Practice Innovation Advisor (Chicago)

Katten is a full-service law firm with approximately 650 attorneys in locations across the United States and in London and Shanghai. Clients seeking sophisticated, high-value legal services turn to Katten for counsel locally, nationally and internationally. The firm’s core areas of practice include corporate, financial markets and funds, restructuring, intellectual property, litigation, real estate, structured finance and securitization, transactional tax planning, private credit and private wealth. Katten represents public and private companies in numerous industries, as well as a number of government and nonprofit organizations and individuals.

Practice Innovation Advisor

Nearly 50 years ago, 24 attorneys in Chicago had a vision to create a law firm more innovative and entrepreneurial than those they had left. Their inspiration was their clients and finding even better ways to provide superb legal services and creative advice to them. Our business has evolved over the decades—but our vision remains the same. Today, Katten Muchin Rosenman is the full-service, business-oriented law firm that our founders envisioned, providing sophisticated, high-value legal services across the United States and abroad.

Our innovation team maintains that vision by exploring new process and technology solutions to modernize our client service delivery and firm operations. We infuse business design, technology, and data science into the practice of law. Reporting to the Chief Innovation Officer, the Practice Innovation Advisor will be primarily dedicated to the firm's transactional practice groups (such as Corporate, M&A, Real Estate, Finance, and Tax), partnering directly with practice group leadership to identify, prioritize, and deliver innovation initiatives that improve the efficiency and quality of transactional legal work.

This is a working-manager role: the Practice Innovation Advisor will project manage the practice innovation portfolio for their assigned practice groups from intake through delivery and will supervise a team of Practice Innovation Analysts and Senior Practice Innovation Analysts, providing day-to-day direction, coaching, and performance management. The Practice Innovation Advisor is expected to combine hands-on project leadership with people management, serving as the primary point of contact between the innovation function and transactional practice leadership.

The Practice Innovation Advisor can be located in our Chicago or New York office. Katten offers a hybrid work model, allowing the flexibility to work both on-site and remotely on a regular basis (KattenFlex).

Essential Duties and Responsibilities include, but may not be limited to, the following. Other duties may be requested and/or assigned. Essential functions are primary job duties that an individual must be able to perform successfully with or without a reasonable accommodation. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• Serve as the primary innovation relationship owner for the firm's transactional practice groups, partnering with practice group leaders, partners, and business professionals to identify opportunities where innovation can improve or change service delivery.
• Project manage the practice innovation portfolio for assigned transactional groups end-to-end — intake, scoping, prioritization, resourcing, timeline management, risk management, and reporting on status to firm and practice leadership.
• Supervise and manage a team of Practice Innovation Analysts and/or Senior Practice Innovation Analysts dedicated to transactional work, including assigning and prioritizing work, coaching, conducting performance reviews, and supporting hiring and onboarding.
• Collaborate with lawyers, clients, firm leadership, and operational teams, including Practice Operations, Talent, Information Technology, Marketing and Business Development, and Finance, to grow the firm's culture of innovation.
• Lead the design and delivery of innovative client solutions and legal technologies that support the efficient management of transactional matters, working directly with deal teams.
• Maintain deep, current knowledge of emerging technology tools relevant to transactional practice (contract automation, diligence/AI review tools, closing/deal management platforms, etc.) and translate that knowledge into a practice-specific innovation roadmap.
• Evaluate and pilot new tools and procedures that promote productivity and service quality, including building business cases, ROI analyses, and budget recommendations for firm and practice leadership.
• Partner with our data science team, Katten DataLAB, to scope and deliver data-driven solutions to transactional practice challenges and client needs.
• Drive adoption of new processes and technology across transactional practice groups, including change management, training strategy, and communications.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration across transactional practice groups by identifying reusable solutions, documenting leading practices and lessons learned, and adapting successful innovations for use across the transactional groups.
• Set and manage governance and operational standards for the practice innovation team's work, including documentation, intake processes, and workflow tracking.
• Lead software pilot programs for transactional use cases — defining success criteria, overseeing testing, and making go/no-go and scale-up recommendations to firm leadership.
• Act as an internal and external advocate for the innovation function, representing the team to senior firm leadership, practice group heads, and clients.
• Lead and direct the team's contributions to the firm's AI and Gen AI efforts as they relate to transactional practice, including use-case prioritization and oversight of pilots.
• Manage projects and staff under the general direction of the Senior Innovation Manager, escalating firm-wide or cross-practice issues as appropriate.

Supervisory Responsibilities

• This position directly supervises Practice Innovation Analysts and/or Senior Practice Innovation Analysts dedicated to the firm's transactional practice groups, including responsibility for work assignment, coaching, performance management, and input into hiring decisions.

Knowledge, Skills And Abilities

• A Juris Doctor degree (J.D.) is required and six (6) or more years of experience working within a large law firm or in the legal technology industry, preferably supporting or working closely with transactional practice groups (such as Corporate, M&A, Real Estate, Finance, or Tax); or equivalent combination of education and experience. The ideal candidate will also have significant hands-on experience and/or formal training in emerging legal technologies, process improvement, design thinking, and/or data science, along with demonstrated experience managing or mentoring other team members.
• Prior people-management experience, including assigning work, coaching, and conducting performance reviews, is strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated project management experience leading multiple concurrent, cross-functional initiatives from intake through delivery; formal project management training or certification (e.g., PMP) is a plus but not required.
• Hands-on, working experience with several of the following, including configuration-, administration-, or power-user-level experience with at least one or two:
• Legal-focused generative AI tools (such as Harvey, CoCounsel, Legora).
• Document automation tools (such as Avvoka).
• Document analysis and diligence tools (such as Draftwise).
• Collaboration platforms (such as SharePoint, HighQ, etc.); and/or Business Intelligence/ETL platforms.
• General AI tools like Claude, OpenAI and Perplexity, with demonstrated experience evaluating output quality and designing effective prompts/workflows.
• Experience building business cases, ROI analyses, and budget recommendations, and presenting them persuasively to partners and firm leadership.
• Experience negotiating with and managing technology vendors, including contract renewals and performance management.
• Displays intelligence, creativity, resilience, and persistence in solving varied, complex, and non-routine problems.
• Comfortable working both independently and in diverse teams, and skilled at motivating and developing direct reports.
• Displays excellent time management and project management skills to meet objectives and deadlines across multiple concurrent initiatives and direct reports.
• Able to effectively distill complex information, synthesize, simplify, and present to Firm Management, attorneys, and business professionals.
• Possess excellent reading, writing, grammar, spelling, punctuation, proofreading, and formatting skills in order to interpret and analyze source data, prepare correspondence and documentation, and proofread material for grammatical, typographical and spelling errors.
• Able to perform mathematical calculations and apply mathematical concepts when computing, reconciling balances, verifying numerical data, and preparing various reports.
• Able to operate standard office equipment including computers, printers, telephones, photocopiers, scanners, calculators, facsimiles, etc.
• Able to regularly lift and/or move up to 10 pounds.

The annualized salary range for this position is $140,000 - $200,000. Actual pay will be adjusted based on experience an]]> <