Legal AI Engineer

Chicago, Illinois, Dentons US LLP is currently recruiting for a Legal AI Engineer to turn legal expertise into reliable, scalable AI solutions. Working closely with lawyers, practice groups and knowledge, innovation, and technology teams, the Legal AI Engineer will redesign legal workflows for an AI-enabled environment. This position will build them with prompts, schemas, playbooks, decision logic and evaluation frameworks, using platforms such as Harvey, Microsoft Copilot, and other enterprise AI platforms. Responsibilities

Design, build, test and improve AI-enabled legal workflows, applications and agents, including solutions on Harvey, Microsoft Copilot and other enterprise AI platforms. Re-engineer legal processes for AI-first execution, deciding what AI, automation and lawyers should each do and where human review is required. Turn playbooks, checklists, negotiation positions and drafting standards into prompts, schemas, decision trees and workflow logic. Curate precedents and model documents into reference sets for retrieval-augmented generation and evaluation. Build evaluation frameworks, such as golden datasets, rubrics and regression tests, to measure the accuracy and reliability of AI output. Find failure modes and hallucinations, and put controls, review gates and escalation steps in place. Work with Information Security, Risk and Knowledge Management to make sure solutions meet Dentons policies and professional obligations, including protection of confidential and privileged client information. Other duties as required to fully meet the needs of the position. Experience & Qualifications

J.D. from an accredited law school, required and a degree in computer science, data science, engineering or a related field, or equivalent technical experience, preferred Minimum two years of substantive legal practice. Minimum two years in a legal engineering, innovation attorney, AI engineering or similar role. Experience on a law firm innovation team, or at a legal AI company, alternative legal services provider or legal software company, preferred. Hands-on experience building and refining AI workflows, prompts or agents, not only using AI tools as an end user. Practical experience with legal and enterprise AI platforms such as Harvey and Microsoft Copilot, including configuring workflows, agents or prompt libraries and driving lawyer adoption. Skill with JSON, JSON Schema, YAML and Markdown. Working understanding of LLMs, RAG, embeddings, tool use, agentic workflows, structured outputs and model evaluation. Clear communication with both lawyers and technologists, and sound judgment about where AI helps and where human review is still needed.