Director of Legal Innovation and AI

Director of Legal Innovation and AI

Los Angeles; New York City; Washington, D.C.

Gibson Dunn is a leading global law firm, advising clients on significant transactions and disputes. Our exceptional teams craft and deploy creative legal strategies that are meticulously tailored to every matter, however complex or high-stakes. The firm's work is distinguished by a unique combination of precision and vision.

Based in Los Angeles, New York or Washington, D.C., the Director of Legal Innovation and AI is a new role that reflects the firm's conviction that legal innovation is a strategic imperative that will reshape legal practice, client service, and firm competitiveness for the next decade. The role will serve as a firm legal innovation leader: executing the enterprise legal innovation strategy, governing the responsible deployment of AI across 2,200+ attorneys and all offices, building the firm's internal AI capability, and supporting Gibson Dunn's authoritative voice on AI in legal practice.

This role reports to the Chief Legal Operations Officer.

Responsibilities Include:

Execute on Legal Innovation Strategy

• Execute on the evolving firmwide legal innovation and AI multi-year roadmap, approved by firm leadership, covering practice-group AI deployment, client-facing capabilities, operational AI, and AI talent development.
• Advise the CLOO on AI's strategic implications for firm competitiveness, pricing strategy, talent markets, and client expectations.
• Lead Legal Innovation and AI competitive intelligence: maintain awareness of how peer firms are deploying AI, and position Gibson Dunn accordingly.
• Run the firm's AI Execution Committee, with representation from all business services teams.

Legal Tech & AI Vendor Leadership

• Own the firm's Legal Tech and AI vendor portfolio end-to-end: evaluation, selection, contract negotiation, performance governance, and sunset decisions across all tools, including generative AI platforms, contract analysis, and emerging entrants.
• Working with IT, maintain a rigorous AI evaluation framework, score vendors on accuracy, security architecture, confidentiality controls, attorney UX, integration capability, and total cost of ownership.
• Working with Procurement, negotiate enterprise agreements at the executive level, secure preferential terms, security commitments, and roadmap influence with key Legal Tech and AI vendors.
• Build executive relationships with Legal Tech and AI platform leadership to give Gibson Dunn early access to new capabilities and a voice in product development.
• Manage the firm's AI tool budget and report to the CLOO on investment, ROI, and portfolio optimization on a quarterly basis.

AI Solutions & Custom Development

• Lead the firm's AI Solutions function: overseeing development of custom tools, GibsonAI practice-group prompts, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, integrations, and API-connected legal workflows.
• Working with the CLOO, establish and execute development standards for all firm AI development: output validation protocols, hallucination testing, model version control, security review gates, and human-in-the-loop requirements.
• Partner with the Director of Data Services to ensure tools and solutions have access to clean, governed, AI-ready data infrastructure, including vector databases, embedding pipelines, and retrieval indexes.
• Evaluate advanced AI capabilities, including fine-tuning, custom model development, multi-agent architectures, and AI-native workflow automation, and provide executive-level recommendations.

Legal Tech Governance, Ethics & Risk

• Enforce the firm's AI Governance Framework.
• Own the firm's ongoing compliance with bar association guidance on AI across all jurisdictions, maintaining a real-time compliance register and advising partners and associates on their professional responsibility obligations.

Adoption, Training & Culture

• Deliver upon the AI Institute literacy and adoption program, encompassing onboarding modules, practice-group workshops, CLE-eligible training, and ongoing competency development for attorneys at all levels.
• Sponsor an AI Cohort Program: a network of attorney and staff advocates across practice groups and offices who accelerate peer adoption and surface real-world AI use cases.
• Partner with Legal Recruiting to position Gibson Dunn's AI program as a market-leading talent differentiator, integrating AI fluency into lateral hiring messaging and associate evaluation frameworks.
• Partner with Professional Development to embed AI competency into the associate training curriculum, from first-year orientation through partnership-track development.

Executive Leadership

• Build, lead, and develop a high-performing team of professionals across AI solutions, governance, and adoption, with a deep commitment to talent development and succession planning.
• Maintain a strong peer network with AI leaders at Am Law 100 firms, technology companies, and AI research institutions to ensure the firm's program reflects best-in-class thinking.

Qualifications:

• 15+ years of progressive experience in AI/ML strategy, enterprise technology, or legal technology; at least 5 years in a similar level role.
• Proven track record of designing, deploying, and governing enterprise programs at scale, including generative AI, large language models, and AI-enabled workflow automation.
• Deep expertise in the generative AI landscape: LLM capabilities and limitations, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, AI evaluation methodologies, and responsible AI frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience leading AI vendor evaluation, enterprise contract negotiation, and vendor performance governance at the executive level.
• Exceptional executive presence: ability to advise and influence managing partners, boards, and peers through compelling, evidence-based narratives.
• Experience building and leading multidisciplinary teams.
• Track record developing and implementing AI governance frameworks, ethics policies, and incident response protocols in a regulated environment.
• Deep understanding of AI ethics, responsible AI principles, and professional responsibility obligations governing attorney AI use.

Experience:

• Prior experience in a law firm, legal operations, in-house legal department, or legal technology company.
• Familiarity with legal AI platforms: Harvey, CoCounsel, Lexis+ AI, iManage integrations, or equivalent.
• Experience building custom AI tools using Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, or other frontier APIs, including RAG pipelines, document-processing workflows, and multi-agent systems.
• Knowledge of attorney professional responsibility rules governing AI (Model Rules 1.1, 1.6, 3.3, 5.1, 5.3) and emerging jurisdictional guidance.
• JD, MBA, or an advanced degree in Computer Science, AI, or a related discipline.

Gibson Dunn will consider for employment qualified Applicants with Criminal Histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of local law.

The annual compensation range for this position is $300,000 – $380,000. The salary offered within this range will depend upon qualifications and other operational considerations.

Benefits offered for this position include health care; retirement benefits; paid days off, including sick time, and vacation time; parental leave; basic life insurance; Flexible Spending Accounts; as well as discretionary, performance-based bonuses.