"I train AI to think like a lawyer"
Jeannique Swiegers, Legal Engineer at Sirion
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 profession’s quiet reinvention, from drafting and review to data and intelligence. For Jeannique, it’s more than a career shift; it’s a way to shape how the law itself learns and evolves.
Building Bridges Between Law and Technology
Growing up, Jeannique often loved a good debate and never shied away from standing up for what she believed was right. Her interest in logic and people eventually led her to pursue a Bachelor’s in Commerce and Law.
“Law appeals to me because it blends structure, reasoning, and justice, yet still touches the human side of stories and decisions,” she says. “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 her as a legal engineer.
The Shift from Legal Practice to Legal Engineering
Jeannique was the first in her family to study law. Early in her career, she worked in commercial litigation in Johannesburg.
“The work was challenging and rewarding, but it also made me realize how slowly the legal profession was adapting to change,” she recalls. “While other industries were using technology to move faster, law was still tied to manual systems and outdated workflows.”
The realization stayed with her. Over time, it became the spark for something new.
Even as she continued to build her legal career, Jeannique never stopped learning. Artificial Intelligence (AI) caught her attention early. It wasn't just for the fact that AI promised disruption, but because it demanded understanding.
The more she 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 Sirion came along, it felt like the perfect place to bring that curiosity to life—a place where law and technology truly converge to redefine how contracts are created, negotiated, and managed. “What stood out to me about Sirion’s vision was its focus on making legal work simpler, smarter, and more human through a next-gen CLM platform,” she says.
Defining Legal Engineering
Ask Jeannique what a legal engineer does, and she answers without missing a beat: “Civil engineers build bridges. Legal engineers build systems that make law work better.”
Simply put, “I train AI to act and think like a lawyer by combining logic, language, and law.”
The idea began to take shape during the COVID 19 pandemic, when the shift to remote, work exposed how much of legal work still depended on manual effort. “Those two years pushed me to think differently,” she says. “I realized it wasn’t just about making legal processes faster but about rethinking how they could work smarter.” That moment set her on the path to legal engineering.
For Jeannique, legal engineering is about making the implicit explicit. “Lawyers link ideas instinctively, 'how clauses connect', 'where risks sit', 'what’s open to negotiation',” she says. “My job is to translate that kind of reasoning into something a machine can understand and apply.”
From Manual Review to Intelligent Contracting
Jeannique’s role at Sirion sits at the crossroads of law and technology. It is best explained as a kind of translation layer between two disciplines that don’t naturally speak the same language.
Jeannique along with her team are helping reshape how law operates day to day, while tackling the twin challenges of scale and time that hold legal teams back. Together, they focus on building systems that let lawyers move from reactive, manual tasks to a more proactive, intelligent way of working
Describing her work as similar to that of a bilingual interpreter. “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,” she explains. “Legal engineers at Sirion are also practicing attorneys who can validate both the legal output and the technical model at every step.”
At its heart, Jeannique’s work is about creating systems that make legal work faster, smarter, and more human. “Sirion is not just building AI for contracts,” she says. “As a team, we’re building understanding between disciplines, people, and what law has been and what it’s becoming.”
Building the Foundation of Legal AI
Working with legal AI, she says, is never about replacing people. It’s about collaboration. “The system takes care of the routine work, flagging missing terms, spotting patterns, and surfacing insights so humans can focus on what requires judgment and context,” she explains. Her role is to design that balance, ensuring the system knows when to act on its own and when to defer to human expertise.
Jeannique adds, “I am certain our team's work will help accelerate the shift from contract management to contract intelligence, enabling businesses to make better decisions, faster." AskSirion is one such example. The industry's first 360 conversational interface, AskSirion empowers users to interact with complex agreements in natural language, reduce legal bottlenecks, and ultimately help legal professionals focus on strategic, high-value matters.
With AskSirion, 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,” she explains. “It reduces friction and gives legal teams more time to think instead of search.”
Collaboration at the Core
The newness of it all excites Jeannique. It also challenges her to keep growing, learning, and adapting. Just as she once pushed herself to balance law and commerce, she now pushes herself to balance legal reasoning with data science.
Much of her day is spent collaborating with engineers, data scientists, and product managers. The 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 law and technology learning from each other.”
Those conversations aren’t just technical. They’re about trust. “AI has a tendency to overreach,” she says. “Part of my work is to keep it honest, to make sure it knows when to stop guessing and defer to human input.”
“I am often asked why a clause matters, and I explain the reasoning behind it. Then they (team) show how that logic translates into a system model. It’s law and technology learning from each other.”
Making Contracts Conversational
A breakthrough moment came when the AI learned to handle fallback logic, the way one clause triggers another. “Now, 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.”
That capability powers AskSirion, built on Sirion’s Agent OS platform. Instead of sifting through PDFs, users can ask plain questions like “What are our renewal terms?” or “What happens if we terminate?”
“The system finds the relevant clauses, interprets their relationships, and gives an answer that’s grounded in the text,” Jeannique says. “It’s about teaching the system to speak the way people do.”
She calls this evolution “smarter contracting”. Contracts that can be analyzed and acted upon instead of sitting static in a folder. Contracts that can talk and respond.
The Human Side of Technology
Even as she builds AI systems, Jeannique keeps her focus on people. “Lawyers and machines don’t have to compete. They can collaborate,” she says. “Technology should extend what people do best, not replace it.”
Jeannique's approach comes from experience. “The best tools don’t erase judgment—they make space for it,” she says. “That’s the real value of legal AI.”
Her 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?
Looking Ahead
Today, Jeannique is focused on scaling legal engineering practices across global enterprises for Sirion. She sees 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,” she says. “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.” Find a qualification. Unlock your potential.
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