A field guide for people learning the work and organizations building the capability.
You do not need to want the title for these capabilities to matter. Use this guide to develop your own judgment, understand where colleagues contribute, shape a role, build a pod, or interview for the work.
The plain English edition · no AI background assumed
The same AI models, the same licenses, the same vendor demos, available to any firm able to pay for them. To be clear: this is machine intelligence, not lateral hires.
The edge is no longer who has AI. It is where, how, and why a firm uses it.
Someone has to decide where AI belongs inside legal work.
How the work actually happens today: people, systems, exceptions, and the routing logic written down nowhere.
Where AI belongs, and where it does not. What stays deterministic, what gets a model, what stays human.
Working software carrying real responsibility: an audit trail, evals, and escalation to a lawyer built in.
The role matters because it controls how AI enters the firm, and whether it can be trusted once inside.
Forward deployed legal engineering is a capability before it is a job title. One unusually broad person may carry it. More often, a small pod combines the judgment required to understand the work, build the system, test it, and earn adoption. The operating standard is the same in either form.
Matter economics, risk, privilege, professional responsibility. What clients are asking for, and what partners will actually trust and adopt.
Models, agents, evals, guardrails, integration with the systems a firm already runs. Knowing when AI is the answer, and when it is overkill.
Nobody arrives holding all six, and waiting to hire someone who does is not a plan. The feasible path is the pod: three or four of your own people whose individual spikes compose into full coverage. A lawyer spikes on legal judgment and collapses on the technical side. A business professional spikes on workflow and commercial instincts. Toggle the profiles and watch the composition work.
The same six components can guide individual development, team coverage, role design, and evidence based interviews. The use changes. The operating standard does not.
Identify the artifacts you can already produce. Choose one thin component and build the next artifact to an objective quality bar.
Ask people to complete their own profiles and share them voluntarily. Combine complementary spikes. Find the component no one currently owns.
Select the two or three components that must be strong on day one. State what can develop and what the surrounding team will supply. Do not write a six component unicorn description.
Use the components to structure questions. Ask what the person produced, what failed, what changed, and who reviewed it. Evidence carries more weight than fluency with terminology.
The Hexagon is a development and team conversation framework. It is not a validated employment selection test. Use it to improve job descriptions and interview questions, not to create score cutoffs or rank candidates.
learns how the work really happens and finds the workflow worth rebuilding.
prove the system behaves, with evidence a partner and a client can rely on.
makes it work inside the firm, on the firm's own systems.
Ask a partner how NDA intake works and you will get five clean steps. The real workflow lives in the exceptions, the workarounds, and the routing logic that exists only in one senior lawyer's head.
Click any step. The clean version hides the real work.
Sitting with the work determines what should be built before anyone builds anything. It ends in one artifact the whole firm can argue with.
swipe the diagram sideways if it is cut off
Prioritize high volume workflows where the improvement is large enough to matter. Then design the split.
Most of the workflow should not be AI at all. Deterministic software does what it is told. The model gets exactly the steps that need judgment. A lawyer holds the decision. And every step, human or machine, lands in the audit trail.
The forward deployed legal engineer understands the current workflow, designs the intelligent one, and builds the system that connects the two.
A golden dataset of real cases, labeled by lawyers. Run the system against it, keep the evidence, and set the rules for what must always escalate. Law firms need defensibility and predictability in their agentic workflows. This is how you deliver both.
| Right data | Required steps | Matches the expert | Safe to act | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The standard NDA | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| The unusual counterparty form | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| A missing exhibit | ✗ | · | · | → lawyer |
| An ambiguous instruction | ✓ | ✗ | · | → lawyer |
| A material indemnity change | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | → lawyer |
swipe the table sideways to see all columns
swipe the diagram sideways if it is cut off
Build on the DMS, the matter system, and the research stack. Never force a migration.
A sandbox on the firm's own licenses, to run, inspect, and debug safely. No client data leaves.
Shadow mode first. The smallest useful action. More authority only as the evals prove it.
Deployment is where software begins carrying professional responsibility.
Map your contribution to the capability. Six components. About nine minutes. You receive an individual evidence and confidence profile immediately.
