Forward Deployed Lawyers

Extracted Attributes

• Inspiration

  Palantir's Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs)

• Core Concept

  Embedding legal and technical professionals directly within client teams to iterate rapidly on legal workflows and AI integration

• Key Benefits

  Practicality, speed, value delivery, and bridging the communication gap between business operations and legal perfectionism

Timeline

• Harvey AI begins deploying its tools at Allen & Overy, pioneering the use of forward-deployed staffing models to integrate AI into BigLaw workflows. (Source: Harvey AI's Forward Deployed Engineers: How the $3B Legal ... (Web Search))

  2023-02-01

• Legora actively deploys Forward Deployed Lawyers to elite firms like Kirkland & Ellis to automate intensive tasks and challenge legacy data monopolies. (Source: Document 1f1fe157-4cfa-4f8f-bea6-2e12b0469bc2)

  2025-01-01

Targeting of law firms and lawyers under the second Trump administration

The second administration of U.S. president Donald Trump has taken unprecedented actions targeting American law firms and lawyers that had previously represented positions adverse to Trump. This targeting of political opponents includes issuing executive orders and presidential memoranda limiting the ability of attorneys to obtain access to government buildings, stopping any consideration for future employment with the government, canceling government contracts, and preventing any company that uses such a firm from obtaining federal contracts. President Trump signed memoranda and orders that both threatened attorneys in general and targeted certain law firms and lawyers in particular. The Trump administration made efforts to influence practices by law firms, such as directing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to send letters to 20 law firms demanding information about each firm's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) employment practices. Law firms and lawyers have responded in a variety of ways to these actions, with some firms and attorneys that were specific targets suing the Trump administration in response, resulting in six separate lawsuits against the administration. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison (Paul Weiss) is the sole law firm targeted by an executive order that did not sue the administration and instead made a deal with the administration to avoid sanctions and restore access. In addition to Paul Weiss, eight other firms made preemptive deals with Trump to avoid being similarly targeted by executive orders. As part of the settlements, the nine law firms have agreed to provide a total of $940 million in pro bono work to efforts supported by the president and the firms. Trump later issued an executive order stating that the attorney general should create a mechanism to provide pro bono services to law enforcement officers who unjustly incur expenses defending their actions. Some have asserted that Trump intends to have the firms that settled provide such legal work. The administration also threatened to bring attorneys before disciplinary proceedings in an executive order, while individuals close to the administration simultaneously campaigned to become officials of the District of Columbia Bar, who would then oversee those proceedings for many of the attorneys. Legal experts have stated that this effort of targeting of lawyers and law firms for the clients they represent could intimidate lawyers from representing certain clients in the future. Those firms that have sued over Executive Orders, to June 2025, have each prevailed in court, with favorable judicial rulings.

Web Search Results

• Operating at the Edge: Lessons for Lawyers from Palantir’s Forward Deployed Engineers

  Rapid Prototyping and Iteration: This can be particularly difficult for lawyers used to perfection. FDE operates in extremely tight feedback loops with the business team. A Forward Deployed Lawyer should not disappear to write a perfect 50-page contract; they should identify key risks and prepare a first draft of terms addressing just the key issues, then iterate on it in real-time with the project lead. They build a minimally viable set of documents and refine it side-by-side with the operations team as the feature set and geographies evolve. This approach prioritise practicality, speed and value delivery over legal perfectionism. [...] Sergey Kinchin, PhD ### Sergey Kinchin, PhD Palantir are famous for their ‘Forward Deployed Engineers’ (FDEs). In contrast to traditional software engineers, FDEs are not consultants who help the client from afar. They are deployed ‘forward’ eg directly into the client’s business, joining their teams. This has useful parallels for lawyers, who can become more effective by adopting some FDE approaches: FDEs are hands-on builders who write code, wrangle datasets, and implement the solution themselves from within client’s premises. The value of the FDE is their ability to bridge the gap between a complex technology platform and a unique, real-world problem, iterating rapidly with the customer to deliver value in days or weeks, not months. [...] This approach requires a deeper sense of ownership, judgment and risk taking that many lawyers might be accustomed to. However, there can be immense value both for lawyers and for the business. It solves a critical communication problem: in novel scenarios, neither the lawyer nor the business often know what information to exchange. Lawyers end trying to cover all bases, which the business, justifiably, often perceive as being too theoretical and overcomplicated. By being immersed in the business, the lawyer can focus on the real issues and help the business reach their goals faster. Like Celebrate Support Love Insightful Funny To view or add a comment, sign in ## More articles by Sergey Kinchin, PhD ### Stop the Spanners: Levelling Lawyers into Legal Business Partners

• A Forward-Deployed Military Attorney with Special ...

