About
Engineering legal intelligence from the source up.
LawEngine is a legal research engine built by Stephen Murphy, an engineer and data scientist who cares about the details behind the answer.
Built by an engineer who wins.
Stephen is the founder and CEO of LawEngine, with degrees in mechanical engineering and mathematics and an Executive MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He previously led financial planning and analysis at Zillow and applied machine learning to resource planning, forecasting, and optimization. At Hubs.com, he led North American sales and operations, including AI pricing and expansion work before the company’s acquisition. He built LawEngine from source data through research algorithms to the product.
His engineering work has earned two competition wins: the NVIDIA Jetson Prize (opens in a new tab), a Special Technology Prize in Google’s Gemma 3n Impact Challenge, and first place (opens in a new tab) as part of the SteppenWolf team in Zindi’s Ghana Crop Disease Detection Challenge.
Winning project write-up (opens in a new tab)Final leaderboard (opens in a new tab)SteppenWolf team (opens in a new tab)
Rule 703
One detail. A public process. A visible result.
In a proposal dated February 13, 2026, Stephen and his daughters proposed replacing he with the applicant in Illinois Supreme Court Rule 703. On April 1, the Court adopted matching wording. The two documents are dated 47 days apart.
The habit
The method behind the Engine.
LawEngine is the system Stephen wished existed: legal data, machine learning, and systems engineering built around the details that decide whether legal research can be checked, traced, and used.
What we stand for
- Grounded truth over generated confidence.
- Logic, source records, receipts, and repeatable checks before persuasion.
- Systems engineering applied to legal information at production depth.
- Benchmarks, boundaries, and reviewable evidence whenever a claim matters.
Put the Engine to work
Give the Engine a Problem
LawEngine searches a purpose-built corpus of legal sources. Bring us the jurisdiction, the sources, and the detail everyone overlooks, and we will scope the work together.