Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer
Solutions Architect, Strategic Applications
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Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer is a world-leading global law firm, where our ambition is to help you achieve your goals.
Exceptional client service and the pursuit of excellence are at our core. We invest in and care about our client relationships, which is why so many are longstanding. We enjoy breaking new ground, as we have for over 170 years.
As a fully integrated transatlantic and transpacific firm, we are where you need us to be. Our footprint is extensive and committed across the world’s largest markets, key financial centres and major growth hubs.
At our best tackling complexity and navigating change, we work alongside you on demanding litigation, exacting regulatory work and complex public and private market transactions. We are recognised as leading in these areas.
We are immersed in the sectors and challenges that impact you. We are recognised as standing apart in energy, infrastructure and resources. And we’re focused on areas of growth that affect every business across the world.
All of this is achieved by supporting the growth of our people, who help us deliver on our ambition – which is to help you achieve yours.
Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer: Your goals. Our ambition
The Opportunity
About the Team
Strategic Applications is a revenue-generating legal technology team sitting within Digital Legal Delivery. The team designs, builds, and delivers technology-enabled legal solutions directly on client matters. This is not an internal IT function — the team operates commercially, with the majority of its work charged to client matters and directly tied to live legal processes.
The team's primary focus is the corporate and transactions side of the business, which the firm is actively investing in and growing. Typical work includes M&A transaction management, due diligence workflow automation, contract lifecycle management, and technology-enabled advisory on complex corporate mandates. The team also supports a wider range of legal disciplines, including compliance, volume claims, and regulatory work.
Because the team's output is chargeable and integral to live legal processes, the standard of delivery — technically and commercially — is the highest. Errors, delays, or poorly scoped solutions have direct consequences for client outcomes and fee recovery. Every member of the team is expected to understand this environment and to take personal responsibility for the quality and risk profile of their work.
The Solutions Architect and Senior Analyst are two new, complementary roles being introduced to strengthen the team's capability. The Architect is responsible for designing and integrating the technical infrastructure underpinning client solutions; the Senior Analyst is responsible for executing those solutions at the delivery level. The two roles are designed to work in close collaboration and are expected to maintain a shared understanding of the end-to-end workflow on every engagement they work on together.
Role Overview
The Solutions Architect is a critical, client-facing role responsible for designing and delivering the technical architecture that powers the Strategic Applications team's client solutions.
This is not a purely internal infrastructure or IT architecture role. The Architect works at the intersection of legal process, technology, and commercial delivery. Solutions designed by this role will be deployed directly on client matters, will be chargeable, and will be evaluated by clients and partners on their quality, reliability, and fitness for purpose. The role carries significant responsibility and demands both technical rigour and genuine commercial and legal judgement.
A defining expectation of this role is that solution design begins with the client's need, not the firm's technology stack. The ideal candidate will be able to interrogate what a client is actually trying to achieve — legally and commercially — and work backwards to a solution architecture that is proportionate, robust, and deliverable within the constraints of a live legal matter.
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The Architect will work closely with the Strategic Applications Senior Analyst, with the two roles forming the core of the team's delivery capability. The Architect sets the technical design and integration framework; the Analyst executes within it. Effective collaboration between the two roles is essential and both will be expected to maintain a shared, end-to-end understanding of every workflow they work on together.
The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience designing and delivering integrations and agent-driven solutions using APIs and Model Context Protocols (MCPs) across cloud systems, within a law firm or legal service delivery environment.
Key Responsibilities
Solution Architecture & Design
- Develop high-level and detailed solution architectures aligned to enterprise architecture standards, ensuring they are proportionate to the client mandate and deliverable within the constraints of a chargeable engagement.
- Define end-to-end solution design across document management, workflow, AI, knowledge, and data systems — starting from the legal workflow and working to the technical architecture, not the reverse.
- Design scalable integration patterns using APIs, webhooks, workflow orchestration, and agent/automation frameworks.
- Produce clear and robust architecture documentation including process maps, sequence diagrams, data flow diagrams, and technical specifications to a standard that can be reviewed by both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Map legal workflows end to end — including handoffs between people, systems, and processes — before committing to a solution architecture, ensuring the design reflects how the work operates in practice rather than how it is assumed to operate.
