Senior AI & Innovation Counsel

Norton Rose Fulbright•Austin, TX

About The Position

At Norton Rose Fulbright, people thrive because of a shared commitment to quality, unity and integrity. The highly regarded law firm consistently receives recognition from Great Place to Work and Top Workplaces, two companies that specialize in assessing organizational culture. Teams collaborate across regions, value new ideas and deliver meaningful client solutions, supported by a culture that embraces ambition, development and shared success. With more than 3,000 lawyers and 3,000 business services professionals working together across 50 offices worldwide, this global law firm provides a full range of legal services to leading corporations and financial institutions operating in key markets and sectors. About you You are an accomplished attorney seeking to leverage your technical and commercial fluency in a global law firm. You are keen on not just leveraging AI for client delivery but rethinking how delivery gets executed at scale with the technology available. You are equally comfortable discussing workflows with attorneys, legal practice considerations with engineers, and translating ambiguity into commercial products. You bring a curious and conscientious mindset: focusing on client value while ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, and aligned with firm risk tolerance. About the role Norton Rose Fulbright has a long-standing commitment to leveraging technology to enhance legal services and streamline operations. We are seeking a highly motivated and experienced Senior AI & Innovation Counsel to play a central role in embedding AI into legal practice and driving adoption across the firm. This role sits within the US Innovation team and reports to the US Director, Head of Innovation, and collaborates closely with legal practice groups, IT, KM, and other business services functions. A successful candidate will bring strong legal practice background, a practical understanding of AI technologies, and the ability to lead a team as well as complex, cross-functional initiatives. This is a unique opportunity to help build an AI and Innovation lawyer function inside one of the world's leading law firms -- with organizational support, a growing team, and genuine executive sponsorship. The work is consequential, the problems are hard, and the potential to reshape how legal services are delivered is real. This role is critical to translating the firm’s AI investments into real-world impact. By combining legal judgment with practical innovation, the Senior AI & Innovation Counsel ensures that solutions are not only built -- but trusted, adopted, and embedded into how legal work gets done.

Requirements

JD required
Minimum seven years' experience as a practicing attorney or in KM/ Innovation within professional services, preferably at an AmLaw 100 in a practice group of strategic importance to Norton Rose Fulbright
Demonstrated and deep understanding of legal workflows and how legal work is delivered in practice
Proven experience with legal technology, project management, business planning, and team management
Comfort operating in ambiguity: this function is still being defined, and you will help define and mature it
Excellent communication skills and ability to translate business or legal requirements into technical solutions and workflows; able to present to senior partners and work alongside engineers in the same day
Demonstrated ability to manage multiple projects, deliver results in a fast-paced environment, and drive organizational behavior change
Genuine broader market curiosity about AI and its implications for the future of legal practice – beyond simply familiarity with the tools
Understanding of data privacy, security, and responsible AI considerations in a professional services context
Experience developing scalable frameworks, playbooks, or reusable solution patterns

Nice To Haves

Practical understanding of AI technologies

Responsibilities

Embed within priority practice group(s) and support other Innovation teams and key Innovation initiatives by encouraging adoption of AI tools and workflows
Validate AI outputs through a practiced legal lens, ensuring they meet professional, ethical, and client standards
Translate attorney needs into actionable requirements for other innovation and legal engineering teams
Integrate AI and agentic tools into existing legal workflows to improve efficiency, consistency, and quality
Maintain a pipeline of practice driven priorities and use cases
Contribute to a library of reusable workflow patterns and agentic playbooks that can be adapted across practices
Identify, prioritize, and develop high-value use cases based on real legal work and practice experience
Decompose legal matter workflows into discrete tasks, decision points, and dependencies to identify where AI and agentic solutions can drive the greatest impact
Partner with other Innovation functions and translate decomposed workflows into clear functional specifications: agent behaviors, guardrails, evaluation criteria, and success metrics
Partner with attorneys, other Innovation teams, and Legal Practice Management to map matter lifecycles and pinpoint high-leverage automation opportunities within each phase
Support rapid prototyping and testing of new workflows and tools; and help iterate solutions from concept to scalable, production-ready offerings
Capture feedback and measurement loops from attorneys to continuously improve and validate solutions performance against attorney expectations and matter quality standards
Operate as a player-coach, balancing hands-on engagement with people leadership and development
Manage and mentor a team of AI and innovation lawyers as the function scales
Establish AI and Innovation lawyer best practices/standards, cross-functional collaboration expectations and workflows, and quality practices for the team
Partner with the Director of Innovation and senior leadership to shape the AI and Innovation lawyer roadmap and org design
Lead with impact and client value, and help shape future commercial outcomes and team structures
Build trusted relationships with partners and attorneys across practice groups
Serve as an adoption conduit and be an interface between lawyers, Innovation, and technical teams
Work directly with Innovation leadership, attorneys, practice leaders, and business stakeholders to co-design solutions
Partner with the AI Governance & Program Manager, IT, and Info security teams to ensure solutions meet firm standards and governance requirements