What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior AI Innovation Manager position at McDermott Will & Schulte?
Build your big career with the firm that does Big Law, Better. McDermott Will & Schulte is a leading global law firm that brings together more than 1,750 lawyers and 3,200 business professionals. We celebrate excellence, collaboration, and community and have been recognized as a top workplace by USA Today, Fortune, The American Lawyer, Vault and others. We are also certified by Great Place to Work.
At McDermott, we don’t just invest in your future, we accelerate your career – wherever it may lead. That includes supporting you both in and outside of the office.
With Us, You’ll Find
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. In addition, this 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.
Essential Functions And Responsibilities
Target Hiring Range $188,000 - $294,000
Please note that quoted salary ranges are not guarantees of what final salary offers may be. Base pay is based on market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and geographic location. Base pay is only one part of the Total Rewards that MWE provides to compensate and recognize our staff professionals for their work. Full time positions are eligible for a discretionary bonus and a comprehensive benefits package.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
As part of our ongoing commitment to be #AlwaysBetter for our people, clients and communities, we have created a culture of belonging that champions your individuality as both a person and a professional. From our competitive compensation, top benefits and award-winning professional development programs to industry-leading wellness initiatives, we support you through every stage of your life and career. With McDermott, you can live a life you love both in and outside of the office.
Physical Demands And Work Environment
The physical demands and work environment characteristics described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
Physical Demands
Typical indoor office environment
Disclaimer
The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of the work being performed by people within this classification. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills required of employees assigned to this job.
At McDermott, we don’t just invest in your future, we accelerate your career – wherever it may lead. That includes 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 smarter and stronger when everyone has a voice and a seat at the table. We welcome unique viewpoints and ideas, and we make opportunities for you and your career to thrive.
- Support to feel your best and do your best: Wellness is integral to building a successful career and a rich life. That’s why our benefits program supports your physical, emotional, mental, and financial health, with an emphasis on work-life balance.
- Real rewards for real work: We offer 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. In addition, this 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.
Essential Functions And Responsibilities
- 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 key 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 to (1) identify portions of matters that consume the most time, (2) inform pricing and alternative fee arrangements, and (3) benchmark the impact of AI adoption by comparing billing patterns on AI-enabled matters to those handled through traditional workflows.
- Client & Matter Outcome Tracking: Develop AI workflows that classify matters by results (e.g., settlement, trial outcome, deal closed) and connect them to financial, staffing, and industry attributes, creating a richer dataset for experience management and client pitches.
- AI Over Internal Data Delivery: Translate firmwide priorities into targeted AI-enabled assistants (e.g., intake classification, OCG compliance checks, metadata enrichment). Design labeling/annotation workflows, prompts, evaluation sets, and feedback loops; integrate outputs into EDW.
- Metrics & Impact: Define success measures, track outcomes, and report on how AI initiatives improve metadata quality, strengthen billing compliance, and deliver pricing and efficiency insights.
- Other CKO-Led Data Initiatives: Support additional enterprise data projects identified by the Chief Knowledge Officer in collaboration with firm leadership.
- Bachelor’s degree required
- At least five (5) years of product management and project management experience in legal technology or professional services.
- Experience working with IT teams, legal SMEs, and vendors to deliver technology projects.
- Knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite (Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word)
- Strong project management and organizational skills, with the ability to manage concurrent workflows
- Strong knowledge of AI technologies, particularly in text classification, natural language processing (NLP), and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
- Experience structuring and normalizing metadata for large-scale data environments
- Ability to design and deliver projects that align with firm-level strategic goals
- Excellent stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work across business, legal, and technical teams while driving a unified data agenda.
- Ability to strategically think and build, test, and iterate on AI solutions for practical business impact.
Target Hiring Range $188,000 - $294,000
Please note that quoted salary ranges are not guarantees of what final salary offers may be. Base pay is based on market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and geographic location. Base pay is only one part of the Total Rewards that MWE provides to compensate and recognize our staff professionals for their work. Full time positions are eligible for a discretionary bonus and a comprehensive benefits package.
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
As part of our ongoing commitment to be #AlwaysBetter for our people, clients and communities, we have created a culture of belonging that champions your individuality as both a person and a professional. From our competitive compensation, top benefits and award-winning professional development programs to industry-leading wellness initiatives, we support you through every stage of your life and career. With McDermott, you can live a life you love both in and outside of the office.
Physical Demands And Work Environment
The physical demands and work environment characteristics described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.
Physical Demands
- While performing the duties of this job, the employee is required to sit, use hands, reach with hands and arms, stoop, talk and hear
- Employee must occasionally lift up to twenty (20) pounds
Typical indoor office environment
Disclaimer
The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of the work being performed by people within this classification. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills required of employees assigned to this job.
Salary : $188,000 - $294,000
