Forward Deployed Lawyer

Telon is an AI Native Legal Services company. We embed Forward Deployed Lawyers and Engineers inside client legal teams to take AI from idea to durable, everyday use. We do not build our own product. We make the AI our clients have already bought deliver real outcomes. Our clients range from in house legal functions at global enterprises to law firms.

The Role

We are looking for a Forward Deployed Lawyer: a practicing lawyer who uses their domain expertise to help other lawyers build and deploy AI tools they rely on every day.

Most legal teams now have AI licenses. Few have changed how they work. The gap is rarely the technology. It is knowing which tasks to hand to AI, how to frame them, what good output looks like, and how to trust it. Closing that gap takes someone who has done the legal work themselves and can speak to lawyers as a peer.

You will sit alongside client lawyers, understand their matters and pressure points, and advise them on the prompts, playbooks, agents and workflows that fit how they actually work. You will build alongside them, but your real measure of success is adoption: lawyers using what you helped create, routinely, without you in the room.

What you will do

• Advise client lawyers, from General Counsel to individual contributors, on where AI can genuinely help their day to day work and where it cannot.
• Spend time with legal teams to understand their matters, workload and bottlenecks (contract review, negotiation, intake, advisory queries, compliance) at a practical level of detail.
• Use your legal judgment to shape the tools: what a good answer looks like, which clauses or risks matter, where human review must sit, and when a matter needs escalating.
• Design and build prompts, playbooks, agents and workflows with lawyers, drawing on Telon's prompt library and working alongside our Forward Deployed Engineers on anything more technical.
• Test tools against real matters and documents, judge whether the output is right, partly right or wrong, and refine until lawyers trust it.
• Coach and enable lawyers so they can use, adapt and extend these tools themselves. Run workshops, office hours and one to one sessions.
• Track adoption and outcomes, and be honest with clients about what is working and what is not.
• Feed what you learn back into Telon's playbooks and prompt library, and to the platform partners we work with.

What you will bring

• A qualified, practicing legal background: JD and bar admission, or equivalent, with at least four years of hands on legal work. In house experience is strongly preferred.
• Real depth in at least one area of legal practice, such as commercial contracting, corporate, employment, privacy or regulatory, so lawyers see you as a peer rather than a technologist.
• Strong legal judgment and the confidence to call output right or wrong, and explain why.
• Daily, hands on use of AI tools in your own work, and a clear view of where they help lawyers and where they fall short. You do not need to be a software engineer.
• A process mindset. You naturally break legal work into steps, inputs, decision points and exceptions.
• A credible, polished advisory manner. You are comfortable running workshops, presenting to General Counsel and changing how experienced lawyers work.
• Patience and practicality as a teacher. You measure success by what others can do after you leave.
• Comfort with ambiguity, working independently on client engagements, and the pace of an early-stage business.

Nice to have

• Experience leading AI adoption, legal operations or knowledge management initiatives inside a legal team.
• Hands on experience building prompts, playbooks or agentic workflows in enterprise legal AI or CLM platforms.
• Prior experience at a legal tech vendor, an alternative legal services provider, or a legal consultancy.
• Experience training or upskilling lawyers on new tools and ways of working.