Product Manager

• Prior large law firm or large management consulting firm experience

Cooley AI is seeking a Product Manager to join the Innovation team.

About Cooley AI:

Cooley AI is the wholly-owned subsidiary of Cooley LLP. The frontier development arm of the leading technology law firm in the world. Our mission is to bring the best-in-class practices from the technology field into the legal domain to help lead our firm and the legal industry into the AI era. All employees of Cooley AI are employees of Cooley and are seconded to Cooley AI.

Position summary

As a leading technology law firm, Cooley is determined to become a leader in the digital practice of law. The Product Manager (“PM”) is responsible for turning operational processes into products. They will own a portfolio of workflows, spanning firm administration, practice operations, or client delivery, with a mandate to transform them from manual, inconsistent, and opaque into instrumented, automated, and measurable, software-enabled processes. Process Cooley Technical Solution Project Managers touch are meant to become a product: designed, shipped, adopted, and continuously improved. This is a shipping role. They will be accountable for product delivery by a dedicated product squad with allocated engineering resources, dedicated budget, and executive sponsorship. They will also partner with software engineering on the how by influencing technical decisions through clear requirements, constraints, discussion, and long-term needs; software engineering owns final technical design and implementation approach. Success is defined by outcomes in production: time saved, quality improved, adoption achieved, insights delivered.

Specific duties and responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

Position Responsibilities

• Create, maintain and own a roadmap that maximizes time-to-value, reduces manual effort, and improves quality, with explicit outcome targets (e.g., cycle time, adoption, error rate)
• Prioritize opportunities using a consistent scoring model (impact, volume, reusability, risk, effort) grounded in data and stakeholder input
• Make and communicate clear tradeoffs: what ships now, what is sequenced next, and what will not be pursued (and why)
• Run structured discovery (interviews, workflow observation, data review) to validate problems, quantify opportunity size, and define MVP scope
• Deliver and produce clear, reviewable product artifacts that enable predictable delivery: PRDs/MVP briefs, acceptance criteria, and release notes appropriate to scope
• Define measurable success criteria for each increment, including baseline metrics, target outcomes, and post-launch evaluation method
• Ensure target-state workflow and operating rules (roles, states, exceptions, handoffs), are documented, comprehensive, and correct
• Ensure requirements are “shippable”: unambiguous scope, explicit non-goals, dependencies identified, and QA/validation approach defined

Key Performance Indicators

• Define and measure KPI’s
• Ensure instrumentation is built into workflows by design
• Deliver dashboards and reporting that surface bottlenecks, trends, and improvement opportunities
• Track KPIs pre and post-rollout and proactively adjust roadmap and rollout strategies to maximize measured impact

Strategy

• Develop and execute go-to-market strategy
• Drive adoption through enablement, training, and working agreements with stakeholders
• Establish standards for workflow definitions, data semantics, and component reuse
• Use outcome data and executive sponsorship to resolve disputes and standardize where needed
• Run regular operating reviews with leadership: outcomes, adoption, platform economics, roadmap tradeoffs

Shipping

• Run delivery from MVP through scale: define the release plan, sequence increments, and drive execution cadence with cross-functional squad and stakeholders
• Pilot with real teams: launch controlled trials, measure outcomes, iterate rapidly, and operationalize what works into repeatable playbooks
• Partner with Practice Innovation, a dedicated innovation function comprised of former practicing attorneys, to run pilots, measure outcomes, iterate rapidly, and scale what works
• All other duties as assigned or required

Required

Skills and experience:

• After orientation at Cooley LLP, exhibit proficiency in the Microsoft Office suite, iManage and other firm applications
• Ability to work extended and/or weekend hours, as required
• Ability to travel, as required
• 3+ years’ directly applicable experience (e.g., product management, shipping workflow, platform, or experience with automation products in production)
• Experience productizing services or building playbook-driven operations
• Demonstrated success building and shipping products from conception to release

Preferred

• Bachelor’s degree
• Demonstrated record delivering measurable improvements in cycle time, quality, adoption, or efficiency, and using such KPIs to shape the product roadmap
• Strong systems thinking and a track record of connecting people, process, and systems into scalable designs
• Data fluency and the ability to define instrumentation, metrics, ontologies, and taxonomies
• Strong technical skills, including comfort with APIs, integrations, and enterprise system constraints
• Clear ability to make ROI-based tradeoffs and drive adoption in stakeholder-rich environments
• Technical fluency (APIs, integrations, enterprise constraints); CS/engineering background a plus or equivalent hands‑on experience.
• Prior large law firm or large management consulting firm experience
• Familiarity with our stack or adjacent technologies: FastAPI, .NET Core, Angular, LangGraph, Pydantic-AI, vector databases, or similar frameworks and technologies
• Experience with workflow platforms, document automation, AI-assisted tooling, or process mining
• Experience measuring platform economics (reuse, build-time reduction, cost-to-serve)
• SQL proficiency or experience partnering closely with analytics teams

Competencies

• Self-directed learner who is curious about technology and how it works
• Self-starter who can identify problems, form hypotheses, build a test plan, and execute.
• The ability to adjust based on learnings and independently suggest pivots and refinements to existing strategies.
• Enthusiasm for legal technology and the challenge of bringing modern product thinking to high-stakes, high-trust environments where precision matters
• High emotional intelligence with the ability to build trust with senior stakeholders, navigate ambiguity with engineering leaders, and bring people along on difficult decisions.
• A team player who can successfully and enthusiastically collaborate across various disciplines, functions, and levels of responsibility
• Ability to think strategically and innovatively, possessing strong planning/analytical skills and problem-solving capabilities
• Ability to work effectively in time-sensitive situations and under extreme pressure with meticulous attention to detail – including the ability to work on multiple initiatives simultaneously.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to succinctly translate technical and complex details to a non-technical business audience.

Cooley LLP offers a competitive compensation and excellent benefits program. EOE.

The expected annual pay range for this position with a full-time schedule is $150,000 - $200,000. Please note that final offer amount will be dependent on geographic location, applicable experience and skillset of the candidate. Senior level candidates may be considered for this position and would be eligible for a higher salary range based on experience.

We offer a full range of elective benefits including medical, health savings account (with applicable medical plan), dental, vision, health and/or dependent care flexible spending accounts, pre-tax commuter benefits, life insurance, AD&D, long-term care coverage, backup care for children and/or adults and other parental support benefits. In addition to elective benefit options, benefited employees receive firm-paid life insurance, AD&D, LTD, short term medical benefits as well as 21 days of Paid Time Off (“PTO”) and 10 paid holidays each year. We provide generous parental leave and fertility benefits. New employees will attend a detailed benefit orientation to learn more about our many benefits and resources.