Partner & General Counsel - Legal Domain Expert
Listing checked August 29, 2026 · pay as published by Mercor
Overview
A leading AI lab needs a senior legal domain expert to join its GenAI research team and help frontier models reason through real legal work. You will review the quality of legal knowledge tasks, write instruction specs and golden solutions, and design evaluation sets that measure genuine progress. This full-time W-2 role runs through Cincinnatus LLC and places you inside the client's own tools alongside their research and program managers. The engagement starts with 6 months at 40 hours per week, with a hybrid schedule in the Bay Area and on-site work multiple days each week.
What You'll Do5
- 1Vet the quality of legal knowledge work tasks and model outputs, flagging answers that sound plausible but fail professional scrutiny.
- 2Write clear instruction specs and produce golden solutions for legal problems, setting the standard for what a correct answer looks like.
- 3Define new legal tasks that mirror real practice across corporate, litigation, regulatory, IP, employment, or tax matters.
- 4Build challenging legal benchmarks and evaluation sets that show whether the model improves over time.
- 5Collaborate with client researchers and adjacent specialists to keep standards consistent and translate unspoken legal judgment into explicit scoring criteria.
Requirements9
- 1Juris Doctor (JD) from an accredited law school, ideally one with a strong national reputation.
- 2At least 5 years of post-qualification legal practice at a reputable law firm, corporate legal department, regulatory body, or court, with internships and clerkships excluded.
- 3Substantive specialization in one or more practice areas such as corporate and transactional, litigation, regulatory and compliance, IP, employment and labor, or tax.
- 4Progression to a senior role like partner, of counsel, senior associate, or general counsel, with genuine ownership of matters.
- 5Active membership in good standing with at least one U.S. state bar.
- 6Hands-on experience using large language models in professional work, along with the judgment to distinguish a well-reasoned legal answer from a fluent but wrong one.
- 7Reliable availability for 40 hours per week across a 6-month initial engagement.
- 8Current residence in the Bay Area or willingness to relocate there at your own expense before starting.
- 9Strong written communication skills and the ability to give precise, structured feedback.
Who Should Apply
The ideal candidate is a practicing lawyer who uses LLMs daily and wants to turn legal judgment into measurable model quality. This role suits a senior practitioner with real ownership experience, not someone looking for a remote side project. It is less suitable for generalists or lawyers without active bar membership, since the work demands deep specialization and on-site presence. Candidates often get rejected for lacking 5+ years of substantive practice, for having only clerkship-level exposure, or for being unable to commit to the hybrid Bay Area schedule.
Salary Insight
The pay rate is $100 to $150 per hour. For a full-time 40-hour week, that annualizes to roughly $208,000 to $312,000 before taxes, which is a range usually reserved for senior legal specialists with significant AI collaboration duties.
Pay and demand for Legal roles
AggregatedTypical pay
$115/hour
This role
$100–$150/hr
Most Legal roles pay $95–$135 per hour. This role's pay falls inside that range.
Based on 96 similar roles that publish pay · 9 publish only a top rate; those count at the rate they gave
Rates shown per hour. Yearly and monthly pay converted; one-time fees and non-USD pay are not included.
- Live similar roles
- 101
- Listed in last 30 days
- 33
- Remote
- 96%
Hiring most right now: micro1 (62) · AfterQuery (13) · Mercor (11)
Most requested skills · share of roles
- legal writing33%
- legal research31%
- Contract Drafting14%
- legal reasoning14%
Figures from Legal roles live on NearSkill when this page loaded. A role can close before you apply, so check the listing itself.
Compare your resume against these rolesLocation
Compensation
$100–150/hr
Required Skills
Application Tip
In your application, name a specific instance where you used a tool like GPT-4 or Claude to draft or analyze a legal document, and describe the exact error you caught that a general reviewer would have missed. That evidence directly proves the AI fluency and attention to professional scrutiny this role demands.
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