Legal Products Manager

At Fried Frank, we’re a community of 800 lawyers and 500 business services professionals across New York, Washington, DC, London, Frankfurt, and Brussels. We advise leading corporations, investment funds, and financial institutions on high-stakes M&A, securities, regulatory matters, real estate, and litigation. Our culture is grounded in our core values — excellence, integrity and collaboration — and is designed to foster continuous learning, meaningful mentorship, and lasting professional growth. We are firmly committed to pro bono service and social justice, building on a proud legacy in civil rights. Our inclusive talent strategy is a core part of our broader talent management efforts and we remain steadfast in fostering a workplace where everyone has the opportunity to grow, thrive, and become their best professional and personal selves. Our business services professionals are integral to the firm’s success, driving innovation, operational excellence and exceptional client service across all areas of the firm. We offer competitive compensation and a comprehensive benefits package, including comprehensive medical coverage, retirement plans and health and wellness initiatives designed to support your personal and professional wellbeing. We welcome passionate, driven individuals to join us, and be part of a team where you’ll be supported, inspired and empowered to build an exceptional career.

Position Summary:

As part of the broader Innovation & Knowledge team, the Legal Products Manager leads the function responsible for managing, testing, integrating, and optimizing technology solutions that support the firm's legal practice and business operations. This is a player-coach role who leads a team of technologists while remaining personally engaged in the architecture and delivery of key initiatives. The ideal candidate will architect and implement advanced technology solutions within the Microsoft platform, third-party legal apps and custom-built practice solutions. The role involves setting priorities across a growing portfolio of work; analyzing, designing, and automating workflows across the firm; configuring, testing and integrating SaaS solutions; and collaborating with developers, IT operations, and business services stakeholders to deliver firm-wide legal solutions. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with the ability to lead others, strong relationship management skills, and a passion for driving technology transformation across every dimension of a modern law firm, from how lawyers deliver client services to how the firm manages its people, finances, and growth.

Duties & Responsibilities:

• Lead and develop a team of technologists, establishing consistent standards for solution design, documentation, and quality, and fostering a collaborative, accountable, and continuously improving team environment.
• Personally own the legal solution architecture and delivery of key initiatives, modeling the technical rigor and delivery standards expected of the team.
• Implement and support custom and third-party legal solutions. Ensure solutions are well scoped before build begins and validated with practice and business stakeholders before rollout.
• Design, develop, and deploy integrations between practice technology tools and firm systems, leveraging Microsoft Azure and other cloud services, and developing reusable integration patterns that keep the solution portfolio maintainable as it grows.
• Partner with Knowledge & Innovation leadership and practice stakeholders to translate firm strategy into an executable pipeline of work, with clear prioritization and sequencing based on business value, technical feasibility, and team capacity. Serve as a central connector across IT Operations, Infrastructure, Security, Data, and Knowledge, surfacing dependencies early and driving coordinated execution across teams outside the direct reporting line.
• Lead functional evaluations and proof-of-concepts for AI-driven solutions, document automation, document management, finance and marketing applications, etc., and working with IT on technical evaluations, security review, and infrastructure requirements.
• Partner with Knowledge & Innovation teams to identify workflow pain points, architect solutions that address practice and business needs, and align technology initiatives with the firm's strategic objectives.
• Help support the adoption of advanced technology solutions by staying current with product feature updates, troubleshooting technical issues, optimizing solution performance, and ensuring a high-quality user experience.
• Design, build and maintain dashboards and reporting tools to evaluate solution effectiveness and track user adoption metrics.
• Keep Knowledge & Innovation leadership and IT partners informed of progress, risks, and dependencies.
• Ensure solutions comply with the firm's information security, data governance, client confidentiality, and responsible AI standards, including appropriate controls over the firm and client data used with third-party AI systems, working with Security, Risk, and the Technology Committee as required.
• Support vendor management activities, including technical due diligence, solution integration, and ongoing relationship maintenance.
• Develop and maintain technical documentation, solution diagrams, playbooks, and training materials to support the rollout and ongoing use of new applications and integrations.
• Monitor legal technology trends, cloud developments, and industry best practices to inform and advance the firm's technology strategy.

Qualifications:

• Demonstrated ability to be an effective people manager, including mentoring and developing team members, setting clear priorities, fostering accountability, and creating a collaborative, high-performing team environment.
• Demonstrated ability to balance strategic contribution with hands-on execution, contributing to technology strategy and roadmap planning while remaining directly involved in building and delivering solutions.
• Experience leading the architecture, implementation, and ongoing optimization of solutions using Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI), Copilot and Copilot Studio, Azure, Intune, and related technologies, with the ability to guide teams on cloud infrastructure, APIs, solution integration, and automation strategy while remaining hands-on in execution where needed.
• Experience with AI technologies applicable to legal and business operations (e.g., Legora and Harvey), including document automation and drafting (e.g., Avvoka and Draftwise).
• Familiarity with legal technology tools across document management (e.g., iManage, NetDocuments), AI-based search and workflows (e.g., Deep Judge), transaction management (e.g., Simply Agree), legal research (e.g., Westlaw, LexisNexis), firm business management and operations (e.g., Elite, Intapp, Foundation).
• Experience integrating SaaS products and AI tools, including Application Programming Interface (API), single sign-on (SSO), data exchange, and workflow integration.
• Familiarity with data governance, information security, and responsible AI frameworks, and comfort operating within the confidentiality obligations of a law firm.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to interpret usage metrics, diagnose technical issues, and make data-driven decisions.
• Clear and effective communicator, able to build trust and alignment across technical teams, business stakeholders, and firm leadership; to collaborate with lawyers; to lead technical training; and to maintain productive relationships with vendors.
• Proven track record of managing technical projects from inception to completion, driving user adoption, and leading change initiatives in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience managing vendor relationships and overseeing product implementations.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., Microsoft Power Platform, Azure, AI, PMP) are a plus.
• Self-motivated and detail-oriented, with a genuine passion for leveraging technology to enhance legal practice and business operations.

Education / Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field preferred. Degrees in other fields (e.g., Business, Data Science, or Legal Studies) with significant technology experience will be considered.
• Hands-on experience (6+ years) in practice technology architecture, low-code development, advanced technology support, data analytics or solution implementation roles. Experience within a law firm and/or legal tech vendor is a plus.