Senior Counsel — Legal Domain Expert

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About the Role

Join a leading AI lab's cutting-edge GenAI team to be at the core of the AI revolution, where your expertise fuels the development of the most advanced AI models. We are hiring an experienced counsel-level lawyer to work directly with a leading AI lab's research and program management teams, improving how frontier AI models reason about real legal work. This listing is for practitioners at counsel or senior associate level, with roughly 8 to 15 years of post-qualification practice. If you are earlier in your career, or if you are at partner or General Counsel level, please apply to the corresponding Legal Domain Expert listing instead — we run separate listings by seniority so the rate matches the experience.

What You'll Do

• Data QA and reviews: Vet the quality of legal knowledge work tasks and model outputs — spotting missing behaviors, thin reasoning, and answers that read well but would not survive professional scrutiny.
• Instruction specs and golden datasets: Write high-quality instruction specs, produce golden solutions to legal problems, and define new legal tasks that reflect how the work is actually done in practice.
• Benchmarks and domain depth: Design challenging legal tasks and evaluation sets, and help build legal-specific skills and tools together with the research team.
• Calibration: Work with client researchers and specialists in adjacent fields to keep standards consistent, translating tacit legal judgment into explicit, teachable criteria.

You're a Good Fit If You

• Education: Juris Doctor (JD) from an accredited law school; a highly ranked school is strongly preferred.
• Experience: 8 to 15 years of substantive post-qualification legal practice at a reputable institution — an established law firm, a corporate legal department, a regulatory body, or a court. Internships and clerkships alone do not count.
• Seniority: Currently at or has reached counsel, senior associate, senior in-house counsel, or Assistant General Counsel level, with real ownership of matters.
• Domain depth: Genuine specialization in at least one substantive practice area, for example corporate and transactional, litigation and dispute resolution, regulatory and compliance, intellectual property, employment and labor, or tax.
• Licensure: Admission to at least one U.S. state bar, in good standing.
• AI fluency: Hands-on working use of large language models in your professional work, and the judgment to tell a well-reasoned answer from a plausible-sounding wrong one.
• Availability: Able to commit reliably to 40 hours per week for an initial engagement of 6 months.
• Location: Living in the Bay Area, California, and able to work on-site with the client's team multiple days each week, when required. Candidates not currently based in the Bay Area must be willing to relocate there at their own cost; relocation assistance is not provided.

Role Highlights

Pay & Payout

Independent contractor engagement. Apply via the link below - Mercor handles onboarding and pays weekly via Stripe or Wise.

Common Questions

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