Subject Matter Expert, Legal

About the Team

We are building AI systems that help people tackle complex, consequential work in the legal industry. Law demands careful reasoning, precise language, and sound judgment: understanding the facts, identifying the right questions, weighing competing interpretations, and helping clients decide what to do next. We see an opportunity for AI to help legal professionals work with greater rigor and focus more of their time on the problems that matter most.

Our team works across Research, Product, Engineering, and Go-to-Market to build AI capabilities and products for legal work. Our customers include the top law firms in the world as well as in-house legal departments of some of the largest businesses in the world. We translate the realities of practice into evaluations, training signals, and useful tools, with the ambition of making AI a trusted part of how lawyers research, analyze, draft, and advise.

About the Role

We are looking for a Subject Matter Expert in Law who brings the judgment and practical experience developed in a law firm to shaping the next generation of AI. You will help define what excellent legal work looks like, test where our models meet that standard, and turn your findings into better model behavior and product experiences.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role at the intersection of legal practice and AI development. You will work directly with legal materials, model outputs, evaluation rubrics, and product prototypes. Your expertise will help us tackle some of the hardest questions in legal AI, including how to assess reasoning when there is no single correct answer.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In This Role, You Will:

• Define the quality bar for what top-notch legal work looks like, drawing on real matters and the standards lawyers apply to research, analysis, drafting, document review, and client advice.

• Design challenging, realistic AI model evaluations with representative facts, source materials, constraints, and deliverables, including cases that test ambiguity, competing arguments, and professional judgment.

• Create and review reference work such as research memoranda, contract analyses, redlines, diligence findings, and draft legal documents that demonstrate strong reasoning and practical usefulness.

• Develop rubrics that assess legal accuracy, issue spotting, factual grounding, citation validity, jurisdictional context, and the appropriate treatment of uncertainty.

• Evaluate model outputs and complete legal workflows, identify recurring failures, and give researchers and engineers specific, actionable feedback supported by examples and corrected work.

• Partner with Research on datasets, grading methods, and training tasks or environments that strengthen legal reasoning. Test whether model changes address the underlying problems and improve performance on new cases.

• Work with Product and Engineering to identify valuable use cases, prototype workflows, and translate lessons from evaluations into experiences that fit how lawyers actually work.

• Collaborate with legal professionals and design partners to refine our standards and test usefulness in practice, applying sound judgment around confidentiality, privilege, data permissions, and professional responsibility.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You:

• Have practiced law at a law firm, with substantial experience producing and reviewing work for real client matters. We care more about demonstrated judgment and quality of work matter over title or firm pedigree.

• Bring deep expertise in one or more practice areas, such as commercial transactions, corporate law, litigation, or regulatory work, and curiosity about workflows beyond your specialty.

• Are an excellent legal researcher and writer who can assess authorities, distinguish strong arguments from plausible ones, and explain how facts and context affect a conclusion.

• Can make expert judgment explicit: explain why an answer is incomplete, a clause creates risk, or an analysis misses the central issue, and describe what better work would look like.

• Enjoy working directly with AI tools, exploring their limits, and testing ideas systematically. You can collaborate closely with technical teams and communicate clearly across disciplines.

• Take ownership in ambiguous settings and are willing to build the first version of an evaluation, reference document, rubric, or workflow, then improve it through feedback.

• Care deeply about the quality and consequences of legal work, and are motivated by the opportunity to help shape how AI supports the profession.

Especially Strong Candidates May Also Have:

• Experience designing evaluations, benchmarks, datasets, or review frameworks for legal work or frontier AI systems.

• A track record of improving legal workflows through technology, knowledge management, automation, or new ways of working.

• Experience training or supervising lawyers, developing practice guidance, or translating complex legal concepts for different audiences.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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