Practice Lawyer

Overview

At K&L Gates, we are looking for smart, imaginative and hard-working people with diverse backgrounds, experiences and ideas to join us. Perhaps our search for talented visionaries and your search for important and impactful work lead to the same place.

The Practice Support Lawyer (PSL) is responsible for creating, maintaining and updating the knowledge and practice innovation assets and services for their assigned practice areas, as required by the relevant Practice Area Leader partners, Director of Practice Operations and Director of Practice Innovation (Director). Reporting to the Director, the PSL will provide support to their assigned practice areas and designated firmwide projects across a range of knowledge management (KM), innovation, generative AI, precedents, client growth, professional development and practice support initiatives.

Practice Support Lawyers' focus will vary depending on the needs of their practice areas. Core duties include the following responsibilities.

• Develop, review and manage precedent and intellectual property for the practice area, which includes assisting practice lawyers and PSLs to organize and facilitate knowledge, precedents, and innovation forums and projects
• Apply, contribute to, and promote the development of a firmwide KM process to drive consistency, currency and excellence in precedents and knowledge assets and systems within (and across) the practice(s)
• Build close working relationships with partners, lawyers and allied professionals in the relevant practice areas; maintain a good understanding of the legal services provided by the practice areas and its clients/industries; be proactive in finding opportunities to increase efficiency through process improvement or the application of legal technology (including generative AI); and ensure knowledge, innovation and precedents services meet practice area needs
• Ensure compliance with firm policies, protocols and standards relevant to KM, data governance, and generative AI use, and that applicable policies and protocols are communicated in a clear and timely way
• Keep abreast of legal technology available at the firm to drive productivity, and help identify opportunities to apply solutions.
• Work with lawyers in the practice area to help identify use cases for AI or generative AI applications, agentic AI solutions, and automated workflow, including helping define, test, iterate and embed such solutions, both for the practice area and (where appropriate) client-facing solutions
• As required, provide support for document and workflow automation and collaboration projects including design, analysis, mapping, testing and training
• Collaborate with IT developers, data scientists, adoption and change management resources to help drive development and adoption of innovative practice solutions
• Drafting and editing precedents, guidance notes, checklists, client growth pitches and RFPs, training materials and presentations, legal updates and any other communications
• Use visual communication of legal advice and provide consultation to practice areas on visual standards, where appropriate
• Answer client growth and knowledge/innovation related enquiries from partners, lawyers and allied professionals, including Client Growth team members responding to client pitches and RFPs, and assist with the review and editing of pitch related materials for client proposals
• Communicate with the assigned practice areas on developments with KM resources, available legal technology solutions, and successful use cases
• Keep up to date with legal developments in relevant practice area and help advance practice innovation and professional development to reflect those advancements
• Assist with developing and delivering training on legal and practical knowledge and innovation topics

• Provide assistance to the Directors and other PSLs on compliance tasks as required by the Office of General Counsel, which may include researching, advising and training on global and national policies and professional practice standards
• Assist with facilitation of legal design sprints and hackathons and applying design thinking to legal…