How I Help Legal Teams Apply Their Expertise With AI
Harvey Legal Engineer Marlow B. Hooper draws on his experience as a prosecutor and in-house counsel, as well as his background in data privacy and AI governance, to help legal teams use AI effectively and responsibly.
My path to Legal Engineering brought together several parts of my career that once seemed unrelated. I began as an Assistant District Attorney, carrying a full docket and trying misdemeanor and felony cases before juries. It taught me how to think on my feet, explain complicated issues clearly, and earn the confidence of people being asked to consider something unfamiliar. (Once you’ve stood in front of a jury during a complex trial, walking a room of partners or in-house counsel through a new technology feels a lot less intimidating.)
From there I worked as a firm litigator, then a Program Attorney for the Colorado Bar Association CLE before moving in-house as Managing Counsel at Toyota Financial Services. As digital marketing became a larger part of my work, the questions increasingly extended beyond advertising into data, privacy, and the technology behind the campaigns. To better understand those issues, I earned certifications in data privacy and AI governance, including the CIPP/US and AIGP, and later earned a master’s degree in Technology Leadership at Brown University.
Along the way, I watched technology change legal work faster than many organizations could establish the guardrails for using it. I became interested in the practical challenge of helping legal teams adopt AI responsibly: identifying where it could improve the work, translating legal processes into effective workflows, and determining where lawyers still needed to review and decide. As a Legal Engineer at Harvey, I found a role that brings those responsibilities together.
“Legal Engineers sit in the middle [of attorneys and technology], speak both languages, and turn a lawyer’s judgment into something the platform can execute reliably.”
Building AI Around How Lawyers Actually Work
A Legal Engineer starts by understanding how a legal organization works: the task it is trying to complete, the standards it applies, and what useful work product looks like. From there, we help determine how Harvey can support that process, whether the team is reviewing contracts against a playbook, extracting key terms from hundreds of documents, drafting agreements, or conducting legal research.
The work often moves quickly from understanding a problem to building a solution. I might begin by training a legal team on Harvey, then work alongside its lawyers to build and test a custom agent or review table using documents from an active matter. Behind the scenes, I work with other Legal Engineers to evaluate new product capabilities and determine how they could address the challenges we hear from customers.
Recently, my colleagues and I spent two days with an in-house legal department, running training and advanced working sessions with teams across marketing, compliance, product, and other functions. Together, we built custom agents for tasks they had previously handled manually. We then helped the lawyers build their own agents and workflows, so they left with both practical solutions and the ability to continue developing new ones.
“The work is about amplifying attorney judgment, not removing it. Every agent and review table I build is designed so an attorney stays in the loop: reviewing, deciding, and owning the call.”
The hardest part of our sessions wasn’t building the technology. It was helping experienced lawyers put words to decisions they had made instinctively for years. They had to define which clauses they would flag, which facts would change their analysis, what acceptable language looked like, and whether an issue required further review. Once those standards were clear, we could build them into the process and test the results against real documents.
My favorite moment is when a lawyer reviews the output and says, “That is exactly how I would have flagged it.” At that point, the conversation usually shifts from whether the technology can support their work to where else it could be useful.
Making Adoption and Governance Work Together
Legal teams are being asked to adopt AI, demonstrate its value, and meet their legal, ethical, and regulatory obligations at the same time. That requires them to answer questions that extend beyond traditional legal training, including where AI fits into a workflow, what safeguards it requires, and how its output should be reviewed. Legal Engineers help teams work through those questions with an understanding of both legal practice and the technology.
When I work with a customer, I’m not only asking whether Harvey can perform a task. I’m also asking whether the task is appropriate for AI, what sources the output should rely on, how a lawyer will verify it, and which decisions require human judgment. Those questions influence how we design the agent or workflow from the beginning.
My background in data privacy and AI governance makes me especially attentive to that balance. Adoption without governance creates risk, while governance without adoption creates shelfware. My role is to help legal teams build something lawyers will actually use, with review points and controls that give their leaders confidence in how it is being used.
That also means setting realistic expectations. You can’t give AI a vague request and expect finished legal work. If you wouldn’t send a first-year associate a two-word email and expect a perfect memo, you shouldn’t approach AI that way either. Legal Engineers help teams provide the instructions, context, standards, and review to AI that strong legal work requires.
The Skills Lawyers Bring to Legal Engineering
Many of the characteristics that make someone a strong Legal Engineer are already central to practicing law. Curiosity and empathy come first. You need to understand how a legal team actually operates, where its current process breaks down, and what the people doing the work need from a solution. That often means looking beyond the formal process to understand what happens in practice.
Structured thinking is equally important. Legal Engineers break a complex task into individual steps, define what a good result looks like, and test the output against that standard. Lawyers already practice similar skills when they draft precise contract language, organize a legal argument, or give clear instructions to a junior associate.
“What you need [as a Legal Engineer] is the ability to write with precision and think in systems. If you can draft a tight contract clause or a clear legal brief, you already have the core skill for writing a strong prompt or designing an agent.”
Communication matters because much of the role involves teaching. I spend a significant amount of time helping lawyers understand a new capability, apply it to their own work, and become comfortable using it independently. Before practicing law, I worked as a legal recruiter, and the instinct to help people find their footing has stayed with me. A brief stint as a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles also made me comfortable in front of a room and willing to try a legal joke occasionally. Whether it lands is another question.
For anyone interested in becoming a Legal Engineer, my advice is to start using legal AI on real tasks. Notice where it performs well and where it struggles, then try to understand why. The issue may be the instructions, the information provided, or the way the task has been structured. From there, learn how firms and legal departments govern their use of AI. Understanding those requirements will help you move beyond demonstrating what a tool can do and start helping legal teams implement it responsibly.
Most importantly, do not discount the experience you already have. Every deposition you have prepared, contract you have redlined, and client you have guided through a complicated issue can prepare you for this work. Legal Engineering gives you a different way to apply that experience, and an opportunity to help define a profession that is still taking shape.
Interested in becoming a Legal Engineer? Build the foundational skills with Harvey Academy’s free, self-paced Legal Engineering Certification.
