Associate Director, Practice Intelligence

Morrison & Foerster, LLP • Washington, DC

45d • $175,000 - $257,000

About The Position

The Associate Director of Practice Intelligence is a strategic leader responsible for reimagining how MoFo captures, curates, and deploys the firm's institutional knowledge — and for ensuring that knowledge becomes the engine that powers the firm's AI and innovation initiatives. This role bridges the gap between the substantive practice of law and the transformative potential of AI and emerging technologies.
Reporting to the Director of Practice Innovation & Technology, this role sits within the Practice Innovation team as an integrated part of the firm's innovation strategy. The premise is simple: AI is only as good as the knowledge it's trained on. The firm's precedents, playbooks, templates, and accumulated expertise are its most valuable intellectual assets, and this role ensures they are structured, accessible, and optimized to fuel AI-enabled legal delivery.
This is a strategic, practice-embedded role for an experienced attorney who understands both the substance of legal work and the transformational potential of making firm knowledge intelligent, searchable, and actionable at scale.

Requirements

• Attorney with BigLaw Experience: You have a JD and at least 3-5 years of legal practice experience at an AmLaw 100 firm. You understand the substance of legal work deeply enough to know what knowledge matters, why it matters, and how attorneys actually use it.
• Visionary: You have experience in or a strong vision for knowledge management, but you see KM as a strategic innovation function, not an administrative one. You may have managed a KM team, served as a Professional Support Lawyer, or led knowledge initiatives within a practice group. What matters most is that you have ideas about how to make KM fundamentally different.
• Systems Thinker: You see connections between the firm's knowledge assets, its AI tools, its workflows, and its competitive position. You can design systems and frameworks, not just manage content.
• AI & Technology Fluency: You understand how AI tools consume and leverage knowledge. You don't need to be a technologist, but you grasp concepts like RAG architectures, knowledge graphs, and structured vs. unstructured data well enough to make informed strategic decisions.
• Consultative & Persuasive: You can convince a senior partner that investing 30 minutes in structuring a playbook will save their team hundreds of hours over the next year. You lead through influence, not authority.
• Education: Juris Doctor (JD) required.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead MoFo's Practice Intelligence strategy: a reimagined approach to knowledge management that treats firm knowledge as a strategic asset and a prerequisite for effective AI deployment.
• Apply legal practice experience to develop frameworks for how the firm captures, organizes, curates, and surfaces institutional knowledge across practice groups. This includes precedents, work product, playbooks, deal/case intelligence, and accumulated expertise.
• Establish "knowledge-readiness" standards for practice groups, ensuring their institutional knowledge is structured and AI-ready as a prerequisite for AI tool adoption and pilots.
• Partner with Practice Innovation colleagues and IT to ensure knowledge architecture decisions align with the firm's AI platform strategy and tool ecosystem.
• Serve as a consultative partner to practice group leaders: applying legal practice experience to diagnose knowledge gaps, identify high-value opportunities for knowledge capture and curation, and design solutions that integrate naturally into attorney workflows.
• Work directly with attorneys to develop practice-specific knowledge assets: playbooks, clause libraries, template systems, matter intelligence databases, and other structured resources that improve quality, consistency, and efficiency.
• Lead initiatives to capture tacit knowledge from experienced practitioners and translate it into structured, reusable formats that benefit the entire practice group and enhance AI tool effectiveness.
• Collaborate with the Innovation Attorney & Practice Advisor to ensure that knowledge strategy and AI tool adoption are tightly integrated.
• Serve as the bridge between firm knowledge assets and AI tool deployment to ensure that our technology & tools are powered by curated, high-quality, practice-specific knowledge rather than generic content.
• Design knowledge ingestion workflows: determine what firm knowledge should feed into AI tools, how it should be structured, and how to maintain quality and currency over time.
• Evaluate emerging AI capabilities for knowledge discovery, automated tagging, intelligent search, and knowledge graph construction.
• Partner with the Sr. Product Manager on knowledge-related product requirements for both vendor tools and internally-built solutions.
• Drive cultural change around knowledge sharing to move from a model where knowledge is hoarded by individuals to one where contributing to the firm's knowledge base is recognized as essential professional behavior.
• Design and implement programs that make knowledge contribution easy, integrated into existing workflows, and visibly valued by firm leadership.
• Develop metrics that demonstrate use and adoption of “practice intelligence” across practices.

Benefits

• MoFo offers a comprehensive benefits package starting on your first day.
• A variety of options for medical, dental, vision, life and disability coverage to meet the needs of you and your family.
• Industry-leading parental leave and family benefits including adoption and fertility treatment options and backup child and elder care.
• Global wellness program, including free access to Talkspace and Calm apps.
• Annual community service day to make an impact on your community and a birthday holiday just for fun.
• Education reimbursement annually.
• Dedicated Talent Development team.
• Competitive annual profit-sharing contribution.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree