Legal Tech & Innovation Recruiting

Legal insight. Executive search precision. One team.

Law firms are investing in AI, legal technology, and innovation at a pace the market hasn't seen before. New roles are being created: Directors of Innovation, Chief AI Officers, data scientists with no precedent in traditional legal hiring. The candidate pools for these roles are narrow, competitive, and largely passive. The firms that move deliberately and recruit with precision will build meaningful advantages. The ones that treat these searches like standard hiring will struggle.

At Onward Recruiting, we work at the intersection of legal and technology recruiting. We understand what it takes to identify candidates who have both the technical credentials and the professional fluency to operate inside a law firm environment, and we know those are rarely the same person you find by posting a job.

We are proud members of the National Association of Legal Search Consultants (NALSC) and hold ourselves to their Code of Ethics in every engagement.

WHO WE PLACE

We recruit across the full spectrum of legal tech and innovation roles:

  • AI/ML Engineers and Data Scientists: technical professionals building and deploying AI-driven tools in legal contexts, including LLM applications, contract analysis, and litigation analytics

  • Legal Tech Product Managers: professionals who translate legal workflows into product requirements and manage implementation across a firm

  • Innovation Leaders: Directors of Innovation, Chief Innovation Officers, and Chief AI Officers charged with setting strategy and driving adoption

  • Knowledge Management, Legal Operations and Implementation: professionals who deploy technology platforms and build the process infrastructure that makes those investments work at scale

  • Specialized and Emerging Roles: if your search doesn't fit a standard category, that's exactly where we tend to perform best

OUR APPROACH

Legal tech and innovation searches require a different kind of recruiter. One who can credibly engage technical candidates while also understanding what law firm leadership actually needs from these hires. Here is how we approach it.

1. Understanding the role beneath the role. A title like "Director of Innovation" means something different at every firm. Before we source a single candidate, we invest time in understanding your firm's technology landscape, adoption maturity, and what success looks like in this specific environment, not just the skills on the job description.

2. Reaching candidates who aren't looking. The strongest legal tech and innovation professionals are almost never on the open market. They are embedded in firms, vendors, or legal tech companies, doing work they find interesting enough not to leave until the right conversation reaches them. Our network and outreach capabilities are built for exactly this.

3. Evaluating what actually matters. Technical credibility is table stakes. What separates a legal tech hire that works from one that doesn't is the second dimension: can this person navigate a law firm? Can they earn partners' trust, manage without authority, and operate in a culture that didn't grow up around technology? We assess for both, and we move with the urgency these searches require.

THE TEAM BEHIND THESE SEARCHES

Legal tech and innovation searches sit at a rare intersection, and so does the team that runs them.

Lacie Marshall brings 20+ years of legal recruiting experience, including senior talent leadership roles inside law firms. She understands how firms evaluate technology investments, how innovation initiatives gain or lose traction with firm leadership, and what a candidate actually needs to succeed in a legal culture. That insider perspective shapes every search from brief to close.

James Shenton, Co-founder and Managing Consultant at Opus Resourcing, brings 29 years of executive search experience with a 95%+ client repeat rate and a 31-day average time to placement. His methodology, research-led and built for senior and hard-to-find talent, is applied to every search we run together.

Legal industry depth. Executive search discipline. On the same search.

Meet Lacie
Meet James

WHY ONWARD

  • We understand law firms from the inside. Our team has worked within law firm environments. We know how decisions get made, how technology initiatives succeed or fail, and what a candidate actually needs to thrive.

  • Specialized network, not a generalist database. We have built deliberate relationships in the legal tech and innovation space. See our case study as an example of what that looks like in practice.

  • Honest counsel throughout. We will tell you when a candidate pool is thinner than expected, when a role needs to be repositioned, or when compensation is out of step with the market. You will always know where your search actually stands.

RESOURCES

Work With Us

Whether you're looking to hire or looking to make a move, it starts with a conversation. Tell us what you're working toward and we'll tell you what's possible.

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