AI & Innovation Lead

The Role

The AI and Innovation Lead will play a central role in shaping and delivering Mishcon's AI and innovation agenda across legal practice, business operations, and service model innovation. Reporting to the Head of Product and working closely with Technology leadership, this role will identify high-value opportunities, turn ideas into practical propositions, and lead the experimentation, incubation, and scaling of AI-enabled products, workflows, and ways of working.

This role sits at the intersection of Product, Technology, legal practice groups, and firm strategy. It is responsible for ensuring that innovation activity is grounded in real user needs, aligned to firm priorities, and translated into measurable outcomes. The role will lead a multidisciplinary team spanning product management, innovation management, and selected implementation capability, and will work closely with stakeholders across the firm to move from concept to delivery at pace.

Duties and Responsibilities

Lead Mishcon's AI and innovation portfolio

• Own and shape a portfolio of AI and innovation opportunities across legal workflows, business operations, and service model innovation.
• Prioritise opportunities based on strategic fit, user need, delivery feasibility, value potential, and adoption readiness.
• Balance short-term impact with longer-term capability building and differentiated innovation.
• Act as a visible champion for practical, responsible innovation, encouraging experimentation while reinforcing the importance of trust, quality and professional standards.

Drive 0-1 product and proposition development

• Lead the discovery, design, and incubation of new AI-enabled products, workflow capabilities, and service propositions.
• Work with lawyers, business teams, and senior stakeholders to identify unmet needs and clear problem statements, and test new concepts rapidly.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with legal technology start-ups, scale-ups, and established vendors, staying close to developments across the legal tech and automation landscape.
• Translate ideas into MVPs, pilots, or prototype services with clear hypotheses, success measures, and pathways to scale.

Enable practical AI adoption across the firm

• Partner with practice groups and business teams to embed AI into real workflows and ways of working.
• Bring meaningful integrations to reduce workflow time, improve the user experience and service design, thus reducing cost-to-serve.
• Ensure successful initiatives move beyond pilot into repeatable, supported use.

Support service model innovation

• Work with legal and business stakeholders to explore how AI can improve the delivery, packaging, and scalability of legal services.
• Identify opportunities for new or enhanced client propositions, differentiated ways of working, and more effective service delivery models.
• Help translate innovation into tangible improvements in client value, lawyer experience, and firm capability.

Evaluate and shape external innovation opportunities

• Assess emerging vendors, partners, and technologies across the AI and legal technology landscape.
• Run structured experiments (with external vendors or suppliers where appropriate), and make clear recommendations on where the firm should buy, build, partner, or stop.
• Bring informed external insight into the firm in a way that is practical, commercially grounded, and aligned to strategic priorities.

Develop practical approaches to AI-enabled workflows

• Work closely with Technology, Data, Architecture, and Security teams to ensure AI-enabled solutions are deliverable, supportable, and aligned with firm standards.
• Help define practical patterns for integrating AI capabilities into existing systems, workflows, and knowledge assets, including human-in-the-loop controls where needed.
• Support the development of reusable approaches to AI delivery that can be applied consistently across the innovation portfolio.

Lead a multidisciplinary innovation team

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of product managers, innovation managers, and selected implementation capability.
• Create a high-performance environment focused on curiosity, execution, learning, accountability, and outcomes.
• Build strong ways of working across Product, Technology, legal teams, and business stakeholders.

Measure value and inform investment decisions

• Define success metrics for innovation initiatives and track outcomes such as adoption, productivity, quality, risk reduction, capacity creation, and client impact.
• Provide senior stakeholders with clear evidence on what is working, what is not, and where further investment is justified.
• Ensure the firm's innovation effort remains focused on meaningful outcomes rather than activity alone.

Skills and Experience

Essential

• Strong product and innovation leadership skills, with the ability to take opportunities from discovery through to pilot, adoption, and scale.
• Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills, with the ability to work credibly across legal practice groups, business teams, Product, Technology, and senior leadership.
• Strong commercial judgement, including the ability to assess opportunities, prioritise investment, and articulate the value, trade-offs, and risks of different options.
• Demonstrable ability to lead multidisciplinary teams and create clarity in ambiguous or fast-moving environments.
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making capability, with a pragmatic approach to balancing innovation, delivery, and operational reality.
• High levels of curiosity and external awareness, with the ability to identify relevant market developments and translate them into practical opportunities for the firm.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to frame problems clearly, tell a compelling value story, and align diverse stakeholders around a shared direction.
• Good understanding of AI-enabled workflows, emerging product and delivery patterns, and the practical considerations involved in deploying innovation in a regulated professional environment.
• A delivery-focused mindset, with a clear bias toward outcomes, adoption, and measurable impact.

Desirable

• Experience leading cross-functional teams spanning product, delivery, technology, and business stakeholders.
• Experience in professional services, legal services, financial services, consulting, or another regulated or knowledge-intensive environment.
• Experience evaluating and working with external technology partners, vendors, or start-ups, including structured experimentation and buy/build/partner decision-making.
• Experience enabling change and adoption, particularly where success depends on changing user behaviour and embedding new ways of working.
• Familiarity with AI platforms, low-code or workflow tools (ideally MS Power Platform), and practical approaches to integrating AI into existing systems and processes.
• Experience contributing to or leading service model innovation, proposition development, or client-facing innovation initiatives would be advantageous.
• Experience working in environments where innovation must be balanced with security, reliability, and professional standards would be beneficial.

Please note that this job profile is not an exhaustive list of duties but merely an outline of the key components of the role. You may be required by your line manager to take on additional responsibilities when requested.

About Mishcon de Reya LLP

Mishcon de Reya is an independent law firm, which now employs over 1400 people with more than 650 lawyers offering a wide range of legal services to companies and individuals. The firm has grown rapidly in recent years, showing more than 40% revenue growth in the past five years alone.

With presence in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Singapore, Hong Kong and UAE, the firm services an international community of clients and provides advice in situations where the constraints of geography often do not apply.

The work the firm undertakes is cross-border, multi-jurisdictional and complex, centered around three increasingly entwined and connected sectors: the Innovation Economy, Private Wealth and Capital, and Real Estate. The firm is known as a disputes powerhouse with a formidable capacity firmwide for dispute resolution.

We strive to create a fully diverse and inclusive workplace where all our people are empowered to fulfil their potential. We are proud of our agile working culture and are always happy to talk flexible working.

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