  Even in an intensive operational environment, forward-deployed military lawyers handle military justice matters. For ex-ample, we have a curfew here. Sailors and soldiers sometimes the world. Unlike other elite special operations forces, the Green Berets are required to maintain proficiency in languages com-monly spoken in their geographic areas of operation. The Special Forces Group operates within the United States Central Com-mand, which includes countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. Many of our operators are fluent in Arabic. [...] Practicing military law while forward deployed requires both knowledge of the law and the tact to explain it to your client clearly and diplomatically. For example, consider that the client did not choose you to represent him (although he can fire you), does not pay you, significantly outranks you, has many more years of military service than you, and will write your fitness evaluation, which will significantly impact your future promotion potential. Depending on the commander’s past experience with other JAG attorneys, he may be distrustful of you from the outset. [...] Those unfamiliar with military law often ask what work mil­ itary attorneys perform. The duties and responsibilities of a forward-deployed military attorney in a joint special operations command are wide ranging. We work long hours seven days a week. Each day begins at 7 a.m. with physical training, in tempera­ tures often approaching 90 degrees. Training with Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs is challenging, to put it mildly. Unfortu-nately for me, CrossFit is popular. This often involves AMRAP—as many rounds as possible—of certain rotations of multiple painful “The only easy day was yesterday.” “The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.” “You deserve what you settle for.” “I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor seek recognition for my actions.” Having repeatedly

• Bridging the gap between models and reality. Legora’s first Forward Deployed Engineer, Di Qi, on embedding with clients to build fast | Legora

  She also sees a clear parallel between the evolution of legal work and what has already happened in software. “In software, developers didn’t get replaced by AI. They levelled up. The same thing is happening with lawyers. It’s not about automating judgment. It’s about removing the repetitive work so lawyers can spend more time on strategic thinking.” That shift doesn’t happen automatically. It requires close collaboration, trust, and a willingness to work through complexity – exactly the conditions the FDE role is designed to support. #### Still learning, still building When asked what she’s learning right now, Di doesn’t hesitate. “I’m still learning the legal space. I want to understand where the hard problems are, and what’s coming next.” [...] The work is collaborative and fast-paced. “Sometimes you’re building something that will go into our product roadmap. Other times it’s a one-off fix that helps a customer right now. You have to be technical, but you also have to know how to listen.” That closeness to the problem, and to the user, is what drew her to the role. “It’s not about reinventing how lawyers work. It’s about understanding existing workflows deeply and figuring out where AI can create leverage.” Unlike traditional enablement roles, the FDE sits upstream of the product: part researcher, part builder, and part translator between how lawyers work today and what the platform should become next. #### From AI founder to legal tech builder [...] For Di, the Forward Deployed Engineer role isn’t a departure from that way of working. It’s the same core motion – talking to users, scoping messy problems, shipping fast – but inside an organisation that’s already scaling. #### The role of a Forward Deployed Engineer at Legora Di works directly with law firms to understand how they operate, identify unsolved problems, prototype new ideas, and guide them into production. “You’re in the room,” she explains. “You get to see how the work is really done, and you learn directly from the lawyers. Over time, you start spotting the gaps – where things slow down, where processes get messy. And you start to see where the right software can make a big difference.” The work is collaborative and fast-paced.

• AI in legal hiring: Contrary to job loss predictions | Hetty Strickland posted on the topic | LinkedIn

  Hottest new job in Legal AI: Lawyers who understand AI enough to fix custom copilots The Financial Times reports that job listings across the sector for forward-deployed engineers rose over 800% from January through September. It is becoming essential to the AI economy. Companies like Anthropic hire these software developers to troubleshoot bespoke chatbots that often misfire out of the box. The title isn’t flashy, but the role of forward-deployed "legal" engineer is already becoming essential to the next era of legal tech. Firms are realizing that off-the-shelf copilots can’t handle complex legal workflows out of the box. They hallucinate, misread clauses, or fail to align with firm-specific precedent and tone. Enter the new hybrid role: part lawyer, part technologist. These

• Harvey AI's Forward Deployed Engineers: How the $3B Legal ...

  Allen & Overy / A&O Shearman. A&O was Harvey's first major enterprise customer, announced in February 2023, when 3,500 lawyers across 43 offices got access to Harvey-powered tools. The deployment was led by David Wakeling, A&O's then-head of the Markets Innovation Group, who functioned as the firm-side counterpart to Harvey's FDE team. Wakeling has publicly said that early use was concentrated in contract drafting, due diligence, and regulatory work — exactly the workflows Harvey FDEs prioritize in Phase 2. The 2024 A&O–Shearman merger gave Harvey an even larger combined practice to deploy against. [...] BigLaw deployment demands forward-deployed staffing because three structural features of large law firms — strict confidentiality regimes, on-prem and private-cloud data-residency requirements, and partner-by-partner adoption autonomy — make remote, self-serve SaaS rollouts mathematically impossible. You cannot ship a Harvey instance to Allen & Overy's London office the way Notion ships to a fintech startup. The technical, organizational, and cultural friction has to be absorbed by a human who lives inside the firm. [...] A Harvey AI forward deployed engineer embeds full-time inside a single BigLaw client for 6–9 months to translate the firm's most valuable, most idiosyncratic legal workflows — M&A diligence, securities filings, regulatory memos, litigation document review — into firm-specific LLM applications running on top of Harvey's foundation-model layer. The role blends three jobs that are usually separate at a normal enterprise software vendor: customer-discovery researcher, applied ML engineer, and onboarding lead. Harvey FDEs spend roughly a third of their time on conversation — with partners, associates, knowledge-management lawyers, and IT — a third on data engineering against the firm's document management system (typically iManage or NetDocuments), and a third on retrieval, evaluation, and