Legal Domain Expert: AI Training & Evaluation

What you'll do

Unlike Mercor's contract legal listings, this is a full-time job placed inside an AI lab's own team. You work with its researchers and program managers, on its accounts and equipment, in its tools, to improve how frontier models handle real legal work. The ad describes four strands:

• Data QA and review: vet legal tasks and model outputs, catching thin reasoning and answers that sound right but would not survive a senior lawyer's read
• Instruction specs and golden data: write the specs and the golden solutions that define "correct", and design new tasks that reflect how legal work is really done
• Benchmarks: build hard legal evaluation sets and help develop legal-specific skills and tools with the research team
• Calibration: work with researchers and specialists in adjacent fields to turn tacit legal judgment into explicit criteria

The ad asks for a practising specialist rather than a generalist.

Who fits

• JD from an accredited law school; a highly ranked school is strongly preferred
• 5+ years of substantive post-qualification practice at a law firm, corporate legal department, regulator or court; internships and clerkships alone do not count
• Genuine specialization in at least one area (corporate, litigation, regulatory, IP, employment, tax and similar)
• A senior trajectory with real ownership of matters: the ad lists partner, of counsel, counsel, senior associate, senior in-house counsel or general counsel
• Active admission to at least one US state bar, in good standing
• Hands-on use of large language models in your own work
• Able to commit 40 hours a week for an initial 6 months

Location and employer

This is hybrid in the Bay Area, not remote. You must live there and be on-site with the client team several days a week when required. Relocation is at your own cost; no assistance is offered.

The employer is Cincinnatus LLC, a staffing company that acts as employer of record, separate from Mercor. That means W-2 employment with payroll and benefits administered by Cincinnatus, not an independent contractor arrangement. The Stripe and Wise weekly payment terms on Mercor's contract listings do not appear here.

What it pays

$60–100 per hour. The ad does not say what sets the rate within that range. Mercor runs this role as separate listings by seniority: a Senior Counsel version pays $85–120 and a Partner and General Counsel version pays $100–150, so if your experience is at those levels, apply there instead.

Worth knowing

Good:

• W-2 employment with benefits, rare in AI training work
• Direct work with a frontier lab's research team, not a contractor queue
• A clear 6-month initial term

Less good:

• The bottom of the band ($60/hour) is low for a lawyer with five years' post-qualification practice
• On-site in the Bay Area, relocation unpaid
• Full-time commitment rules out keeping a practice going alongside it
• The lab is not named

About this listing

Posted on Mercor for Cincinnatus LLC as a full-time position with a United States location requirement, read on 24 September 2026. Pay, location terms, term length and qualifications are the ad's own. See Mercor.