Senior Innovation Manager in Manchester

We are looking for an experienced Senior Innovation Manager with a background in legal practice to join our FutureLaw team. In this role, you will develop and implement new innovations and legal transformation initiatives for our legal and other services. You will be responsible for identifying innovation opportunities, leading and managing innovation projects, collaborating with internal and external stakeholders, and embedding and promoting a culture of innovation within the firm.

Your Role: As Senior Innovation Manager, the successful candidate will take a leading role in helping the firm and its clients challenge convention and be ready for what comes next. You will work directly with TLT clients to understand their needs and will design and deliver products and services to meet those needs. You will also work with our legal teams to identify opportunities for delivering improved experience, services and outcomes for clients, as well as efficiencies and other business benefits for the firm. In each case you will look to use existing FutureLaw solutions (including legal strategy and operations, intelligent technology, legal project management), ideate new solutions and integrate these with our legal services. You will help to embed our culture of innovation; delivering measurable innovation outcomes and building sustainable competitive advantages through technology and process innovation. You will also play an important role in advancing the firm's Project Maui programme - our strategic initiative to embed generative AI and intelligent technology at the heart of legal practice - ensuring successful delivery and firmwide adoption.

Your day-to-day remit includes:

• Work collaboratively: Collaborating with FutureLaw team members to build and maintain an innovation network and ecosystem within and outside the firm.
• Identify and evaluate opportunities: Facilitate the generation of new innovation ideas and evaluate the opportunities for innovation and technology in the delivery of our services, both internally and externally. Work with the wider FutureLaw team to prioritise any new opportunities to ensure a balanced pipeline for innovation initiatives.
• Requirements gathering: Work with internal stakeholders across the business to collate ideas for new solutions and help gather clear requirements and prioritise opportunities. Distil requirements into a clear roadmap for solution delivery that can be used to communicate with legal, technical and operational stakeholders involved in the project.
• Manage initiatives: Manage and coordinate teams, resources, budgets, and timelines to create, evaluate, manage and implement innovative solutions. Including engagement with FutureLaw, Business Services and legal teams.
• Nurture relationships: Build up strong relationships with our stakeholders. Work with internal legal teams to drive, embed and champion innovation, legal technology and our centre of excellence philosophy within legal service lines. Develop deep and lasting relationships with clients, helping them transform their legal operations and maintain ongoing relationships to explore continuing improvement opportunities.
• Legal team business partnering: You will partner with legal teams to lead on service line level innovation support. You will coordinate input from various senior stakeholders and ensure strategic alignment between innovation initiatives and legal service delivery objectives, driving transformational outcomes.
• ROI - pre implementation: Identify and develop ROI assessments and business cases for innovation based on a good understanding of commercial terms and business requirements. Provide a clear vision of the value that is expected to be generated from any solutions you put forward and identify the KPIs we can use to measure success.
• ROI - post implementation: Review implemented solutions to ensure they deliver the value that was anticipated at the start of the project. Continually improve and iterate on solution implementations, where needed, to maximise the value generated by solutions delivered by your team.
• Deliver workshops: Run workshops using design thinking or similar innovation techniques to identify internal and external client requirements, needs and pain points. You can move seamlessly between high-level concepts and low-level detail to create holistic, practical solutions for legal processes that solve key problems.
• Communicate problems: Emphasise with legal stakeholders to help elicit new ideas for innovation. Help stakeholders clearly articulate what they need to do things better. Ask the right questions to resolve ambiguities and create a clear, shared vision for new solutions.
• Design solutions: Support the FutureLaw team in the design, development, and implementation of new solutions, adopting our agile methodologies and user-centric approaches.
• Market leadership: Position TLT as a thought leader in legal innovation, through speaking engagements, detailed recommendation reports and engaging collateral that is easy for stakeholders to understand and action, driving meaningful, lasting change.
• Communicate value: Contribute to the promotion of the FutureLaw team and its achievements internally and externally. Generate new interest in our solutions and encourage new use cases for existing solutions we have developed. Demonstrate the value the team provides for the firm and its clients.
• Promote our expertise: Support the team in the delivery of training, thought leadership and awareness sessions around innovation, technology and related areas to internal legal teams and clients. Be an advocate for TLT FutureLaw inside and outside the firm.
• Grow our consulting practice: Support the expansion of our legal transformation consulting practice, working with the Head of FutureLaw and others. Identify and develop new client opportunities. From scheduling and facilitating exploratory workshops to developing actionable recommendations reports, you will lead consulting engagements and successful client outcomes.
• Horizon scanning: Keep up to date with the latest trends and developments in innovation, technology, and operations in the legal sector and beyond.

Our employees are talented people, distinguished by technical excellence, with a willingness to embrace team working and a passion for client service. You will be able to demonstrate a similar collaborative, flexible and driven ethos and will have accumulated the following experience and skills:

• Demonstrable experience in creativity, innovation and technology in the legal sector, with prior legal practice experience (at least 5 years of PQE strongly preferred). Including designing and executing innovation projects, from ideation to implementation, using design thinking and other human-centred methodologies.
• Strong understanding of the legal market and the challenges and opportunities for innovation and technology in the delivery of legal services.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to engage and influence stakeholders at all levels.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to identify and evaluate opportunities and solutions.
• Proactive and creative mindset, with the ability to generate and implement new ideas.
• Collaborative and team-oriented approach, with the ability to work effectively with diverse and multidisciplinary teams.
• A good understanding of how legal GenAI tools (e.g. CoCounsel, Legora and Harvey) can be used to streamline legal service delivery, for both our lawyers and our clients.
• Agile and flexible working style, with the ability to adapt to changing priorities and environments.
• Legal practice experience enabling you to empathise with our lawyers and clients on complex legal issues, communicate effectively about nuanced problems and think holistically about legal and regulatory requirements for new solutions.

Desirable:

• Proven experience using relevant legal technologies to solve legal problems. In particular, experience using collaboration and innovation platforms, no-code tools (e.g. HighQ, PowerPlatform), document automation (e.g. Contract Express, Clarilis) or legal AI (e.g. Kira, Copilot and other GenAI tools) would be advantageous.
• Experience in providing consultancy services around legal transformation projects, such as document automation, contract lifecycle management, artificial intelligence, or process improvement.
• Qualification or certification in technology, innovation or project management.

Fast paced, fast growing and forward thinking, TLT is the law firm that helps clients stay one step ahead, and we do the same for our people. We work with high profile clients in innovative sectors. With local, national and international reach, we have over 1,200 people in offices across the UK and a network of partner firms across Europe, India and the US. In 2021 we were named The Lawyer's Law Firm of the Year, recognising our incredible success story. Our purpose is to protect, prepare and progress our clients for what comes next and it's essential that we do the same for our people, our planet and our communities too. In our open and collaborative culture, we encourage everyone to be their whole self, to have a voice and to contribute.

Benefits: We value our employees highly and we want you to feel valued. You'll receive a competitive salary with an annual pay review. You will also have access to an extensive range of benefits via our flexible benefits scheme including 25 days holiday (which will increase to 30 days based upon length of service) and private medical insurance. At TLT we have a progressive fully flexible working approach. We empower our people to work in a place and at a time that meets their needs, those of their clients and the wider team and firm. Part of this agile approach is a focus on hybrid working and supporting the work/life balance of our people.