Staff Project Manager, Legal Operations

Key Responsibilities

• Portfolio & Roadmap: Own the Legal Ops COE project portfolio and roadmap. Build and maintain integrated plans, milestones, dependencies, logs, and resource views across all workstreams.
• Governance: Run the COE governance rhythm: steering-committee materials, monthly portfolio reviews, red/yellow/green status and decision logs that support Legal leadership's prioritization and resource decisions.
• Intake & Prioritization: Facilitate intake and prioritization of new Legal Ops requests. Maintain the ideas register and business cases, and recommend sequencing based on value, risk and effort.
• Cross-Functional Delivery: Support delivery with IT, the Global Operations PMO, Procurement (Ariba), Finance/AP (CounselLink and accruals), Privacy (TrustArc) and Enterprise AI. Ensure handoffs and stakeholder alignment.
• Implementation: Manage or oversee the implementation projects for legal systems and process changes (for example matter intake, CLM workflows, e-billing rules and templates), including requirements gathering, user acceptance testing, cut-over and hyper care.
• Change Management: Apply change-management practices: stakeholder mapping, communications, training plans, a champions network and adoption tracking. Develop job aids, SOPs and process documentation.
• Process Excellence: Document and maintain a catalog of Legal business processes with named process owners. Lead process-improvement work using Lean or continuous-improvement methods.
• Monitor and Measure Success: Work with the Data Analytics Analyst to define, track and report KPIs and KRIs, such as cycle time, throughput, spend versus budget and adoption. Manage project budgets and vendor or consultant deliverables, and track benefits/ROI realization against the business case.
• Executive Communication: Prepare clear executive updates for the Chief Legal Officer and the Legal Leadership Team.

Qualifications

• Project Management: 8+ years of project or program management experience, including 4+ years in legal operations, compliance operations, or another corporate function supporting a legal department.
• Collaboration: Demonstrated success leading multiple concurrent cross-functional initiatives in a matrixed, global organization, without direct authority.
• Governance & Reporting: Experience establishing project governance, operating cadences, status reporting and performance metrics for senior leaders.
• Process & Change: Experience with process mapping and improvement (Lean, Six Sigma or similar) and with change-management methods.
• Domain Knowledge: Working knowledge of legal-department systems such as e-billing/spend management, CLM, matter management and document management, and of how they connect to procurement and finance processes.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication, facilitation and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to influence attorneys and executives.
• Experience and Education: Typically requires a minimum of 8 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 6 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with 3 years of experience; or equivalent experience.
• PMP, PgMP, Prosci or Lean/Six Sigma certification (or willingness to obtain) is preferred.
• Experience in a life science, biotech, diagnostics, medical device or other regulated industry is a plus.
• Proficiency with project tools such as Smartsheet, Jira, Planner or MS Project, and with Microsoft 365 (Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, SharePoint) is required.
• Experience effectively and ethically using AI tools, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, in day-to-day work is required.
• Experience with CounselLink, Icertis, Ariba, TrustArc or comparable platforms is a plus.
• Experience supporting AI-enablement or digital-transformation programs, including AI governance and review processes, is a plus.
• Familiarity with CLOC's Core Competencies or other legal-operations maturity frameworks is a plus.