Jeannique Swiegers is part of a new generation of legal engineers redefining how law meets technology. At Sirion, she turns legal language into intelligent systems that help organizations reason, decide, and act with speed and precision.
Her journey from commercial law to legal engineering reflects the legal profession’s quiet reinvention—from drafting and review to design and intelligence. For Jeannique, it’s more than a career shift; it’s a way to shape how the law itself learns and evolves.
Why did you choose to study law?
Growing up, I loved a good debate and never shied away from standing up for what I believed was right. That eventually led me to pursue a bachelor’s degree in commerce and law. I was the first in my family to study law.
Law appeals to me because it blends structure, reasoning, and justice, yet still touches the human side of stories and decisions. Business, on the other hand, shows me how to translate those ideas into real-world impact. That balance between logic and empathy continues to guide me as a legal engineer.
What made you switch from legal practice to legal engineering?
Early in my career, I worked in a commercial litigation firm in Johannesburg. The work was challenging and rewarding, but it also made me realize how slowly the legal profession was adapting to change. While other industries were using technology to move faster, law was still tied to manual systems and outdated workflows.
That realization stayed with me. Over time, it became the spark for something new. Even as I continued to build my legal career, I never stopped learning. Artificial intelligence caught my attention early, not because it promised disruption but because it demanded understanding.
The more I explored, the clearer it became that the gap between law and technology wasn’t about skill, it was about translation. Legal language is dense, layered, and situational. Machines can process it, but they can’t yet reason through it. That’s where I saw an opportunity.
When the opportunity to join Sirion came along, it felt like the perfect place to bring that curiosity to life, a place where law and technology converge to redefine how contracts are created, negotiated, and managed. What stood out to me about the company’s vision was its focus on making legal work simpler, smarter, and more human through a next-gen CLM platform.
How would you define legal engineering and your current role?
In a nutshell, I train AI to think like a lawyer, but I like to describe it as building bridges between law and technology. Civil engineers build bridges. Legal engineers, like me, build systems that make law work better.
The seed was sown during the pandemic, when the shift to remote work exposed how much legal work still depended on manual effort. Those two years pushed me to think differently. I realized it wasn’t just about making legal processes faster but about rethinking how they could work smarter. That set me on the path to legal engineering.
For me, legal engineering is about making the implicit explicit. Lawyers link ideas instinctively—how clauses connect, where risks sit, what’s open to negotiation. My job is to translate that kind of reasoning into something a machine can understand and apply.
I would say my role sits at the crossroads of law and technology, a kind of translation layer between two disciplines that don’t naturally speak the same language.
My team and I are helping to reshape how law operates day to day, while tackling the twin challenges of scale and time that hold legal teams back. We’re building systems that let lawyers move from reactive, manual tasks to a more proactive, intelligent way of working. That’s cool.
I break legal reasoning into modular components, including definitions, dependencies, fallback positions, risk thresholds, and work with engineers to model them so the (legal) tasks can be executed reliably. Many of our legal engineering team are also practicing attorneys who can validate both the legal output and the technical model at every step.
We’re building understanding between disciplines, people, and what law has been and what it’s becoming.
Working with legal AI is never about replacing people. It’s about collaboration. The system takes care of routine work, flagging missing terms, spotting patterns, and surfacing insights so humans can focus on what requires judgment and context. My role is to design that balance, ensuring the system knows when to act on its own and when to defer to human expertise.
What has been your biggest achievement in your current role?
The team and I are proud of our work with our natural language conversational interface, meaning anyone can interact with a contract using everyday language. You can ask, ‘Can we end this agreement early?’ and get a precise, source-cited answer. It reduces friction and gives legal teams more time to think instead of searching. It’s about teaching the system to speak the way people do.
I’m also fascinated by our work with fallback logic, the way one clause triggers another. For example, when someone asks about early termination, the system doesn’t just quote a line. It connects related penalties, exceptions, and definitions. It starts reasoning through the contract.
Looking back, what piece of advice do you wish you had received when you started out your career?
Keep growing, keep learning and always remember that you can’t solve everything yourself, collaboration is key.
The newness of everything we are doing excites me. It also challenges me to keep growing, learning, and adapting. Just as I once pushed myself to balance law and commerce, I now push myself to balance legal reasoning with data science.
Most of my day is spent collaborating with engineers, data scientists, and product managers. Our exchanges are constant and practical. They’ll ask why a clause matters, and I’ll explain the reasoning behind it. Then they show how that logic translates into a system model. It’s about law and technology learning from each other.
Those conversations aren’t just technical. They’re about trust. AI tends to overreach. Part of my work is to keep it honest, to make sure it knows when to stop guessing and defer to human input.
How do you see legal AI evolving?
The best tools don’t erase judgment; they make space for it. That’s the real value of legal AI.
I think my own journey mirrors that belief. From the student who loved argument, to the lawyer parsing complex contracts, to the engineer translating legal logic into code, each chapter is a continuation of the same question: how can this be done better?
I see the next phase of law as one defined by collaboration, not competition between people, technology, and data. The future of law isn’t about efficiency alone. It’s about insight. AI can help lawyers and businesses make decisions with clarity and confidence. We’re still at the beginning. The possibilities are endless.
Jeannique Swiegers is based in Cape Town, South Africa. You can find her LinkedIn bio here.
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