Innovation Data Scientist

About Kirkland & Ellis

At Kirkland & Ellis, we don’t just meet the standard for legal excellence — we set it. Our culture is built on teamwork, ingenuity and an unwavering commitment to continuous growth. We tackle the most sophisticated legal challenges with bold ideas and innovative solutions, powered by the exceptional experience and ambition of our 7,000+ people, including 4,000+ attorneys, across 24 offices worldwide. Our dedicated professionals share our lawyers’ commitment to excellence and show up each day to do meaningful work that helps drive global business, investment and innovation forward.

What You’ll Do

• Energized by applying advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to transform how a leading law firm delivers client service and drives business performance.
• Partnering closely with attorneys, innovation leaders, and enterprise teams, you’ll translate complex legal and business challenges into secure, scalable AI and machine learning (ML) solutions.
• Lead discovery sessions with attorneys and practice stakeholders to convert end-to-end legal processes into clear data and LLM requirements, measurable success criteria, and evaluation plans aligned to business value.
• Build and evaluate AI/ML techniques, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, vector database integrations, and orchestration frameworks to assess feasibility, performance, and scalability.
• Develop solutions for contract analysis, due diligence review, document summarization, large-scale agreement comparisons, and other practice-driven needs.
• Define and operationalize production-ready evaluation standards, measuring accuracy, robustness, bias and fairness, hallucinations, and business-aligned performance thresholds with ongoing monitoring.
• Create internal libraries, documentation, and repeatable development patterns that enable efficient and scalable AI solution delivery.
• Partner with embedded data science teams and business stakeholders to align priorities, co-develop solutions, and ensure successful adoption across practice groups.
• Present evaluation results, trade-offs, risks, and expected impact in clear, accessible language to non-technical stakeholders, including attorneys and business leaders.
• Evaluate emerging tools, open-source libraries, and vendor platforms to inform technology strategy, contribute to internal thought leadership, and support firmwide AI enablement initiatives.
• Mentor & Enable Growth – Support and guide data scientists and engineers, fostering knowledge sharing and strengthening the firm’s AI capabilities.

What You’ll Bring

• Education – bachelor’s degree in computer science, statistics, mathematics, engineering, or a related quantitative field; advanced degree preferred.
• Experience – 7+ years of experience delivering AI/ML solutions in professional services, financial services, legal, or technical environments, with substantial cross-functional collaboration involving legal and business stakeholders.
• Technical Expertise – Strong Python skills for data analysis, statistical modeling, and AI/ML prototyping (e.g., pandas, PyTorch, TensorFlow); advanced SQL proficiency; experience building data pipelines and preparing structured and unstructured datasets.
• AI & LLM Application Knowledge – Hands-on experience with AI platforms and tools (e.g., OpenAI, Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Hugging Face, LangFlow, LangChain), vector databases, retrieval methods for unstructured data, and knowledge-graph-backed applications.
• Production AI Evaluation – Demonstrated experience defining and implementing evaluation frameworks for enterprise AI solutions, including monitoring for accuracy, robustness, hallucinations, bias, and fairness.
• Visualization & Communication – Familiarity with data visualization tools (e.g., Plotly, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI) and the ability to translate complex findings into clear, actionable insights.
• Legal & Industry Insight – Familiarity with legal use cases such as due diligence, contract review, or legal research; experience in a law firm or Microsoft Azure environment preferred.
• Leadership & Collaboration – Proven ability to mentor peers, collaborate across multidisciplinary teams, and drive adoption of AI solutions at scale.

Compensation

The base salary range below represents the low and high end of the salary range for this position in each of the below locations. This range may differ based on your geographic location and cost of living considerations.

• Chicago: $158,000 - $187,000
• New York: $158,000 - $208,000

How to Apply

Thank you for your interest in Kirkland & Ellis LLP. To complete an application and submit your resume, please click "Apply Now." Don't meet every job requirement? That's okay! If you're excited about this role but your experience doesn't perfectly fit every qualification, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right person for this role or others at Kirkland.

Equal Employment Opportunity

All employment decisions, including the recruiting, hiring, placement, training availability, promotion, compensation, evaluation, disciplinary actions, and termination of employment (if necessary) are made without regard to the employee’s race, color, creed, religion, sex, pregnancy or childbirth, personal appearance, family responsibilities, sexual orientation or preference, gender identity, political affiliation, source of income, place of residence, national or ethnic origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military veteran status, unfavorable discharge from military service, physical or mental disability, or on any other basis prohibited by applicable law.