Senior AI Innovation Manager

Overview

Be among the first 25 applicants. Get AI-powered advice on this job and more exclusive features. Build your big career with the firm that does Big Law, Better. McDermott Will & Schulte is a leading global law firm with more than 1,750 lawyers and 3,200 business professionals. We are recognized as a top workplace by USA Today, Fortune, The American Lawyer, Vault, and others, and certified by Great Place to Work.

At McDermott, we invest in your future and accelerate your career, supporting you both in and outside of the office. With Us, You’ll Find:

• A firm where everyone belongs:
  Our award-winning culture prioritizes warmth and authenticity — we encourage you to be yourself.
• Enthusiasm for all perspectives:
  We’re stronger when everyone has a voice and a seat at the table. We welcome unique viewpoints and ideas and make opportunities for you to thrive.
• Support to feel your best and do your best:
  Wellness is integral to building a successful career and a rich life. Our benefits program supports physical, emotional, mental, and financial health, with emphasis on work-life balance.
• Real rewards for real work:
  Generous compensation packages that recognize hard work and excellence.

The Senior AI Innovation Manager (i) serves as the product owner for ChatGPT, CoCounsel, CoPilot, and all custom Legal AI Assistants developed by the KM team and (ii) executes firmwide, CKO-led initiatives that apply AI to enrich the firm’s matter, billing, and financial data. As product owner of our GenAI tech stack, this role ensures consistent communication of developments from these vendors.

The role focuses on enterprise-level projects that support three strategic objectives: (1) enabling advanced, firmwide search capabilities through high-quality matter metadata; (2) improving compliance with outside counsel guidelines (OCGs) to protect revenue; and (3) classifying and analyzing time entry data to generate actionable insights for pricing, staffing, and the impact of AI on billing efficiency.

By applying AI to existing datasets—such as OCGs, matter intake records, historical matter data, and billing narratives—the Senior AI Innovation Manager will help the firm normalize and structure its data for the enterprise data warehouse. These enriched datasets will underpin better compliance monitoring, inform client pricing strategies, and provide benchmarks to measure efficiency gains from AI adoption.

• Vendor & Market Monitoring
• Serve as product owner for CoCounsel: own day-to-day vendor relationship, track roadmaps, influence priorities, and schedule feature reviews and testing.
• Test enhancements from CoPilot on a quarterly basis to determine potential lawyer-facing use cases.
• Track and communicate new features and product updates from OpenAI to GenAI stakeholders across KM, IT, and GC.
• Monitor developments from other AI vendors (e.g., Harvey, Legora, Centari) to evaluate emerging tools for potential firm use.
• Enterprise Data Projects
• CKO-Driven AI Data Projects:
  Execute AI-driven initiatives prioritized by the CKO that strengthen matter metadata, billing compliance, and financial insights.
• Matter Metadata Capture:
  Use AI to classify new business intake and client/matter records into matter types, roles, and industries; ensure clean, consistent metadata capture for the enterprise data warehouse.
• OCG Data Extraction & Compliance:
  Deploy AI (e.g., CoCounsel or Relativity) to extract billing and compliance requirements from outside counsel guidelines, structuring them for enterprise use to reduce billing disputes and revenue leakage.
• Classify and Enrich Historical Matter Records:
  Apply AI to analyze legacy matter records and fill in missing metadata such as client roles, outcomes, jurisdictions, governing law, practice areas, and industry sectors. Ensure consistency across the enterprise data warehouse to enable more powerful search and analytics.
• Classify and Analyze Time Entry Narratives:
  Use AI to classify large volumes of time entry narratives into phases, tasks, and activities to build a richer dataset on how matters are staffed and executed. Leverage this structured data…