Practice Ops Lead, Legal AI & KM

Practice Operations Lead, Legal Knowledge Management & AI

Function: Law Firm Advisory

Role Summary

The Practice Operations Lead sits within the Law Firm Advisory function and is accountable for the operational performance of the Legal Knowledge Management & AI practice, while remaining an active hands-on contributor to client engagements. The role is split roughly 50:50 between practice operations (pipeline management, estimating and contracting, practice development) and direct project delivery. This balance is intentional: the successful candidate needs enough current delivery experience in data/AI/KM engagements to estimate and scope credibly, and enough operational ownership to keep the practice running efficiently and developing commercially.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage the practice's engagement portfolio from intake through close-out, ensuring appropriate prioritisation, resourcing, and risk visibility at all times
• Act as the senior point of escalation for at-risk engagements, intervening early to resolve scope, resourcing, or client-side blockers
• Drive rigour in project closure — documentation, handover, and structured capture of lessons learned
• Provide leadership with regular, accurate reporting on pipeline health, team utilisation, and delivery risk
• Own project estimation for prospective client engagements, including timeline scoping and cost/resourcing models
• Liaise with legal and risk teams to support the processing of engagement contracts — MSAs, PSAs, MNDAs, SOWs — ensuring commercial terms align with what's actually deliverable
• Act as the bridge between practice delivery reality and the firm's contracting process, flagging scope or risk issues before they're baked into signed terms
• Build and refine estimation templates/benchmarks over time based on actual project outcomes, improving forecasting accuracy

Project Delivery

• Work directly on client engagements (approximately 50% of time), applying hands-on experience in data, AI, and knowledge management
• Bring current delivery expertise back into estimating, methodology, and practice development work — ensuring these stay grounded in what's actually happening on live projects
• Model best practice on engagements for junior consulting staff

Practice Development & Asset Building

• Translate delivery experience into scalable practice assets — methodologies, playbooks, diagnostic tools — that reduce time-to-value on future engagements
• Identify recurring client problems suited to productisation, and lead the build-out of these into repeatable offerings
• Establish and maintain the practice's knowledge base, ensuring institutional learning is retained and reused

Commercial Contribution

• Maintain a clear view of market movement in legal AI and knowledge management, feeding insight into the practice's strategic and commercial planning
• Partner with practice leadership and business development on the shaping, scoping, and pricing of new engagements and service offerings
• Bring a delivery-grounded perspective to proposals and pitches, ensuring commercial commitments are realistic and deliverable

Operational Excellence

• Identify and resolve structural inefficiencies in how the practice operates — approval chains, handoffs, tooling, resourcing conflicts
• Own capacity planning to keep the team appropriately utilised and delivery-ready
• Support the development of junior consulting staff, strengthening delivery capability as the practice scales

What Success Looks Like

• Accurate, defensible estimates that hold up through delivery, with minimal scope/cost surprises post-contract
• Contracting processes for engagements run smoothly, with legal/risk teams well-supported and turnaround times kept tight
• A pipeline that runs with minimal firefighting and clear visibility at all times
• A growing library of reusable methods and tools that measurably reduce delivery time on comparable engagements
• Consistent, credible delivery track record maintained alongside operational duties

Profile

• Background in legal tech, legal operations, or professional services consulting, with direct hands-on experience in data, AI, and/or knowledge management projects
• Demonstrated experience estimating project timelines and costs, ideally with exposure to contracting processes (MSAs, SOWs, NDAs)
• Comfortable operating at both a tactical (weekly pipeline/estimating) and strategic (annual practice planning) level, while also delivering client work directly
• Strong stakeholder management skills, credible with delivery teams, legal/risk functions, and senior practice leadership

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