01
Legal judgment and strategy
Work that cannot be decomposed into steps or handed to a system. Susskind’s two continuing roles sit here.
- expert trusted adviser established
- enhanced practitioner established
Living document · revised 2026-07-29
New legal professions
There is no shortage of overviews of the new legal professions, and each says something different. That is not carelessness. No generally accepted classification exists, and worse, the frameworks do not even classify the same thing: sometimes professions, sometimes job titles, sometimes functions of a legal department, sometimes skill profiles. So this page opens with a map of who published what, and what they actually sorted. The list of occupations comes after it.
What is here:
Susskind: from ten roles to fifteen
The most cited list of new legal jobs is Susskind’s table in Tomorrow’s Lawyers. It is usually quoted in the second-edition version, with ten roles. The third edition has fifteen.
2017 10 roles · Chapter 13 · Table 13.1
2023 15 roles · Chapter 16 · Table 16.1
- legal design thinker new in the 3rd edition
Opens the table in the 3rd edition. Not about a user-friendly surface but about what the system actually contains: guiding users through complex areas of law, replacing bulky procedure with leaner rules, and designing for disadvantaged users from the start rather than as an afterthought.
- legal knowledge engineer
Models law into systems. Susskind warns explicitly that this is not work to hand to juniors or systems analysts: building a system that solves many problems is harder than answering one.
- legal no-coder new in the 3rd edition
A line back to the rule-based “shells” of the 1980s. Useful for pilots and demonstrators; a fully operational system, Susskind says, still needs a mainstream programmer.
- legal technologist
Not an interpreter between lawyers and technologists but a self-sufficient role trained in both.
- legal hybrid
A lawyer with a second discipline. Susskind insists on rigorous training, not “a couple of days” (the 2nd edition said “72 hours”).
- legal process analyst
Decomposes a matter into manageable chunks and finds the right supplier for each.
- legal project manager
Picks up where the analyst stops: allocates the work, holds time, budget and quality, and pulls it back into one service. Susskind likens it to a production manager.
- legal data scientist
The 3rd edition adds that they will also build systems making legal predictions.
- legal data visualizer new in the 3rd edition
Susskind grounds this in a blunt observation: the language of the boardroom is no longer the long document, it is the slide deck.
- R&D worker
Dead ends are not failures here. An absence of failure signals a shortage of adventure.
- digital security guard new in the 3rd edition
System reliability and security, data privacy, cleansing data of bias, auditing algorithms, defence against attack.
- ODR practitioner
Alongside the adviser, the e-negotiators and e-mediators themselves.
- moderator new in the 3rd edition
Quality control over communities where lay people trade legal experience. An editor who corrects errors, inconsistencies and confusions.
- legal management consultant
Susskind predicts it will become a distinct discipline, as consulting grew out of audit at the Big 4.
- legal risk manager
The most urgently needed and longest overdue of the lot, in Susskind’s words. A fence at the top of the cliff rather than an ambulance at the bottom.
Above the table, both editions carry two roles Susskind does not count as new because they persist:
- expert trusted adviser — Where work cannot be standardized or computerized. The 3rd edition adds that clients say lawyers overstate their claims of craftsmanship.
- enhanced practitioner — A skilled but not deeply expert lawyer whose reach is extended by standardization and technology. Often assists the expert trusted adviser.
What changed inside the old roles
Beyond the five new roles, passages inside the original ones were rewritten. This is a comparison of both texts, not a borrowed summary.
| Where | 2nd edition (2017) | 3rd edition (2023) |
|---|---|---|
| Dateline at the end of the chapter | „in 2016" | „in 2022" |
| Expert trusted adviser | „Clients think otherwise." | „Many clients think otherwise and say that lawyers overstate these claims of high craftsmanship." |
| Expert trusted adviser | „in a confidential manner" | „in strict confidence" |
| Legal hybrid | „in 72 hours" | „in a couple of days" |
| Legal data scientist | (věta chybí / absent) | „They will also develop systems that can make all manner of legal predictions" |
Two sentences that carry more than the new job titles
If looking at this list unnerves current lawyers, then I am doing my job. This is a wake-up call.
I prefer to define lawyers as people whose work is devoted to helping legal clients with their legal difficulties, rather than in the more limited terms of their original training and subsequent career path.
