Subject Matter Expert, Legal

OpenAI•San Francisco, CA

1d•$284,000 - $315,000•Hybrid

About The Position

OpenAI is seeking a legal subject matter expert to help shape AI systems and products for legal work. The role applies practical law-firm experience and judgment to define excellent legal work, evaluate model performance, and improve model behavior and product experiences. It is a hands-on individual contributor role involving legal materials, model outputs, evaluation rubrics, and product prototypes, including work on assessing reasoning where there may be no single correct answer. The role partners with Research, Product, Engineering, Go-to-Market, legal professionals, and design partners. It is based in San Francisco, California, with a hybrid schedule requiring three days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is offered to new employees.

Requirements

Have practiced law at a law firm, with substantial experience producing and reviewing work for real client matters.
Bring deep expertise in one or more practice areas, such as commercial transactions, corporate law, litigation, or regulatory work, and curiosity about workflows beyond that specialty.
Be an excellent legal researcher and writer, able to assess authorities, distinguish strong arguments from plausible ones, and explain how facts and context affect a conclusion.
Be able to make expert judgment explicit, explain shortcomings or risks in legal work, identify missed central issues, and describe what better work would look like.
Enjoy working directly with AI tools, exploring their limits, testing ideas systematically, collaborating with technical teams, and communicating clearly across disciplines.
Take ownership in ambiguous settings and be willing to build and improve evaluation materials, reference documents, rubrics, or workflows through feedback.
Care about the quality and consequences of legal work and be motivated to help shape how AI supports the legal profession.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing evaluations, benchmarks, datasets, or review frameworks for legal work or frontier AI systems.
A track record of improving legal workflows through technology, knowledge management, automation, or new ways of working.
Experience training or supervising lawyers, developing practice guidance, or translating complex legal concepts for different audiences.

Responsibilities

Define quality standards for excellent legal research, analysis, drafting, document review, and client advice, drawing on real matters and lawyers’ professional standards.
Design challenging, realistic AI model evaluations using representative facts, source materials, constraints, and deliverables, including cases involving ambiguity, competing arguments, and professional judgment.
Create and review reference work, including research memoranda, contract analyses, redlines, diligence findings, and draft legal documents.
Develop rubrics assessing legal accuracy, issue spotting, factual grounding, citation validity, jurisdictional context, and treatment of uncertainty.
Evaluate model outputs and complete legal workflows, identify recurring failures, and provide researchers and engineers with specific, actionable feedback supported by examples and corrected work.
Partner with Research on datasets, grading methods, and training tasks or environments that strengthen legal reasoning, and test whether model changes address underlying problems and improve performance on new cases.
Work with Product and Engineering to identify valuable use cases, prototype workflows, and translate evaluation lessons into experiences suited to how lawyers work.
Collaborate with legal professionals and design partners to refine standards and test usefulness in practice, applying sound judgment around confidentiality, privilege, data permissions, and professional responsibility.