If you’ve read the first two articles in this series, you’ll now know what an innovation lawyer does and how different firms are structuring the function. The obvious next question is: who gets hired to be an innovation lawyer?
The honest answer is that the strongest candidates for an innovation role are rarely the ones with the loudest “AI interest”; they’re the ones who can combine credibility, curiosity and execution, and, crucially, prove that they have all three.
Common traits that travel well
Across the market, the most attractive candidates for innovation lawyer roles tend to share a fairly consistent set of qualities, regardless of which firm or model they’re targeting.
- They have legal training and genuine credibility with fee-earners;
- They communicate well across seniority levels and can also translate between lawyers and technical teams without losing either audience.
- They think in workflows and processes, not just legal issues.
- They have a product mindset and are comfortable with requirements, user needs, testing and iteration;
- They’re genuinely curious about technology without confusing curiosity with qualification;
- Plus, they’re pragmatic: willing to experiment, measure what works, and train others rather than hoarding knowledge.
None of this is revolutionary, but the combination is rarer than you’d think, which is exactly why these roles remain hard to fill successfully.
Candidates who tend to do especially well
If you’re wondering whether your background fits that of an innovation lawyer, the profiles that tend to land well in these roles are:
- Mid-level associates who’ve become the “go-to” person for legal tech on their matters, not because they were told to, but because they couldn’t help themselves.
- Knowledge lawyers, PSLs and KM lawyers with strong process insight and a practical delivery mindset. If you’ve spent years turning legal expertise into usable resources, the jump is shorter than you think.
- Legal ops professionals with enough legal fluency to work credibly with partners. The fluency part matters: if you can’t hold your own in a conversation about risk allocation, you’ll struggle to influence how it’s done.
- Lawyers from tech-heavy practice areas — TMT, data/privacy, funds, finance, high-volume transactional work — who can demonstrate genuine workflow awareness, not just subject-matter expertise.
- Hybrid profiles: law plus product, law plus coding, law plus consulting-style execution. These are still unusual enough to stand out, and firms increasingly value them.
The common thread is not technical depth. It’s the ability to sit in between legal practice and something else — technology, process, product, operations — and be useful in both directions.
How to get ahead now
This is where most people undershoot. They read about AI, follow a few LinkedIn accounts, and assume that counts as preparation; however, it does not. Interest is not evidence; if you want to stand out, you need to show that you can do innovation work, not just talk about wanting to.
1. Build a “translation” track record
Create tangible examples of where you identified a pain point, mapped the process, tested a tool or workaround, improved the workflow, gathered feedback and documented the outcome. These can be small, but they just have to be real. A candidate who can walk through one genuine example of improving how legal work gets done will always be more compelling than someone who can list ten tools they’ve “explored”.
2. Learn product basics (enough to be useful)
You don’t need to become a software engineer. But you should be comfortable with user stories, requirements gathering, scoping, pilots and POCs, testing, adoption metrics and iteration cycles. That language increasingly appears in these roles for a reason; if it’s foreign to you, you’ll spend your first six months learning vocabulary instead of delivering.
3. Improve your AI literacy beyond the buzzwords
Candidates who stand out can discuss appropriate use cases versus poor ones, hallucination risk and validation, confidentiality and data handling, workflow design, prompt iteration, user adoption challenges, and governance and policy implications. You need practical understanding of the jargon.
4. Become visibly useful inside your current team
The best springboard into an innovation lawyer role is often your current one. Run a short training session, create a matter checklist that improves AI-assisted review, test and compare outputs from approved tools, draft internal guidance on safe use, or help a partner, PSL or KM lead run a small pilot.
If you’ve never implemented change inside your current team, you’re not yet ready for an innovation lawyer move. Similarly, if you’ve never persuaded a sceptical partner to try something new, you haven’t yet tested the core skill these roles actually require.
5. Prepare better interview questions
Candidates often ask, “What tools do you use?” This is not a bad question, but it’s not a revealing one either. A better set of questions looks like this:
- Where does this role sit organisationally?
- How is success measured in the first 12 months?
- What has this team shipped in the last year?
- What percentage of the role is strategy, versus delivery, versus training?
- What budget or vendor decision influence does the role have?
- How does the firm handle governance and responsible use?
- Is the model centralised, embedded by practice, or hybrid?
These questions tell you whether you’re stepping into a genuine platform or a well-dressed support function. They also signal to the firm that you understand what the role truly involves, which in itself is a differentiator.
Final thoughts for candidates considering a move
If you’re thinking about moving into the innovation lawyer space, the right mindset is not “I want to escape fee-earning.” It should be: “I want to apply legal judgment in a more leveraged way.”
This framing tends to produce stronger applications, better interviews and better career decisions. Leverage is what senior law firm leadership understands. It’s also what separates candidates who thrive in these roles from the ones who find themselves adrift six months in, wondering why nobody is listening to their strategy deck.
If you would like to discuss the role of an innovation lawyer in more depth, or if you wish to explore your career options, please get in touch with me directly.
