Today, as a legal engineer at Legora, she sits between legal practice and legal technology, helping teams turn AI from an abstract promise into something that genuinely works in day-to-day legal life.

In a role that just didn’t exist a few years ago, for Suzanne, it feels like the natural culmination of a career shaped by curiosity, efficiency, and a deep belief that legal work can be done better.

From law firm life to legal engineering

Suzanne has spent most of her career in private practice, ultimately specialising in corporate law and M&A after starting out in litigation. She gradually moved into innovation roles, leading legal tech initiatives inside her firm long before legal AI became a mainstream topic.

“I had already been working with legal technology for eight or nine years,” she explains. “And I first implemented a legal AI platform about three years ago, which, in this space, is actually quite a long time.”

That extended exposure gave her a rare perspective on what the technology can do, but also on what lawyers actually need, and why so many tools struggle to gain real traction.

What does a legal engineer actually do?

At its core, Suzanne describes legal engineering as a translation role.

“It’s a bridge between legal practice and legal technology,” she says. “You need a deep understanding of how lawyers work, their processes, their use cases, where time is really being lost, and then you also need to understand what the technology is capable of right now.”

Lawyers, she notes, operate under intense pressure. Their work is nuanced, and unforgiving of error. They have little patience for tools that are imperfect or poorly aligned with real workflows.

“If you only understand the tech, it won’t work. If you only understand the legal practice, you can’t move things forward. A legal engineer brings those two worlds together to create something that lawyers can actually adopt, trust, and use.”

Why legal engineering matters

The legal industry is particularly hard to build for. Confidentiality, trust, and accountability are non-negotiable, and expectations around quality are uncompromising.

This is where legal engineers play a critical role, not just in implementation, but in shaping products themselves.

“They bring the lawyer’s perspective into the product, and the product into the lawyer’s practice,” Suzanne explains. “On one side, you’re saying: this isn’t how lawyers work, the product needs to adapt. On the other, you’re helping lawyers understand how the technology fits into what they already do.”

That two-way translation is essential for meaningful adoption, sustained engagement, and real time savings, not just surface-level experimentation.

Frustration as a catalyst for change

Suzanne’s motivation for this work is deeply personal.

Like many senior lawyers, she found herself spending vast amounts of time on process, even years into her career, rather than on the strategic, high-level thinking that drew her to law in the first place.

“There’s this incredible distraction in legal work,” she says. “No matter the practice area, you spend so much time on repetitive processes before you can even get to the real craft of the job.”

That frustration became a catalyst. What if technology could take on more of the repetitive work, not to replace lawyers, but to free them?

“I genuinely believe legal engineers can help liberate the legal mind,” she says. “So lawyers can focus on strategy, judgement, and the actual chess game, not just moving the pieces around on the board.”

A different approach to collaboration

When Suzanee was looking to take the leap from law to tech firm, what initially drew Suzanne to Legora was the platform itself.

“It struck me how infrastructurally thoughtful it is,” she says. “From the core design, everything is built around collaboration as a principle.”

Transparency matters deeply to her. She wants to see how workflows are built, understand how prompts and structures work, and empower users to adapt and build on them themselves.

“I want every part of the platform to empower not just me, but everyone at a firm,” she says. “That’s what instantly drew me to the Legora platform.”

Meeting the team only reinforced that impression: a group that values collaboration not just in the product, but in how they work with clients and with each other.

What surprises lawyers once AI is embedded

Lawyers, Suzanne notes, are a tough audience. Skeptical, exacting, and understandably cautious.

But one moment never gets old.

“There’s this shift, that ‘aha’ moment, when skeptics see good results,” she says. “When they save hours of time, or uncover something buried deep in a dataset that they would never have found otherwise.”

That excitement, that sudden enthusiasm for what’s possible, is one of the most rewarding parts of her role.

The central role of human judgement

For Suzanne, the question of what AI should and shouldn’t do is clear.

AI excels at repetitive tasks. That’s where automation should begin. But responsibility, accountability, verification and decision-making must remain human.

“The higher you go in legal strategy, the more important human judgement becomes,” she says. “AI augments the lawyer, it doesn’t replace their judgement.”

Used well, it can give lawyers a much better vantage point: scanning vast datasets quickly, surfacing risks and patterns, and enabling more grounded, informed decisions.

The rise of the legal engineer

Legal engineering is no longer a niche role. Suzanne sees it becoming central across law firms, in-house teams, legal ops functions, and legal tech companies alike.

“Firms that didn’t even have innovation leads a few years ago are now building legal engineering hubs,” she says. “They’re realising how essential this role is for scale, change management, and long-term adoption.”

It’s also opening up entirely new career paths, including for people going straight from law school into these hybrid roles.

Who should consider becoming a legal engineer?

For Suzanne, becoming a legal engineer is a lot about mindset.

“You need curiosity, but not just the passive kind,” she says. “You need a real hunger to learn, to experiment, and to keep up with a pace of change we haven’t seen before.”

Nothing in this space is static. The most successful legal engineers are those who don’t stop  exploring. 

“We talk a lot about what might disappear,” she reflects. “But what excites me is what’s emerging. This is a chance to help shape what legal work looks like for the next generation. And that’s a great place to be.”