Systems Integration & Technical Delivery
- Design and build API integrations between core legal technology platforms and connected systems, including DMS, HR, finance, and knowledge management systems.
- Integrate core legal technology platforms including:
- SharePoint / SharePoint Online
- Microsoft Power Platform
- HighQ or alternative platforms (Ansarada, Intralinks etc.)
- Legatics
- Kira
- Contract Express
- DocuSign
- ShareDo (Clio Operate)
- iManage / NetDocuments (or equivalent DMS)
- Design integration solutions involving Generative AI-enabled legal assistants and LLM-based platforms, integrating tools such as legal-specific GenAI solutions (e.g. Harvey, Legora, Emma Legal) and foundation models including Claude (Anthropic), with consideration of prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture, and LLM orchestration frameworks where relevant.
- Ensure all integration architectures meet the firm's information security, data classification, access control, and information governance requirements.
Stakeholder Engagement & Commercial Contribution
- Partner with lawyers, innovation teams, PMOs, and business services teams to translate legal and business needs into robust technical solutions — acting as the primary technical voice in client-facing and internal solution scoping discussions.
- Advise on the commercial implications of architectural decisions, including the cost, time, and risk profile of proposed solutions. Scope solutions in a way that is transparent and appropriate for fixed-fee or retainer-based client engagements.
- Participate in vendor assessments, RFPs, and procurement activity, evaluating new tools against client need and the firm's enterprise standards.
- Contribute to business case proposals for addressing gaps in core infrastructure, working close with IT stakeholders to align solutions with wider technology programmes and firm wide initiatives.
- Conduct and manage proofs of concept and contribute to AI governance and risk assessments for emerging technologies being considered for client deployment.
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Risk & Governance
- Take ownership of the risk profile of every solution architecture produced. Identify, document, and escalate architectural risks before solutions are deployed on live client matters.
- Ensure solutions are designed with data security, client confidentiality, and regulatory compliance (including GDPR and SRA requirements) built in from the outset — not retrofitted.
- Maintain awareness of the commercial and legal consequences of architectural failure in a chargeable, client-facing environment and design accordingly.
Qualifications, Skills and Experience
Technical Skills
- Strong knowledge of integration methods: REST APIs, Graph API, JSON, XML, OAuth, SSO, and event-driven architecture, with experience integrating external platforms using well‑structured, resilient integration patterns.
- Experience integrating LLM‑based and agentic platforms into enterprise solutions, including vendor‑provided MCPs and model APIs (e.g. Anthropic/Claude), with consideration of context exchange, tool invocation, and access control.
- Understanding of secure and scalable patterns for consuming external AI services, including rate limiting, error handling, versioning, auditability, and the management of prompts, context, and data boundaries in legal environments.
- Experience with workflow automation and orchestration tools (Logic Apps, Clio Operate, Power Automate, Nintex, or equivalent).
- Proficiency in data modelling and schema design, including JSON schema and relational data models.
- Experience with process mapping tools and notation (e.g. Visio, Miro, Lucidchart, or BPMN-compliant tooling).
- Familiarity with Microsoft 365 cloud ecosystem and Azure integrations.
- Working knowledge of document management systems, with iManage strongly preferred.
- Familiarity with collaboration and virtual data room platforms (HighQ, Datasite, Intralinks, Ansarada) and their role in transaction workflows.
- Exposure to Generative AI integration, including LLM-based platforms, prompt engineering, RAG architecture, and LLM orchestration frameworks (e.g. LangChain, Azure AI Studio).
- Understanding of security architecture principles including data classification, access control design, and legal-sector information governance frameworks.
- Ability to read and interpret legal technology platform documentation and connect technical outputs to legal process outcomes.
Legal & Commercial Skills
- Proven experience working with or supporting a law firm, ALSP, or legal operations team — preferably with direct exposure to corporate or transactions work.
- Demonstrated end-to-end understanding of at least one legal workflow type, for example:
- M&A due diligence (from data room set-up through to completion)
- Contract lifecycle management (from instruction through to execution and obligation tracking)
- Transaction management workflows in a corporate context
- Awareness of matter economics: the ability to scope solutions in a way that is commercially sound, and to understand the relationship between architectural decisions and fee recovery on client matters.
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