Legal Engineer, Innovation and AI

Legal Engineer, Innovation & AI
London, UK

Are you ready to play a central role in reshaping how our lawyers use AI to deliver complex cross-border legal work, as part of our award-winning Innovation & AI function and Applied AI Lab?

Legal Engineers sit at the heart of our Innovation & AI agenda. They design and build AI-powered workflows that let our lawyers work faster, more consistently and at higher quality, translating complex legal processes into structured, AI-executable systems. This is a multidisciplinary role that pulls from legal practice, AI engineering and product thinking, and is central to how we embed AI into everyday legal work.

The role forms part of the Firm’s Applied AI Lab, a lean, high-performance unit built to experiment, prototype and ship AI-powered solutions that change how elite legal work gets done. Legal Engineers work closely with senior practitioners, Innovation & AI leadership and cross-functional teams to turn tacit legal knowledge into robust, data-driven workflows and tools.

We are keen to meet people who are excited by generative AI and large language models, who enjoy structuring messy processes into repeatable systems, and who are comfortable working shoulder-to-shoulder with lawyers, technologists and external partners in a fast-paced, experimental environment.

Key Responsibilities

AI Workflow Design and Execution

• Design and build AI-powered workflows that help our lawyers work faster, more consistently and at higher quality, decomposing complex legal processes into discrete, measurable tasks that AI can execute reliably.
• Re-engineer existing manual legal workflows for AI-first execution, determining where AI adds the most value, where human judgment remains essential and how to design effective handoffs between them.
• Translate the tacit knowledge of senior practitioners, including playbooks, negotiation positions, house style and drafting conventions, into structured artefacts such as prompts, schemas, decision trees and evaluation rubrics that production AI systems can execute against.

Standards, Quality and Evaluation

• Own prompt engineering standards, schema specifications and quality assurance protocols, building the infrastructure that ensures AI outputs are consistently excellent and aligned with what our lawyers need.
• Curate exemplar matters and precedents into reference packs that drive better AI outputs, and design evaluation frameworks that rigorously measure whether AI tools are performing to the required standard.
• Track what is working and what is not, using data to drive iteration, surface insights and make honest recommendations about where to double down and where to pivot.

Lab Strategy and Programme Support

• Contribute to the strategic direction and roadmap of the Applied AI Lab, helping to identify the highest-value experiments and making the case for what should be built next.
• Work across multiple internal teams to identify high-impact use cases and drive adoption of AI-powered solutions, acting as a bridge between legal practice, technology and product disciplines.
• Roll up your sleeves to support whatever the Lab needs, recognising that this is a small team doing big things and everyone contributes beyond their formal job description.

Stakeholder Engagement and Adoption

• Work shoulder-to-shoulder with lawyers, technologists and external partners to identify and shape AI use cases, ensuring solutions are grounded in real practice needs and integrated into existing workflows.
• Communicate clearly and confidently with diverse stakeholders, including partners, product engineers and clients, bringing structure to ambiguity and energy to complexity.
• Handle sensitive and confidential information with the rigor and discretion expected by our clients and the Firm.

Market Scanning and Continuous Improvement

• Stay close to developments in generative AI, large language models, agentic frameworks and prompt engineering techniques, and channel what you learn into experiments that keep the Firm ahead.
• Maintain an informed perspective on how legal teams in transactional, advisory and disputes practices work, and where AI fits or does not fit, bringing practical instinct not just theory.
• Travel domestically and internationally as needed to support global projects and collaboration across offices.

Required Skills and Experience

• At least three years of experience in legal practice, legal technology, management consulting or a technical role supporting legal or professional services workflows, with real ownership of complex work.
• Genuine excitement about generative AI and large language models, with a track record of experimenting with new tools and engaging in technical conversations about prompts, schemas and model behaviour.
• Strong ability to take messy, ambiguous processes and turn them into structured, repeatable and measurable systems, whether legal workflows, AI evaluation frameworks or experiment designs.
• Ability to translate fluently between lawyers and engineers, understanding both perspectives and enjoying being the bridge between them.
• Solid understanding of how legal teams work across transactional, advisory and disputes practices, and a pragmatic sense of where AI should be applied and where it should not.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with confidence interacting with partners, product engineers and clients.
• Proven ability to be proactive and self-directed in a fast-paced, experimental environment, comfortable with uncertainty and building something new inside a large organisation.
• Strong organisational skills, with the ability to juggle multiple workstreams without dropping quality, ensuring that process supports progress rather than substitutes for it.
• Genuine curiosity about where AI and law are headed, including agentic systems, reasoning models and multimodal capabilities, with a bias toward experimentation over analysis paralysis.
• Sound judgment and intellectual honesty, including the ability to assess when an AI output is good enough and when it is not, and the confidence to say so.

Preferred Skills and Experience

• Experience at a legal AI company, a law firm innovation team, an alternative legal services provider or a startup, with non-traditional career paths and diverse thinking valued.
• Comfort working with code or technical artefacts, such as scripting in Python, working with JSON or APIs, or automating tasks. You do not need to be a software engineer, but you are not afraid of a terminal.
• Experience working in legal tech, consulting or in roles that support complex professional services workflows, ideally in an international or cross-border context.

What We Offer

At White & Case, you can make a real difference, work on cutting-edge matters that make the headlines and help shape the world we live in. We live by our values to be pioneering, united and human and we believe that you will experience them from your first day. We will give you the support and training that will help you achieve your potential.

We believe that consistent high performance merits reward and support. Our compensation package reflects your calibre as a member of our market leading Innovation & AI team and our benefits are designed to support your changing needs and priorities across different life stages.

We offer high-quality, internationally oriented work on the most challenging matters and an opportunity to work as part of a truly global organisation.

Location

This role is based in our London office.

Our standard office hours are 09:30-18:00, with a current requirement for 4 days (Monday - Thursday) in the office per week. 

Firm Benefits

We offer a flexible range of benefits, services and programmes designed to help support your lifestyle requirements. Some of the benefits currently available include:

· Private medical insurance
· Pension plan with matched employer contribution up to 7.5%
· Yearly wellbeing fund
· Income protection
· Holiday purchase
· Life insurance
· Critical illness insurance
· Private GP services
· Travel insurance
· Dental coverage
· Cycle to work
· Holiday purchase (available during annual enrolment)

This role reports to

Equal Opportunities

White & Case is committed to creating a fair workplace. It is our Firm’s policy to recruit, employ, train, compensate, and promote without regard to race, religion, creed, national origin, age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, military or veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other category protected by applicable law.

If you require assistance and/or adjustment to participate in our application and/or interview process, please email us. We will be happy to work with you.

The Firm may modify and amend any job description at any time in its sole discretion. Nothing herein creates a contract of employment or otherwise modifies the at-will nature of employment.

The above is only a general description of the essential duties associated with this position and does not represent an exhaustive or comprehensive list of all duties.

Note to Recruitment Agencies

Our internal Recruitment team manages all aspects of lateral hiring. All agencies must have signed terms of business—specific to the relevant office—before submitting any candidates. CVs or applications sent directly to White & Case partners or employees will also not be considered formal introductions. If you have questions, please contact the relevant Recruitment team. We work with our preferred suppliers when engaging agencies.