Strategic Project Lead – Legal

Appen; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Appen is seeking a Strategic Project Lead – Legal to drive strategic legal pilots and research projects for AI model training and evaluation, bridging customer objectives with legal expertise and Appen’s global delivery.

In this hands-on role, you will define scoping, coordinate cross-functional teams, ensure legal quality, confidentiality, and regulatory compliance, and operationalize pilots into scalable programs worldwide.

Qualifications

• JD or equivalent law degree, with 2+ years in private practice, in-house, legal research, or regulatory and compliance work.
• 2+ years leading complex projects, operational workflows, or subject‑matter initiatives.
• Strong communication and stakeholder‑management skills when working with attorneys, legal experts, researchers, and customers.
• Comfortable working in a fast‑paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Own the success of frontier legal AI pilots, taking emerging use cases to validate projects that meet defined standards for legal quality, feasibility, and cost.
• Shape how case law, contracts, statutes, regulatory filings, and legal reasoning are used for model training and evaluation, with privilege, confidentiality, and jurisdictional considerations.
• Establish workflows, expert requirements, quality standards, and operational blueprint to move pilots into scalable programs across Appen’s global delivery organization.
• Deliver pilots that meet defined success criteria and build trusted partnerships with Researchers and Customers.

Skills

Legal project management

Stakeholder management

Communication

Fast-paced environment

Education

Juris Doctor (JD) or equivalent

Job description

Appen’s Strategic Project Management team is central to the company’s growth strategy, partnering with leading AI companies and frontier model developers to deliver the data that makes models work. As Strategic Project Lead – Legal, you will run strategic legal pilots and research projects for legal AI model training and evaluation, from initial scoping through to operationalization. This is a hands‑on role bridging customer objectives, legal expertise, and Appen’s global delivery capability.

Your Impact

You will own the success of frontier legal AI pilots, taking emerging use cases to validate projects that meet defined standards for legal quality, feasibility, and cost.

Your judgement will shape how case law, contracts, statutes, regulatory filings, and legal reasoning are used for model training and evaluation, with appropriate consideration for privilege, confidentiality, and jurisdictional requirements.

Across Appen’s global delivery organization, you’ll establish the workflows, expert requirements, quality standards, and operational blueprint needed to move successful pilots into scalable programs.

Success in this role will create legal AI pilots that meet their defined success criteria, trusted partnerships with Researchers and Customers, and proven approaches that can be operationalized across future legal programs.

What You Bring

• JD or equivalent law degree, with 2+ years in private practice, in-house, legal research, or regulatory and compliance work.
• 2+ years leading complex projects, operational workflows, or subject‑matter initiatives.
• Strong communication and stakeholder‑management skills when working with attorneys, legal experts, researchers, and customers.
• Comfortable working in a fast‑paced environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience working with AI/ML companies, AI labs, or data annotation and evaluation projects.
• Experience managing legal, technical, or data‑intensive projects.
• Familiarity with legal research, contract analysis, litigation, regulatory/compliance work, or other complex legal workflows.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

At Appen, we foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and excellence. We value curiosity, accountability, and a commitment to delivering the highest quality AI solutions for frontier models.

You’ll work on complex challenges that shape the future of AI across industries and geographies, alongside talented people in a culture that values humility over ego. You’ll have the flexibility to deliver in a way that works for you and your team, supported by tools, resources, and development opportunities to continue to build your capability over time.

About Appen

Appen has been a leader in AI training data for over 30 years. We specialise in human generated data to train, fine tune, and evaluate models across generative AI, large language models, computer vision, and speech recognition. Our AI assisted data annotation platform and global crowd of more than 1 million contributors in over 200 countries support model pre training, supervised fine tuning, evaluation and benchmarking, safety and red teaming, and multilingual global expansion.

Compensation

Additional Information