Practice Innovation Advisor

What You’ll Do

At Kirkland & Ellis, we are united in our ambition and drive to move forward. We recognize that the legal landscape is constantly evolving, and our clients face increasingly complex and dynamic challenges that require creative and effective solutions. To meet these demands, we invest in cutting‑edge legal technology, tools, and methodologies that empower our attorneys to deliver best‑in‑class service with efficiency, precision, and innovation.

The Firm believes that by embracing innovation, we can better serve our clients' goals and achieve outstanding results.

As a Practice Innovation Advisor, you will be part of the Practice Innovation team, which supports the firm's strategic goals of enhancing client service, efficiency, and profitability. The complexity, scale, and pace of specific practice group work require customized, tech‑enabled solutions that support both attorney workflows and client outcomes.

• Collaborate with legal teams to assess current workflows, identify pain points, and assess the feasibility, impact, and ROI of potential innovations.
• Designing and running technology pilots from start to finish with minimal oversight, including defining objectives, scope, timeline, budget, metrics, and success criteria, and managing stakeholders, risks, and issues.
• Collaborating with practice groups to socialize new technology and facilitate adoption and change management.
• Engage with practice group leadership and Knowledge Management attorneys, supporting strategic initiatives and becoming the face of Innovation efforts at practice group meetings and training sessions.
• Ensure cross‑functional alignment of practice‑specific needs with firm‑wide innovation initiatives, acting as a bridge between legal teams, innovation professionals, and firm leadership.
• Map existing legal processes and workflows to identify opportunities for optimization, automation, and AI enhancements.
• Complete deep dives on practice group use case requests, develop and stress‑test workflows, and advance custom‑built solutions.
• Work with, identify, develop, and maintain key external vendor relationships. Foster impactful engagements with Pre‑Sales, Customer Success, and Product touchpoints.
• Understand and address potential risks of emerging technology, working closely with Innovation Enablement and Responsible AI personnel to ethically and effectively deploy new legal technology.
• Promote a culture of innovation and continuous learning within the firm by sharing insights, best practices, and lessons learned.
• Stay informed of new technology, market trends, and best practices in the legal industry and beyond, and share insights and recommendations with the Practice Innovation team and the firm.
• Contribute to the development and maintenance of the firm's innovation strategy, roadmap, and portfolio.
• Collaborate with and support the team, building and fostering working relationships with business partners across the Firm.

This list is not exhaustive and may be supplemented and changed as necessary.

• Demonstrate an understanding of the operating policy requirements necessary to be a good Kirkland Firm steward.
• Ability to learn and work independently but actively listen to and understand and follow directives to get desired results.
• Ability to work overtime and perform duties outside of scheduled work hours, as needed, to meet the business needs of the Firm.
• Lead special projects as assigned; activities designated to the Practice Innovation team will continue to evolve and shift as needed based on the needs of Firm leadership.
• The Firm may adjust or assign responsibilities within the context of this role to support the Firm as required.

Education, Work Experience, Skills

• JD or LLM, required.
• 5+ years prior experience at a law firm or customer‑facing experience at a legal technology vendor, required.
• Hands‑on experience leading enterprise software implementation from evaluation through deployment, including both strategic planning and day‑to‑day execution of deliverables.
• Demonstrated familiarity with leading legal tech platforms, GenAI platforms, automation, contract lifecycle management (CLM), or business…