighQ or alternatives (Ansarada, Intralinks, etc.)
- Legatics
- Kira
- Contract Express
- DocuSign
- ShareDo (Clio Operate)
- iManage / NetDocuments (or equivalent DMS)
- Design integration solutions involving Generative AI‑enabled legal assistants and LLM‑based platforms, integrating tools such as Harvey, Legora, Emma Legal, and foundation models including Claude, with consideration of prompt engineering, retrieval‑augmented generation and LLM orchestration.
- Ensure all integration architectures meet information security, data classification, access control and governance requirements.
Stakeholder Engagement & Commercial Contribution
- Partner with lawyers, innovation teams, PMOs and business services to translate legal and business needs into robust technical solutions; act as primary technical voice in client‑facing and internal scoping discussions.
- Advise on commercial implications, including cost, time and risk of proposed solutions, and scope solutions transparently for fixed‑fee or retainer engagements.
- Participate in vendor assessments, RFPs and procurement activity, evaluating new tools against client need and enterprise standards.
- Contribute to business case proposals for infrastructure gaps, aligning with IT stakeholders and firm‑wide initiatives.
- Conduct and manage proofs of concept and contribute to AI governance and risk assessments for emerging technologies.
Risk & Governance
- Take ownership of the risk profile of every solution, identifying, documenting and escalating risks before deployment.
- Design solutions incorporating data security, client confidentiality and regulatory compliance (including GDPR and SRA) from the outset.
- Maintain awareness of commercial and legal consequences of architectural failure in a chargeable, client‑facing environment.
Qualifications, Skills and Experience
Technical Skills
- Strong knowledge of REST APIs, Graph API, JSON, XML, OAuth, SSO and event‑driven architecture, and resilient integration patterns.
- Experience integrating LLM‑based and agentic platforms, including vendor‑provided MCPs and model APIs such as Anthropic/Claude, with context exchange, tool invocation and access control.
- Understanding of secure and scalable patterns for consuming external AI services, including rate limiting, error handling, versioning, auditability and prompt/context/data boundary management in legal environments.
- Experience with workflow automation and orchestration tools (Logic Apps, Clio Operate, Power Automate, Nintex).
- Proficiency in data modelling and schema design, including JSON schema and relational models.
- Experience with process mapping tools and notation (Visio, Miro, Lucidchart, BPMN).
- Familiarity with Microsoft 365 cloud ecosystem and Azure integrations.
- Working knowledge of document management systems; iManage strongly preferred.
- Familiarity with collaboration and virtual data room platforms (HighQ, Datasite, Intralinks, Ansarada).
- Exposure to Generative AI integration, including LLM‑based platforms, prompt engineering, RAG architecture and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, Azure AI Studio).
- Understanding of security architecture principles: data classification, access control design and legal‑sector governance frameworks.
- Ability to interpret technical documentation and connect outputs to legal process outcomes.
Legal & Commercial Skills
- Proven experience working with or supporting a law firm, ALSP or legal operations team – preferably with corporate or transaction exposure.
- End‑to‑end understanding of at least one legal workflow type, e.g.:
- M&A due diligence (data room set‑up to completion)
- Contract lifecycle management (instruction to execution and obligation tracking)
- Transaction management workflows in a corporate context
- Awareness of matter economics: ability to scope solutions commercially soundly and understand the impact on fee recovery.
- Excellent stakeholder engagement and translation of complex needs into architectural designs.
Personal Attributes
- Client‑need‑first design approach, interrogating client objectives before technical solutions.
- Strong communicator, comfortable presenting to partners and developers.
- Analytical, critical thinker with a disciplined, structured problem‑solving approach.
- Proactive, intellectually curious, keen on evaluating emerging technologies while exercising solid architectural judgment.
- Manage multiple projects and priorities in fast‑paced environments, including live transactions.
- Risk‑conscious, understanding the commercial and legal consequences of errors in a chargeable environment.
- Collaborative by default, recognising the value of working closely with the Senior Analyst and wider team.
Measures of Success
- Solution quality: Architectures are well‑documented, peer‑reviewed, technically sound and meet security and governance standards.
- Integration reliability: Deployments achieve high availability, low error rates and strong adoption by legal teams.
- Commercial contribution: Solutions generate or protect fee income, are scoped appropriately for commercial context and avoid write‑offs or overruns.
- Risk record: No material security incidents, data breaches or client confidentiality failures.
- Delivery speed: Projects delivered within agreed timeframes, respecting time constraints of live transaction environments.
- Stakeholder confidence: Internal teams, partners and clients express confidence, reflected in repeat instructions and positive feedback.
- Collaboration effectiveness: The Senior Analyst and team are equipped with clear, actionable direction enabling efficient execution; the two roles operate coherently.
Team
Digital Legal Delivery
Working Pattern
Full time
Location
Belfast
Contract type
Permanent Contract
Diversity & Inclusion
We are committed to attracting people from all backgrounds and creating a respectful and inclusive culture where everyone thrives. This is essential to our success and a key part of our Values—Human, Bold, and Outstanding.
