Securing expertise at the frontier of Legal AI

The ambition

Build a new Legal Engineering capability around AI.

An international law firm with a history of adopting new technology wanted to push further. The ambition was to create a Legal Engineering Solutions team from scratch, bringing together legal understanding with Large Language Models and emerging AI technology.

The firm was moving early. The capability was new and the market for the people capable of building it was still taking shape.

The challenge

How do you search a discipline that hasn't properly defined itself yet?

Traditional technology experience wasn't enough. The firm needed people who understood advanced AI and could apply it within legal services. That intersection made the potential field exceptionally small.

But scarcity wasn't the only problem. The expertise existed, but it wasn't necessarily sitting behind predictable job titles or conventional career paths. Before we could engage the right people, we needed to understand where that expertise actually existed.

The response

We followed the expertise, not the job title.

We started with the capability our client wanted to create and worked backwards. Rather than making assumptions about what the right people would be called or where we would find them, we mapped the emerging market to understand where relevant AI, LLM and Legal Technology expertise was developing.

That gave us a much more precise view of a very small field and turned an emerging discipline into a market we could search intelligently.

Then came the harder part: engagement.

In a field this limited, volume was never going to solve the problem. Every conversation mattered. We approached people individually, understanding what they were working on, where they wanted to take their expertise and what would make this particular opportunity significant to them.

That allowed us to bring together Senior AI/LLM Solution Developers, Data Scientists and Legal Engineers with different backgrounds but a shared ability to apply emerging AI technology within legal services.

We didn't search for a ready-made Legal Engineering team. We found the expertise and brought the capability together.

Our relationship continued beyond the initial build, with Intelligent Talent retained to support the team as the capability develops.