Legal Engineering & Workflow Automation

Workflow automation is a created series of actions, often computerized, for the steps in a business process. The intent is to improve everyday business processes to reduce, ultimately, the transaction costs when providing a good or service. A legal engineer is someone who can create a software application which encompasses law, data and integrates that system into existing corporate IT systems.

Legal engineering is a very new area that is not entirely well defined.  Essentially, a legal engineer is a lawyer who also possesses considerable skills in software development and software architecture.  In some scenarios, the legal engineer is tasked with creating a smart contract and implementing that contract on a blockchain.  In other scenarios, the legal engineer develops a software application that analyzes proposed contracts and can determine whether the proposed contract is acceptable (and auto-generate a smart contract on a blockchain) or flags the proposed contract for additional attention elsewhere.  Another example of legal engineering is the generation of an employee policy that is integrated with natural language understanding and implemented on a chatbot to be used by employees.

Ron has given several presentations regarding workflow automation and legal engineering.  Here is a sample: