Earlier this month, a White House press secretary lasted five days after it emerged she’d called herself a lawyer without ever passing a bar exam. Our profession lost its collective mind, and rightly so.

I thought of that reading Sarah Kessler’s piece in today’s New York Times DealBook newsletter, “The New Hot Job in Law Doesn’t Require a J.D.” Big firms, legal tech vendors, and in-house departments at companies like Microsoft and Nvidia are racing to hire “legal engineers,” people who pair legal knowledge with A.I. skills to redesign workflows and teach lawyers the tools. Legora says it has built a team of about 200 since 2024. Latham is advertising “legal engineering attorneys” at $220,000 to $250,000.

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. The work is real, and many of these people are skilled practitioners. Ropes & Gray’s Howard Glazer notes that “‘Legal engineer’ kind of makes it sound like someone made it up” and insists the role is genuine. I believe him. My quarrel is with the borrowed title, and with us: the ones who should know better.

When a non-lawyer so much as hints at legal credentials, we reach for the torches and shout “Unauthorized Practice of Law!” We insist that “attorney” means something because it took something to earn it. You betcha!

Now ask what it takes to earn “engineer.” Typically it means an accredited degree, a licensing exam, years of supervised experience, and a second exam. At the end is a seal that puts the engineer’s license, and personal liability, behind the work. In Texas, the Engineering Practice Act bars using “engineer” as a professional title without a license, subject to exceptions. The rules vary by state and enforcement is uneven. But the engineering profession’s national society takes the position that the title belongs only to qualified individuals.

Don’t licensed engineers deserve the professional respect and protection we demand for ourselves? We, of all people, know what it feels like when someone trades on a title they haven’t earned. If we expect the world to honor our credentials, we’re obliged to honor theirs.

An engineering professor says the same in the IEEE Computer Society’s magazine. In “Engineering? No Way” (April 2025), Sorel Reisman argues that engineering rests on mathematical and physical science, and that chatting with a chatbot isn’t engineering. He lists “legal engineering” among labels he finds illogical. He fed three chatbots his skeptical prompt and got agreement. When he asked Claude for the opposite case, it argued that too. A discipline whose conclusions flip with the question isn’t the one that signs off on bridges.

Nor is the habit confined to law. The Times notes that LinkedIn postings for “marketing engineer” rose 29 percent from 2024 to 2025. When everyone’s an engineer, the word tells clients nothing, and it costs the people who earned it.

So let’s lead by example. Call them legal technologists, AI implementation specialists, or workflow designers, titles that describe the work without borrowing someone else’s hard-earned credential. And if a title carries “attorney” or “counsel,” let it mean a license, as it always has for lawyers.