Map of frameworks
The frameworks below do not compete, because each sorts something else. The “status” column says where the claim on this page comes from: either a source I opened and checked it against, or somebody else’s description of it. What I did not verify, I do not assert.
| Framework | Year | What it classifies | Items | Nature | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tomorrow’s Lawyers, 2. vydání / 2nd edition Richard Susskind | 2017 | Future roles for lawyers | 10 + 2 | Scholarly book, prediction | verified |
| Tomorrow’s Lawyers, 3. vydání / 3rd edition Richard Susskind | 2023 | The same roles, revised | 15 + 2 | Scholarly book, prediction | verified |
| Report of the Emerging Legal Jobs Work Group NALP (USA) | 2015 | New positions actually advertised | — | Research report of a professional association | verified |
| Core 12 CLOC | — | Functional areas of legal operations | 12 | Industry association framework | verified |
| Legal Operations Maturity Model 2.0 ACC | 2017 → | Maturity of the same functions | — | Self-assessment tool | verified |
| LIFTED Singapore Academy of Law | 2026 → | Career and competency map for the whole sector | — | Institutional framework of a state academy | second-hand |
| Legal-Tech Jobs Taxonomy Reframe | 2026 | Job titles as used on the market today | 7 | Marketing material | verified |
| Allied Legal Professionals, Community Justice Workers NCSC, IAALS (USA) | — | New providers of legal help | — | Survey of regulatory programmes | second-hand |
- Tomorrow’s Lawyers, 2. vydání / 2nd edition — Chapter 13, Table 13.1. Two continuing roles sit above the ten new ones.
- Tomorrow’s Lawyers, 3. vydání / 3rd edition — Chapter 16, Table 16.1. Five roles added, none removed.
- Report of the Emerging Legal Jobs Work Group — Grew out of a group NALP set up in 2014 under the name “Tomorrow’s Lawyers Work Group”, that is, directly in response to Susskind. Method: environmental scanning, employer and law school surveys, interviews.
- Core 12 — Classifies activities, not occupations: business intelligence, financial management, firm & vendor management, information governance, knowledge management, organization optimization & health, practice operations, project/program management, service delivery models, strategic planning, technology, training & development.
- Legal Operations Maturity Model 2.0 — Three maturity stages per function: early, intermediate, advanced. Crowd-sourced from members rather than researched. The report states no count of its own, only a “wide range of functional areas”; I count fourteen from the headings, but that is my count, not its figure.
- LIFTED — The most developed institutional map I know of. I could not download the guide itself, the server returns 403, so the contents here are second-hand and I do not vouch for the detail.
- Legal-Tech Jobs Taxonomy — The seventh track, “Career Foundations”, is not a job group but the author’s own course. Each track carries US salary bands. Good evidence of what roles are called today. Not a taxonomy.
- Allied Legal Professionals, Community Justice Workers — The only branch that is about authorisation rather than job titles: who may independently do a defined range of legal work for a fee without a lawyer’s licence. No Czech counterpart so far.
Nine groups
The groups below are my arrangement; you will not find them in the sources. The frameworks above use different names for the same work, so one role sits in three lists under three titles. The groups sort them by what the person actually does. The maturity level on each role is my estimate based on the frameworks above, not a measurement.
02
Legal knowledge and its modelling
Turning law into a form a system, or someone other than the author, can work with.
- legal knowledge engineer growing
- knowledge lawyer established
- document automation specialist growing
03
Technology and legal engineering
Building the systems legal work runs on.
- legal technologist growing
- legal engineer growing
- legal no-coder emerging
04
Design, product and innovation
The question of who the service is for and whether that person can actually use it.
- legal designer growing
- legal design thinker emerging
- legal product manager growing
- R&D worker predicted
05
Process, projects and legal operations
The most institutionalised branch. It has its own associations, frameworks and conferences.
- legal process analyst growing
- legal project manager established
- legal operations manager established
06
Data, AI and electronic evidence
The fastest growing branch and the least settled in what it calls things.
- legal data scientist growing
- legal data visualizer emerging
- eDiscovery specialist established
- prompt engineer emerging
07
Risk, compliance and digital governance
The preventive layer. Susskind’s fence at the top of the cliff.
- legal risk manager growing
- data protection officer established
- digital security guard emerging
- AI governance professional emerging
08
Dispute resolution and access to justice
The only branch that is about authorisation rather than job classification.
- ODR practitioner growing
- e-mediator, e-negotiator emerging
- moderator predicted
- allied legal professional growing
09
Consulting and the commercial side of the service
Work about the legal service rather than inside it.
- legal management consultant growing
- implementation consultant growing
- pricing manager established
What is established and what is still a label
- established
- There are people with it on their business card and employers advertising for it.
- growing
- The role exists and is growing, but the name differs from employer to employer.
- emerging
- The activity exists. Whether it stays a role of its own or is absorbed into a broader one is unsettled.
- predicted
- Mostly still a prediction. I have no evidence of anyone making a living at it.
Legal work is splitting into judgment, knowledge, technology, design, operations, data, risk and new ways of delivering legal help. The new professions appear in those splits, not as one new estate alongside lawyers.
Open data
The whole section is downloadable as a single JSON file, both languages included, with the verification status of every source and the maturity level of every role. No sign-up, no key.
My own text is CC BY 4.0. Susskind’s role names and quotations are from his book and appear as quotations.
Sources
Everything the section rests on, plus what I took over without reading it myself. Marked the same way as in the framework table: “verified” means I opened the source and checked the claim against it.