Legal Knowledge Engineer

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Legal Knowledge Engineer

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Position Summary

We are looking for a Legal Knowledge Engineer to help ensure we drive value from the systems that hold, classify and surface our knowledge. You will use AI to enhance the firm's knowledge, and onboard teams to the firm's knowledge systems. In practice this makes the role part builder, part governor and part translator: building the classification and metadata that make content usable, governing the quality of that work as it scales across teams, and translating what fee earners need into changes the firm's knowledge and AI systems can actually deliver.

This role requires a dual skillset. It calls for someone comfortable working hands-on with taxonomies, metadata and AI tooling, but equally comfortable working with lawyers to understand how they work and where knowledge is created, lost or duplicated. The firm is consolidating its knowledge estate and connecting that knowledge to the tools lawyers use day to day - this role is central to making that happen.

The White and Case knowledge strategy rests on four pillars: clean data, a single system, governed AI assets, and a culture of sharing. Our Legal Knowledge Engineer is the operational role that carries much of that work into individual practices. You will support the implementation of the firm's strategic knowledge system, partnering with PSLs/Knowledge Lawyers and supporting roles to drive value from our knowledge. A primary focus will be on automated classification at scale, the classification playbook resourcing model, and onboarding teams to the new systems.

Duties and Responsibilities

Classification, Metadata and Enrichment (Pillar: Clean Up Data)

• Build classification capabilities for teams that need significant support, taking a lead role in their design and working directly with lawyers to validate outputs before they are relied upon
• Provide a governance layer over classification work carried out by PSLs and other domain experts, so that skills are built consistently, produce good results, and are measured properly rather than assumed to work.
• Design and run classification at scale so the firm can handle the large majority of tagging and profiling centrally, with domain experts validating the output rather than manually re-profiling document by document.
• Use AI to enhance the firm's knowledge: reducing the burden of long classification forms, producing draft profiles for PSL review, and enriching content with the metadata that makes it findable and useful.
• Define practice-specific metadata with each team, including their legal topics, document types and the data points that matter to how they practise.
• Bring rigour to how classification quality is assessed, including the use of gold sets, calibration and review feedback loops, so confidence in a skill's output is earned from evidence rather than asserted.

Requirements and Practice Engagement (Pillar: Single System)

• Work with fee earners and practice groups to understand their knowledge requirements across content, features and data, ensuring those needs inform the firm’s knowledge strategy and system development.
• Act as a point of contact for those who need help leveraging knowledge, supporting them and building up their skills so the firm's classification and curation capacity grows rather than staying concentrated in one place.
• Interface with Practice Solutions teams to identify where knowledge can be captured or consumed within the tools and workflows those teams own.

AI Assets and Downstream Systems (Pillar: Govern AI Assets)

• Govern the firm's AI assets, including prompts, workflows and skills, so they are portable and vendor-agnostic, able to be shared and moved between systems rather than locked into a single platform.
• Work with downstream systems that consume knowledge, to operationalise the connection of the firm's knowledge into the tools where lawyers do their work.
• Help ground the output of AI tools in the firm's approved knowledge, so that what they produce reflects firm precedent rather than generic suggestions.

Onboarding, Adoption and Culture (Pillar: Build Culture)

• Onboard teams onto the firm's knowledge systems, helping them get their content, metadata and system configuration into good shape.
• Work with the Change Management team so that the communications and messaging around onboarding are clear and land with the people they are aimed at.
• Support efforts to instil a knowledge-sharing culture, addressing not just whether people can share knowledge but whether they actually do. Part of this role is helping make knowledge contribution worthwhile and its value visible.
• Deploy strategies to capture relevant usage and content metrics to drive the firm's knowledge strategy forward.
• Work with the firm's search tooling at a tactical and feature level to make sure the firm is getting the most out of what it has bought.
• Look at how lawyers work in iManage and find the points where knowledge sharing and data capture can happen naturally, as a by-product of normal work rather than a separate task.

Experimentation and Staying Ahead

• Run experiments on how the firm classifies know-how and final work at scale, and turn what is learned into concrete proposals for what to try next.
• Maintain a working view of where knowledge tooling is heading, including knowledge graphs, retrieval-based approaches and the emerging patterns for structuring knowledge so it can be used by machines as well as people, and judge what is worth bringing into the firm's approach.

Qualifications

• You bring a background in knowledge or legal experience, with real technical fluency; or a technical or data background, with the ability to navigate complex stakeholders.
• Comfortable working with structured knowledge, including taxonomies, metadata schemes and document classification, and an understanding of why getting these right matters.
• Practical fluency with current AI tooling, including prompts, skills-style reusable instructions and classification approaches, and enough understanding of how these behave to judge when output can be trusted.
• The ability to work directly and credibly with lawyers, drawing out how a team practises and what it needs without requiring them to speak in systems terms.
• Strong stakeholder engagement across a range of audiences, from individual PSLs to practice group leadership and technology teams.
• An instinct for measurement and evidence, rather than a willingness to assume that a system works because it was built.
• Curiosity about where the field is going and the discipline to turn that curiosity into things the firm can try.
• Legal practice experience is an advantage but not a strict requirement for a candidate strong on the technical and engagement sides. Equally, deep KM experience without any technical confidence is unlikely to be enough on its own, given how much of the role involves building and judging AI-driven classification.

Location

• This role is based in London.
• Our standard office hours are 09:30-18:00, with a 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 
• 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.