Law as Engineering, a recent publication by English legal academic Professor David Howarth of Cambridge University, documents a major change in legal philosophy within the last 10 years.

Professor Howarth notes that these days, approximately 80% of lawyers don’t litigate. Rather, they are similar to how engineers design physical constructs to satisfy their clients. They design social constructs such as contracts, companies and wills to facilitate their clients’ social needs.

As a consequence, he observes that lawyers have a lot to learn from engineers, both in practice and academia. Arguably, engineers utilising design processes have been doing so for a lot longer than lawyers.

Professor Howarth’s 10-minute presentation on Law as Engineering is available here.

These points are demonstrated in the first section of R2A’s Engineering Due Diligence textbook, shown in the table below.

Due diligence is a legal concept that speaks to the social requirements of material infrastructure, that it should be useful (fit for purpose), and safe. In this context, engineering due diligence means designing to ensure that both social and material infrastructure align.

If you'd like to learn more about solving engineering issues in a legal context, Engineering Education Australia's Engineering Due Diligence course will describe the techniques to demonstrate engineering due diligence. It provides decision-makers with tools to implement due diligence processes as part of good governance ensuring that the laws of nature are managed to the satisfaction of the laws of man. This includes projects, safety in design, environmental and financial outcomes.

Richard Robinson is the facilitator of R2A’s Engineering Due Diligence course run in partnership with EEA. Richard is Chairman of R2A Due Diligence Engineers. He is the principal author of Risk and Reliability - Engineering Due Diligence (10th Edition 2015), which is used as a text by a number of Australian universities.