Law firm Womble Bond Dickinson launches Womble AI Labs, with forward-deployed engineers embedded alongside attorneys

Womble Bond Dickinson announced Womble AI Labs on October 20. The initiative sits inside the firm's IT function, is led by Chief AI and Technology Officer Chad Ergun, and extends the firm's Applied AI team of AI engineers, machine learning specialists and legal engineers.

According to the firm, the team's forward-deployed engineers work alongside attorneys and client teams to learn their workflows, design bespoke AI applications, and refine them through hands-on implementation and feedback. The early focus is structured, repeatable legal and administrative work: regulatory monitoring, document generation and packaging, contract review and lifecycle management, and early-stage legal analysis and case assessment.

Why it matters for FDEs: the forward-deployed model is spreading beyond AI labs and software vendors into professional-services firms that build in-house. Here the "customer" is the firm's own lawyers and its clients, and the job calls for engineers who can sit with domain experts, work within strict confidentiality and security rules, and ship tools that need no extra licences or heavy training. Legal engineering is becoming a real landing spot for FDE skills.