Innovation Manager - Built and Natural Environment in Nottingham

This role provides an exciting opportunity to drive outcome-oriented innovation within Freeths’ Built and Natural Environment Division (“BNE”). The successful candidate will combine relevant technical legal expertise with a detail-and process-oriented mindset, and a willingness to challenge conventional thinking.

This is a new role and an important enabler in the next phase of Freeths’ innovation and AI strategy. It follows a period of building out firmwide foundations, structures, and capabilities (people, process, technology), creating a platform for this role to drive innovation within BNE through new and improved service offerings, case studies, and proof points.

Though not exclusively focussed on Generative AI, a key measure of success for this role will be the successful adoption by the Division of AI and other technology tools and solutions that fundamentally transform the way we deliver legal services.

• Innovation Network Management: Responsible for convening, managing, and driving impact from Divisional Innovation Champions, including relevant Working Groups and Change Agent networks; and participation in relevant innovation events, workshops, etc.
• Idea Management: Evaluate ideas and opportunities, undertaking root cause analysis and robust requirements gathering, assessing for strong alignment to both firmwide and Divisional objectives, as well as identifying how success can be tracked and measured. Undertaking thoughtful and robust requirements gathering, and ensuring operational commitment from all stakeholders, and allowing for effective prioritisation and follow-through.
• Project Delivery: Own the end-to-end lifecycle of approved ideas, from initial conception through to measurable impact and delivery, with robust stakeholder management. Keen focus on scope control and clarity/momentum of progress.
• Success Reporting: Monitoring progress and reporting on key innovation metrics, ensuring transparency and accountability for delivering strong outcomes. This will combine adoption, ROI, and other measures, alongside preparation of Case Studies and other proof points of value.
• Central Team Collaboration: Collaborating with colleagues in Knowledge Management, and Central and other Divisionally-aligned Innovation roles, to ensure a coordinated, balanced pipeline of opportunities and prioritisation of resource. Assisting Central Innovation (Legal Design and Legal Engineering) with initiatives to (re)design, document, and build against Agreed Best Practice. Working in collaboration with Head of Legal AI to ensure successful implementation and adoption of GenAI tools and solutions, from prompting templates and workflow design to Agentic solutions.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate with other relevant stakeholders in Business Support roles, to share best practices and drive cross-functional innovation through collaboration and process alignment. In particular, close collaboration with IT (AppDev), feeding ideas/ feedback from the Division vis-à-vis platforms and tools outside the direct remit/ Business Ownership of the KM&I team.

• Minimum 3 PQE in Real Estate
• Track record of identifying and effectively implementing improvements into practice.
• A strong grasp of GenAI and its applicable capabilities/potentials, with some practical experience in harnessing for value.

• Proactive and results-oriented.
• Adaptable and comfortable managing change and ambiguity.
• Highly collaborative with strong interpersonal skills.
• High attention to detail and organisational skills.

This is an opportunity to shape the future of innovation at Freeths. If you want to be at the forefront in driving impact and change in our industry, and place a high value on driving operational excellence, we would strongly encourage you to apply for this role.