Take the assessmentBetween us, more than twenty years across every era that led here. Each one taught the same lesson from a different angle: the technology is never the hard part. The work, the incentives, and the people are.
Strategy counsel to global law firm leadership on practice, pricing, and growth. Professor of legal innovation who built the University of Richmond's Legal Business Design Hub, winner of Fast Company's 2022 Innovation by Design Award and a finalist in Bloomberg Law's inaugural Law School Innovation Program. Currently teaches this work at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Publisher of The Brainyacts, read daily by thousands of senior legal professionals. Has built books of business past $20 million by redesigning how firms sell and deliver work. Six Sigma Green Belt: workflow auditing and future state design.
Technology founder who built a legal software company and sold it to Thomson Reuters. Two decades of systems inside and alongside the Am Law 100: portals, platforms, knowledge systems, and now agentic AI. Six Sigma Black Belt. Fluent in both firm economics and software architecture, which is rarer than it should be.
Every era taught us what survives contact with a law firm. This is the first one where the tools can keep up.
The initial benchmark and instrument study are being conducted with Indiana University Maurer School of Law and Ice Miller LLP.
An OpenAI forward deployed engineering posting lists $162K to $280K plus equity. Current Harvey legal engineering postings list total compensation from $220K to $320K plus equity. Titles and compensation structures vary. The market signal does not.
Sources: OpenAI · HarveyA widely cited 2025 MIT NANDA preprint estimated that 95 percent of the enterprise generative AI initiatives it examined showed no measurable profit and loss impact. That is one early study, not a universal failure rate. Its useful finding is narrower: access to a capable model does not create deployment value on its own.
Source: The GenAI Divide · State of AI in Business 2025Model capability improves every quarter. Firm workflows do not. The gap between what is possible and what firms capture widens on its own.
What agentic delivery does to hourly billing, rates, and realization.
Nobody knows yetHow clients reprice loyalty when the work gets faster and partly machine made.
Nobody knows yetWhich firm structures survive when execution stops being scarce.
Nobody knows yetThe framework is yours to use. These are the limits worth knowing before you do.
Can I get certified in this?
No. This is version one of a self assessment with no norms behind it yet. A credential would be a lie. What you can produce is artifacts, and those are checkable by anyone.
Can I use the framework in my own job descriptions and interviews?
Yes, freely. That is what it is for. The six components and the interview questions in this guide are yours. No permission needed and no attribution required.
Can I use the assessment to screen candidates?
No. It is self reported and unvalidated, and people who want a job will report generously. Use it to write a better role and ask better questions. Do not use it to rank people.
Can my whole team take it and see the results together?
The assessment is free for individuals and always will be. A composite read across a team, showing where you have coverage and which component nobody owns, is something we do with firms directly. Write and ask.
We are trying to hire a legal engineer. Can you help?
We do not recruit. We will help you define the role and build an evidence based interview for it. Map your existing people first: most firms hunting a unicorn are missing two specific components and already hold the other four.
Is this only for large firms?
No. The six components describe the capability at any size. A four person legal department composes a pod the same way an Am Law 50 practice group does, with fewer people wearing more of the hexagon.
Use the framework. Produce evidence. Follow the work as the field develops.
Complete the Hexagon assessment. Use the result to develop your skills, understand team coverage, shape a role, or prepare evidence for an interview.
Your assessment result opens an artifact brief for the thinnest reported component, with a concrete output, quality bar, and reviewer.
Follow the field notes, operating ideas, and evidence as forward deployed legal capability develops in practice.
There is nothing to buy on this page.
We do the work described above. Embedding with a practice group, mapping how it really operates, building the evals, getting a system into production on a firm's own systems. It is done in person, which is why we take on very few firms.
If you want help with a team, a practice group, or a firm, write to me.
jkubicki@transformlegal.com — tell me the problem, not the solution.
Legal Transformation Institute · transformlegal.com
None of this is about talking down to anyone. Leading AI companies are actively hiring forward deployed engineers to turn model capability into production results, and legal AI companies are building their own legal engineering teams. Legal is adopting the capability in several forms. Shared language is the fastest way into the work.