Microsoft will pay up to $279K for a lawyer who can build AI

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty Images Microsoft is hiring a legal engineer — a role that blends legal experience and technical skills.

The hire will help shape how Microsoft's commercial lawyers use artificial intelligence.

The legal engineer has also become a must-have role for startups competing to serve large law firms.

Microsoft appears to want to put its legal department on AI steroids.

The company is seeking a principal legal engineer to help shape how its lawyers use artificial intelligence.

The hire will build agents, sharpen prompts, and train attorneys in Microsoft's Customer & Partner Solutions group, which supports the company's commercial business, according to a job description posted on LinkedIn this week.

A Microsoft spokesperson did not respond to a request to comment.

For decades, lawyers were the corporate world's tech holdouts, wary of tools that could get even a single detail wrong.

Artificial intelligence is starting to change that.

Clients are pushing law firms to use tools such as Harvey and Claude for Legal to get work done faster and, ideally, charge less for it.

That same pressure is moving in-house.

Legal teams are betting that software can help them edit contracts and write policies, allowing them to do more early work themselves and send outside counsel matters that are further along.

That could shrink their legal bills .