We are looking for a “unicorn” product leader to lead all product efforts at DISCO. This is the best job in legal technology.

Law is shifting away from bespoke human labor and toward a world in which legal technology automates the parts of the practice that don’t require human legal judgment so that great lawyers can do what they went to law school to do. Legal technology will transform the way great lawyers work, radically improve the quality and consistency of legal services, and improve legal outcomes for clients. 

DISCO is the place where this technology will be built. We are one of the largest, best-funded, and fastest-growing startups in enterprise legal technology. Our goal is to win the legal technology market and become the legal technology partner of choice for great lawyers at law firms, in legal departments, and in government. As our product leader, you will be at the center of this revolution in the law.

Your mission is to build magical legal technology. You will have at your disposal the best engineers, product managers, and designers that money and mission can buy; and you will operate in a product-first company that deeply believes that enduring value is created only by building magical products. As Steve Jobs was to Apple, you will be to DISCO.

What You’ll Do

• Driving DISCO's thought leadership strategy within our product delivery process by considering input from:
• Product delivery teams, including domain, design, product management, and engineering
• Marketing and sales teams
• Customer success and professional services teams
• Specific customers through interviews and product advisory council
• Customers in the aggregate through surveys and usage data
• Prospective customers, including customers of competitors
• Competitors and other players in legal technology
• Continuously improve our systems for gathering the above input; ensure that our product-delivery organization is making data-driven decisions.
• Own the strategy to accelerate the adoption of analytics and AI within our platform by driving thought leadership and developing best practices in the AI and machine learning domains within the legal industry; work with DISCO data scientists and product teams to maintain a cutting-edge analytics roadmap.
• Approve product roadmap and priorities; represent the voice of the marketplace in product discussions, drive level of spend on all product delivery functions relative to other company priorities; use product to aggressively drive growth.
• Approve specific product designs; drive revisions and high-quality ending output with product management and design teams; question platform and engineering decisions where they impact user-facing functionality and current or future engineering scope.
• Chair Law Review (our principal product review meeting) and design appropriate ancillary meeting schedule to drive outputs above.
• Lead a team of internal product-domain experts (i.e., attorney-turned-technologists) who are responsible for synthesizing market feedback, analyzing legal technology trends and competitive landscape, and providing real-life practice experience to inform product planning.
• Continue building the best legal tech product team in the world, including hiring, firing, coaching, developing, and inspiring other domain experts.
• Make final decisions on product as necessary.
• Articulate product vision and strategy and impact of new product development to the company, our go-to-market organization, our customer base, and the broader market.
• Working with other product leaders to prepare and present executive and board of directors presentations that articulate the product vision and strategy for DISCO.

Qualifications

• Litigation expert. You must be a “domain expert” in litigation who deeply understands the way lawyers think and work, the problems we face, and the kinds of solutions that would feel magical to us. 
  • You are an expert at all stages of the litigation process, including client selection and case assessment, pleadings and forum selection, discovery, dispositive motions, trial, and post-verdict motions and appeal. 
  • You have handled 20+ matters as lead counsel and have worked on a wide range of other matters earlier in your career. Your specialty is complex litigation (class actions and mass actions); general business litigation; a business litigation specialty area like antitrust, construction, environmental, intellectual property, or securities; or government investigations and white-collar crime. 
  • You have held positions of successive responsibility at an AmLaw 100 firm or prominent litigation boutique (associate and then partner) or in government (prosecutor handling business or other document-heavy matters or enforcement branch at a regulatory agency).
  • You have developed and implemented “playbooks” or standard ways of working for your case teams. You believe that a systematic, process-driven approach to handling cases leads to better legal outcomes.
  • You are a legal technology expert and regularly use legal technology in your practice, for example, Westlaw or LEXIS for legal research and DISCO or Relativity for ediscovery. 
• Software engineering amateur (at least). While you need not be a software engineering professional, you can “speak the language” and appreciate the craft.
  • You have enough technical fluency in software engineering to know what is possible, what is easy, and what is hard; talk to engineering teams about how platform design choices affect user-facing features and vice versa; have a reasonably accurate intuitive sense for the size and scope of features as you design them.
  • You have written programs from scratch for your own use or professionally. You know at least one modern programming language (e.g., C++, Python) and its idioms sufficiently to read code. While you need not be a software engineer, you can “speak the language.”
  • You have a working understanding of common algorithms, data types, databases, search, AI/ML, and system design. While you need not be a software architect, you can “speak the language.”
  • You have a deep understanding of the technology and features that will take our products to the next level and widen the gap between us and our competitors, including:
    • Visual search language
    • Enterprise-wide data ingestion pipeline and end-user data management and reporting console
    • Interactive AI-produced topic clusters and search suggestion engines.
    • Visualized human communication network computed by AI.
    • Synthesizing and simplifying complex workflows, often involving hundreds of lawyers collaborating on millions of documents.
  • You have a working understanding of product management, design, and engineering processes. While you need not be a product manager or engineering manager, you understand and appreciate how these processes work. 
  • We are open to different ways in which this requirement can be satisfied. Some examples: an undergraduate degree in computer science; having worked as a software engineer or product manager at a modern software company (FAANG, Microsoft, or top-flight software startup); self-taught with demonstrable projects; software startup founder, CEO, or CPO / VP of Product.
• Product taste; the ability to design magical products. 
  • You will continue to position yourself as a thought leader in regards to the intersection of technology and law, and will drive adoption and awareness with attorneys and other industry experts.
  • You can work with designers and product managers to iterate on designs at all levels of detail, from overall user experience and flow to details of button positioning and copy. You believe details matter and are willing to invest in dozens of revisions if needed to achieve a magical outcome.
  • You can synthesize input, some of which is completely wrong, from sales and marketing, customer feedback, customer and prospect interviews, support and services, internal product delivery teams, and others to inform your own view of product roadmap. You can strike the winning balance between the market’s input (“faster horses”) and your own product vision (“flying cars”). 
  • You are decisive. You will make high-quality decisions quickly in the face of conflicting views strongly held and strongly presented by credible people. You have no hesitation about revising wrong decisions quickly.
  • You are allergic to bad products and exacting in your standards. You likely have interests in one or more of the fine arts and have invested in bespoke design in other aspects of your life. You have clear opinions about what products are well designed and what makes them great.
  • You understand what will sell; you have a mind for commercial matters and can invest product, design, and engineering dollars to drive the best possible return in revenue and company growth. 
  • You think strategically about product investments over a 1, 3, and 5-year time horizon, including build/buy decisions, in addition to managing this quarter’s product development.
  • You are a visionary leader who can marshal people to a cause, make what seems impossible inevitable, and change the way the world thinks about legal technology, legal services, and the law. The best people in the world will choose to work for you.
• You have a deep love and respect for the law. You loved legal practice and are not a “refugee.” You believe that law is the foundation for a just society; that fixing the law is as important a mission as organizing the world’s information, curing cancer, or sending the human race to Mars. Your work here is a calling, not a job.
• Data-driven; smart (high IQ); focused on getting the right answer; comfortable with chaos and continuously changing roles and priorities in a high-growth startup environment; comfortable with an agile, fast-moving, and hard-working company culture.

Educational Requirements

• J.D. from a top-14 law school. 
• Federal appellate clerkship and training as an associate at a top litigation department (AmLaw 100 or leading litigation boutique) are strongly preferred, but not required.
• Bachelor’s degree from a top university. 
• Computer science or a related field is preferred, but not required.