What If the Best Career Move for a Lawyer Is No Longer Practising Law?

For decades, the career map for lawyers has been relatively predictable. Build a career in private practice and pursue partnership, move in-house, join another firm, or perhaps step into government.

Artificial intelligence may be creating an entirely new exit.

In the US, lawyers are increasingly leaving major firms to join AI companies, not necessarily to become in-house counsel, but to take roles such as legal engineers, product specialists, researchers and strategists. New data from Firm Prospects shows that 46 lawyers left Am Law 200 firms for AI companies in the first half of 2026. Harvey recruited 22 of them, while Anthropic hired eight and OpenAI and Legora each hired five. Forty of the 46 were associates.

Perhaps the most interesting number is 15. That's how many moved into roles specifically described as legal engineers.

These aren't traditional legal jobs. Legal engineers sit between law, technology, product and clients. Harvey describes its legal engineers as former practising lawyers who translate real legal workflows into AI solutions, work with law firms on adoption and feed what they learn back into product development.

And this is no longer exclusively a US phenomenon.

Harvey is currently recruiting a Legal Engineer in Sydney, seeking lawyers with at least three years' experience from top-tier firms or sophisticated in-house environments.

That matters for the Australian talent market.

For years, law firms have primarily competed with other firms and corporate legal teams for their best associates. They may increasingly find themselves competing with the technology companies selling software back to them. For ambitious lawyers, the proposition is also different. Instead of advising on one transaction or dispute, they could help build the technology that changes how thousands of lawyers perform those tasks.

LawUno Insight

The rise of legal AI may do more than change how lawyers work. It could change what a legal career looks like.

The traditional question for an associate considering their future was often: partner, another firm or in-house?

A fourth option is emerging.

Leave legal practice and help build the technology reshaping it. And if AI companies can persuade some of Big Law's best associates that the opportunity outside private practice is more exciting than the partnership track, law firms won't just be competing with AI for work.

They'll be competing with it for talent.