Lead Data Scientist

• Work with lawyers, subject matter experts, business analysts and engineers to find where AI and automation can have the biggest impact in legal workflows.
• Prototype LLM-based solutions and test them using human-in-the-loop review and LLM-as-judge evaluation, then guide the successful ones into production.
• Map data across matter, client, document, time-recording and billing systems, and help define a target data model.
• Set baselines and success metrics, and build before-and-after analysis and dashboards to show impact on productivity, quality, cost and margin.
• Monitor models and AI-enabled workflows in production for quality degradation and drift.

• 5+ years as a data scientist, including time leading or setting direction for DS work.
• A track record of taking models from prototype into production and keeping them running.
• Hands-on experience building and evaluating LLM solutions, including prompt design, RAG and structured evaluation. Exposure to agents, MCP or context engineering is a plus.
• Strong Python and SQL, plus experience on a cloud data platform (Databricks, Azure or Snowflake).
• Experience defining success metrics and showing measurable business impact.
• Excellent stakeholder skills, with the ability to turn workflows into testable AI proposals and explain trade-offs to senior, non-technical audiences.
• Experience mentoring or managing others, or a clear ambition to move into people leadership.

Nice to have

• Professional services, legal or legal tech experience.
• Background in a regulated, data-driven industry such as financial services or insurance.
• PE-backed or investor-owned environment experience.
• Familiarity with legal platforms (ShareDo, Clio, Aderant) or legal AI tools (Jylo, Lexis Protégé, Copilot).
• Awareness of confidentiality, privilege and data-protection considerations when applying AI to client data.

This is a full-time position with a hybrid set-up from their central London office. Unfortunately visa sponsorship and relocation support are not available for this role.

Build the data science function at a PE-backed legal services group going all-in on AI

Our client is a fast-growing, private equity-backed legal services group. They’ve grown through a successful buy-and-build strategy and now bring together several leading regional law firms across the UK.

They’ve just secured board approval to roll out a centralised AI platform across the whole group. AI adoption is already high (around 95% of lawyers use it), but use isn’t joined up across the firms. The next phase is making it structured, measurable and scalable. This is a newly created role to lead data science across that programme.

Why this role?

• Founding role: you’ll be the first data scientist and will hire, with room to grow the function from there.
• Models that ship: this is a PE-backed business with a mandate to deliver, so your work goes into production rather than sitting in a notebook.
• Real influence: you’ll be at the heart of the business, shaping how an entire group uses AI, not one of hundreds of data scientists.
• Legal is ahead of the curve: it’s one of the few industries where AI has moved from experiment to everyday practice. What you do here will play out in other sectors later, and you’ll have done it first.