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What is Legal Engineering

The legal profession has evolved throughout history alongside Law as a function of the technologies supporting it.

Currently, Law is in its third technological revolution, with each revolution exponentially increasing complexity and demanding a deeper and more sophisticated approach to legal professions.

1st Revolution: Language (Orality)

The first revolution was the invention of language. When humans began to speak, it became possible to model behaviors hundreds of times more complex than those of other animals living in groups1.

Law began to be formalized, though still in a simple manner, through verbal formulas (often mnemonic) to represent rules and parables to represent general principles.

At this stage, the only legal professional was the primitive version of the Judge: an authority figure (elder, king, chief, etc.) who adjudicated disputes between humans who disagreed about what had been agreed and the behaviors expected of each other.

2nd Revolution: Writing

The second revolution occurred with the advent of writing. By formalizing Law in text, it became possible to further formalize rules and apply principles much more systematically and structurally. Writing also allowed legal rules to be standardized and applied consistently to much larger groups of people, growing from dozens or hundreds to tens of thousands or even millions using the same set of basic rules and principles.

However, this standardization and systematization also brought increased complexity. It became impossible for ordinary people to know all the applicable rules, exceptions, and procedures. This phase saw the emergence of the lawyer, a specialized professional dedicated to knowing the Law to argue on behalf of a party in a dispute (remedial role) and assist in the preparation and negotiation of complex agreements (consultative or preventive role).

3rd Revolution: Computers

The third revolution is happening now with the use of computers, which are capable of automating the execution of contractual or legal rules, increasing the scope of Law. In this era, the agents or participants in the system are not only humans but also computer systems.

For example, parties now aim to reconcile accounts and transfer assets automatically, and various services are provided directly by information systems, with little or no human intervention.

Modern society can no longer function without embedding the infrastructure of Law within the systems that mediate virtually all current economic exchanges.

However, the task of bringing Law into information systems initially fell to programmers who lacked even 1% of the understanding of the vast conceptual framework that Law represents—a framework with centuries of heuristics and solutions already documented and functioning.

This gave rise to the need for a professional to bridge traditional, analog Law and Computational Law.

To automate the application of Law, it is necessary to mechanize and explicitly articulate several stages currently dependent on humans applying heuristics, using Computational Law for traditional legal knowledge.

Thus emerges a new legal professional: the legal engineer.

Engineering is the craft of designing, testing, and building machines, structures, and manufacturing processes using mathematics and science. It is a discipline dedicated to problem-solving. Among the various branches of engineering is knowledge engineering, which addresses all technical, scientific, and social aspects involved in the construction, maintenance, and use of knowledge-based systems.

In the field of Law, the professional bridging legal knowledge and its implementation in digital systems is the legal knowledge engineer (or legal engineer for short), as the various dimensions of legal engineering are divided into specialties.

Looplex pioneered the creation of the legal engineering profession in Brazil, starting operations in 2017. We developed Lawtex®, a programming language exclusively for expressing legal logic in a format understandable by both machines and humans.

Lawtex is a specialized domain language designed not for IT professionals but specifically for legal professionals—humanities specialists who do not need prior knowledge of computer science and systems analysis.

In collaboration with Fundação Getúlio Vargas Law School and the University of São Paulo, we created elective courses for law students and specialized programming courses for lawyers. Over 1,000 professionals have participated in our courses, workshops, and lectures on legal engineering at Looplex Academy.

This first phase of the company was a success. With Lawtex and its sophisticated inference engine, we implemented numerous content automation projects, delivering Intelligent Documents 5 to 20 times faster than traditional lawyer drafting speeds. These documents could execute automated tasks and generate structured data for BI and information exchange with other Intelligent Documents.

As we advanced with dozens of legal digital transformation projects with our clients over the years, new opportunities emerged.

We realized we could deliver much more, offering deeper legal data analysis as well as complete workflow management for contract lifecycle management (CLM) and case lifecycle management (PLM).

To achieve this, legal engineering specialized and expanded into various practices, each more “legal” than the last!

The specializations in this new field of legal engineering include:

  • Legal Content Engineering
  • Legal Data Engineering
  • Legal Process Engineering
  • Legal Business Engineering
  • Legal Knowledge Engineering

Law is essentially expressed in natural language (e.g., Portuguese or other human languages). Concepts, strategies, and disputes need to be represented in a structured format for computers to “reason” about these elements.

Legal content engineers declare the subjects and objects to be manipulated in an operation, creating components—software groupings that process discrete segments of legal logic.

For example, in a legal defense, upon receiving input about a list of possible “claims” (contingent obligations) in a judicial dispute, the component may calculate the time elapsed between the event date and the lawsuit filing date, returning a preliminary prescription.

These legal logic components contain a sequence of instructions limited to a block and identified by a name (e.g., “procedural preliminaries”). All legal logic components have a function, context, and logic:

  • Function: What the component does.
  • Context: The elements being executed.
  • Logic: How the function is executed.

Content engineers do not need to declare the entities and elements used in a specific challenge; instead, they can use standardized models created by legal knowledge engineers.

Content engineers also need not worry about the aggregated data analysis of the content; they only need to ensure they deliver relevant data to be extracted and analyzed in a data warehouse by a legal data engineer.

Thus, legal content and manual lawyer tasks can be automated much faster.

Data science studies the disciplined handling of business data and all the perspectives surrounding a specific topic. It involves capturing, transforming, generating, and analyzing data.

The legal data engineer formulates problems, chooses simulation and statistical models, and delivers data products.

These data products may include visual dashboards, case insights, dimensions of a problem not previously explicit, and aggregate information analyses to identify patterns and strategies.

Legal process engineers understand, monitor, and automate the lifecycle and workflow of a legal service, i.e., the business processes of a digital legal service.

Business process: A collection of related and structured activities or tasks performed by people or equipment, producing a legal service for a client or group of clients.

Legal process engineers create detailed project specifications and other documentation, develop workflow automation based on specific requirements for a Solution, and ensure compliance with legal knowledge engineering standards across modules, templates, and automation dimensions.

Process automation includes three elements: measurement, control, and actuators.

  • Measurement: Inputs or event sensors.
  • Control: Decision-making logic executed in Looplex Flows.
  • Actuators: Outputs of a flow, such as email components, data storage for legal data engineers, or task execution in Looplex Cases.

Legal business engineers handle the setup and parameterization of operational business processes in legal departments or law firms. They map, train, optimize, and manage processes related to back-office and support activities like HR, finance, billing, and case management.

Legal knowledge engineers create models and standards for representing legal information in a format usable by other legal engineers.

Knowledge representation includes classifications, general rules, and relationships among legal problems, allowing challenges to be addressed using prebuilt models and components.

These models enable content, data, process, and business engineers to implement digital transformations more quickly.

Examples include semantic relationship networks, architectural systems, componentized rule flows, ontologies, frameworks, and document topologies.

Footnotes

  1. Chimpanzees, orangutans, and other primates have primitive forms of Law, with hierarchical group organizations, rules on food sharing, and protection of young.