What is a Legal Knowledge Engineer, anyway?
18th June 2018A Legal Knowledge Engineer, or LKE, is a support role in the legal industry. The role is positioned between lawyers and developers, and is responsible for facilitating the development of legal tech tools. The history The term was coined by Richard Susskind in his book The End of Lawyers? In 2008, and has been adopted by the legal industry to an extent. More and more commonly, the industry is dropping the ‘legal’ and just opting for Knowledge Engineer – but I’m a millennial and have been doing this since before it was cool, so I’m keeping the ‘Legal’. What does…
Becoming a Legal Executive
When people talk about ‘qualifying’ they are usually talking about qualifying as a Solicitor. Somehow that has become the default. Barristers ‘take the Bar’, they don’t talk about ‘qualifying’ in the same way, so there’s less confusion there. But Solicitors…
Event: Women of Silicon Roundabout 2019
So, June came around again, and again I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Women of Silicon Roundabout 2019 event. What makes this conference valuable to me is that I get to be the dumbest person in…
A quick guide to..., Legal Knowledge Engineering, LKE Life, The road to qualification, What is an LKE, anyway?Qualification and LKEs
There are two questions people ask me relating to qualification and Legal Knowledge Engineering: ‘do you need to be qualified?’, and ‘can you qualify?’. So, in case you are wondering, here are the answers. Do you have to be qualified…
The Agile LKE
As LKEs, we are working with developers, right at the intersection of technology and law. More than anyone else, we need to be prepared to interact with agile teams and adopt agile principles. The big challenges for LKEs Let’s face…
Why Document Automation IS Valuable, even for you
While I have talked at length on hows of Document Automation, I seem to have omitted to talk about the whys. So, with no further ado, here are the top 5 reasons why document automation is valuable, even for you.…
Being Agile
Agile is the hot new toy in the playground this year, suddenly everyone wants to be more “Agile”. Like ‘AI‘, though, what this means seems to depend on who you are asking. There is a plethora of resource on exactly…
DocAuto Tools Revisited
So, a little over a year ago, I wrote about the big three in DocAuto tools – Exari, Hot Docs and Contract Express. But a year is a long time in technology, and a lot has changed. In 2018, £1.2bn…
Legal Design
Legal documents are well known for being long, dense and generally intractable. This is a fact of life; something everyone just seems to roll their eyes and accept. This does us more harm than good. Not only does it mean…
Document automation systems are old, stable and useful, and so rarely adopted in practice?
I recently stumbled upon a slightly satirical glossary of legaltech/lawtech terms accusing document automation of being “a system for generating a tailored contract or other document based on the answers to questions. Document automation systems are old, stable and useful, and…
My thoughts on… The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken
The Secret Barrister is a must read for every functioning adult trying to make their way in modern Britain. I really don’t know what more there is to say than that. A.L. Kennedy is right; ‘read this, share this with…
Document Automation Software
There are three big players in the Document Automation field, they are Exari, Contract Express and HotDocs. None of these give a very clear picture on their websites of how they work or how they differ, so I shall endeavour…
