AI, Innovation & Legal Tech

Recruiting

Law firms are investing in AI, legal technology, and innovation at a pace the market hasn't seen before. New roles are being created — Directors of Innovation, Chief AI Officers, data scientists with no precedent in traditional legal hiring — and the candidate pools for these roles are narrow, competitive, and largely passive. The firms that move deliberately and recruit with precision will build meaningful advantages. The ones that treat these searches like standard hiring will struggle.

At Onward Recruiting, we work at the intersection of legal and technology recruiting. We understand what it takes to identify candidates who have both the technical credentials and the professional fluency to operate inside a law firm environment — and we know those are rarely the same person you find by posting a job.

We are proud members of the National Association of Legal Search Consultants (NALSC) and hold ourselves to their Code of Ethics in every engagement.

WHO WE PLACE

Legal tech and innovation hiring spans a wider range of roles than most firms anticipate when they start a search. We recruit across the full spectrum:

  • AI/ML Engineers and Data Scientists — technical professionals who build, train, and deploy AI-driven tools in legal contexts, including LLM applications, contract analysis, and litigation analytics

  • Legal Tech Product Managers — professionals who sit between engineering and practice groups, translating legal workflows into product requirements and managing implementation across a firm

  • Innovation Leaders — Directors of Innovation, Chief Innovation Officers, and Chief AI Officers charged with setting strategy, driving adoption, and building internal capability around emerging technology

  • Implementation and Integration Specialists — professionals who deploy and configure AI-driven platforms and ensure adoption across attorneys and staff

  • Knowledge Management and Legal Operations — professionals who build the infrastructure — process, systems, and governance — that makes technology investments actually work at scale

  • Specialized and Emerging Roles — as the legal tech landscape evolves, so do the roles. If your search doesn't fit a standard category, that's exactly where we tend to perform best.

OUR APPROACH

Legal tech and innovation searches require a different kind of recruiter — one who can credibly engage technical candidates while also understanding what law firm leadership actually needs from these hires. Here is how we approach it.

1. Understanding the role beneath the role. A title like "Director of Innovation" means something different at every firm. Before we source a single candidate, we invest time in understanding your firm's technology landscape, adoption maturity, and what success looks like in this specific environment — not just the skills on the job description.

2. Reaching candidates who aren't looking. The strongest legal tech and innovation professionals are almost never on the open market. They are embedded in firms, vendors, or legal tech companies, doing work they find interesting enough not to leave — until the right conversation reaches them. Our network and outreach capabilities are built for exactly this.

3. Evaluating across two dimensions. Technical credibility is table stakes. What separates a legal tech hire that works from one that doesn't is usually the second dimension: can this person navigate a law firm? Can they earn partners' trust, manage without authority, and operate in a culture that didn't grow up around technology? We assess for both.

4. Moving with the pace the market demands. Legal tech talent is competitive. The best candidates are fielding multiple conversations. We run searches with urgency, keep communication tight, and don't let momentum stall between stages.

THE TEAM BEHIND THESE SEARCHES

Legal tech and innovation searches sit at a rare intersection, and so does the team that runs them.

Lacie Marshall brings 20+ years of legal recruiting experience, including senior talent leadership roles inside law firms. She understands how firms evaluate technology investments, how innovation initiatives gain or lose traction with firm leadership, and what a candidate actually needs to succeed in a legal culture — not just on paper. That insider perspective shapes every search from brief to close.

James Shenton, Co-founder and Managing Consultant at Opus Resourcing, brings 29 years of executive search experience with a 95%+ client repeat rate and a 31-day average time to placement. His practice has placed commercial, business development, and technology leadership across global organizations, and his methodology — research-led, precise, built for senior and hard-to-find talent — is applied to every search we run together.

Legal industry depth. Executive search discipline. On the same search.

Meet Lacie
Meet James

WHY ONWARD

  • We understand law firms from the inside. Our team has worked within law firm environments. We know how decisions get made, how technology initiatives succeed or fail, and what a candidate actually needs to thrive — not just to clear a first-round interview.

  • Specialized network, not a generalist database. We have built deliberate relationships in the legal tech and innovation space. See our Irell & Manella case study as an example of what that looks like in practice.

  • Passive candidate access. A meaningful portion of the best candidates for these roles aren't visible through conventional channels. That's not a problem for us — it's where we tend to do our best work.

  • Honest counsel throughout. We will tell you when a candidate pool is thinner than expected, when a role needs to be repositioned to attract the right talent, or when compensation is out of step with market reality. You will always know where your search actually stands.

  • NALSC members. Our ethical commitments aren't aspirational. They're operational.

RESOURCES

Work With Us

Whether you're looking to hire or looking to make a move, it starts with a conversation. Tell us what you're working toward and we'll tell you what's possible.

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