Summary of the Legal Content Director job at Illinois Legal Aid Online

The Legal Content Director leads Illinois Legal Aid Online’s (ILAO) Legal Content Team and is responsible for the quality, accessibility, usability, and effective management of ILAO’s legal information. The director creates and implements content strategies aligned with ILAO’s mission, organizational priorities, and users’ needs; supervises and develops a team of five content staff; and ensures the team delivers accurate, understandable, and actionable legal resources.

The Legal Content Director also serves as a functional leader in cross-team and cross-organizational initiatives. The director works collaboratively with ILAO’s Product Team, Community Engagement Team, leadership, operations, and external partners to ensure that ILAO’s legal expertise and content contribute effectively to shared products, structured knowledge resources, and service-delivery systems. 

ILAO is a primarily remote organization, with a small office in Chicago. This role is expected to attend periodic in-person meetings. We welcome applications from across Illinois.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES

Develop and implement ILAO’s legal content strategy - 30%

• Develop and implement content strategies that advance organizational goals and respond to users’ needs.
• Use performance data, user research, and other evidence to assess content impact, identify gaps, and establish improvement priorities.
• Align the Content Team’s plans and resources with organizational priorities and approved cross-organizational initiatives.
• Collaborate with the Product and Community Engagement Teams to develop effective models, interfaces, and methods for delivering legal information.
• Monitor emerging technologies and content-management practices and recommend appropriate improvements.
• Build productive relationships with internal teams, legal aid partners, subject-matter experts, and other collaborators.
• Represent the Content Team’s expertise, capacity, and operational needs in organizational and collaborative planning.

Govern ILAO’s legal content and knowledge - 30%

• Establish, document, and enforce standards, roles, workflows, and decision-making processes for creating, reviewing, structuring, publishing, updating, reusing, evaluating, and retiring legal content.
• Ensure ILAO’s legal information meets quality standards for legal accuracy, readability, accessibility, usability, cultural responsiveness, and consistency.
• Oversee monitoring of legal, policy, court, and program changes that may affect ILAO’s content or users.
• Maintain and enforce ILAO’s content style guide and related content- and knowledge-management standards.
• Own content performance measures, reporting, and analysis, and ensure findings lead to appropriate improvements.
• Apply appropriate search engine optimization, generative engine optimization, and content-discovery practices.
• Partner with the Product Team on user research and usability testing, and ensure that legal content and design support user needs and organizational objectives.

Lead the legal content team and its production - 30%

• Set clear team goals, priorities, work plans, roles, and performance expectations.
• Lead implementation and adoption of improved content models, governance practices, tools, and ways of working within the Content Team. 
• Supervise, coach, develop, and evaluate Content Team staff and oversee the work of volunteers and contractors, as applicable.
• Hold team members accountable for quality, deadlines, collaboration, and compliance with established standards and processes.
• Plan and allocate team capacity to meet ongoing publishing responsibilities and organizational project commitments. 
• Develop and manage the Content Team’s budget and make recommendations concerning staffing, contractors, technology, and other resources. 
• Foster an inclusive, collaborative, accountable, and continuously improving team culture.
• Maintain direct responsibility for an appropriate section of ILAO’s published legal content.
• Represent ILAO on one or more of the Illinois Supreme Court Access to Justice Commission's statewide forms subcommittees.

Other activities - 10%

• Contribute legal-content expertise to funding strategies, grant proposals, grant implementation, and reporting.
• Participate in appropriate fundraising activities, events, and campaigns.
• Participate in staff, leadership, and administrative meetings.
• Perform other responsibilities consistent with the position, as assigned.

Education/Experience:

• Active Illinois law license, or ability to become an active Illinois attorney.
• Minimum of 7 years’ experience publishing digital content, knowledge management, or legal content technology.
• Minimum 5 years’ experience supervising others, including staff, volunteers, and contractors.
• Experience working in or with legal aid, access to justice, or public interest legal services.
• Expertise in distilling complicated concepts into understandable, actionable resources.
• Experience developing and executing content workflows and using content management systems.
• Experience using Google Analytics or similar tools to evaluate content performance.
• Knowledge of or ability to grow expertise in search engine optimization (SEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO).
• Demonstrated experience leading complex cross-functional work involving people outside the candidate’s direct supervisory authority.
• Experience developing or implementing content-governance, knowledge-governance, or comparable information-management practices.
• Experience building collaborative processes, clarifying roles and decision rights, and resolving competing priorities.
• Working knowledge of structured content, metadata, taxonomies, information architecture, or other methods of making knowledge reusable across systems.
• Experience helping staff adopt new tools, processes, roles, or ways of working.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with technical and nontechnical colleagues on products or systems involving complex subject matter.
• Strong proficiency in using computers, mobile devices, and software, including fluency in using the Internet, mobile apps, Google Workspace, and Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), with the ability to quickly learn new software programs.

Preference is given to candidates with:

• Legal aid practice experience.
• Experience with structured content, taxonomies, ontologies, knowledge bases, knowledge graphs, or comparable knowledge systems.
• Experience participating in multi-organizational initiatives with shared governance.
• Familiarity with source provenance, versioning, legal-change monitoring, and structured review workflows.
• Familiarity with the responsible use of generative AI or retrieval-based systems for legal information.
• Experience with Drupal.
• Experience using legal technology, such as form preparation programs and case management systems.
• Proficiency or fluency in Spanish.

Apply online at https://illinoislegalaid.bamboohr.com/careers/33.  No recruiters and no snail mail, please. Must be authorized to work in the United States for any employer. 

Deadline to Apply: Friday, October 2, 2026

Salary: $94,000 - $104,000

Benefits: ILAO offers a comprehensive benefits package, including health and dental insurance, life insurance, long-term and short-term disability insurance, health and dependent care flex spending account; 15 paid days off and 15 holidays in the first calendar year of employment; and, 403(b) retirement plan, to which ILAO contributes a required 1% of salary monthly. ILAO has a flexible workplace policy that supports remote work, wellness, and work-life balance. 

About ILAO

At ILAO, we believe in justice. We believe the law is for everyone. We know, however, that not everyone is equal in the eyes of the legal system. People with intersectionalities of historically oppressed identities face the greatest barriers to using the law to get justice. ILAO seeks to break these barriers. ILAO believes that, equipped with the right tools, opportunities, and connections, people can shift the power differentials and get the justice they deserve.

For more than 20 years, Illinois Legal Aid Online (ILAO) has opened opportunities for justice so that people can resolve their problems, especially those from historically oppressed communities and groups who have the least access to lawyers. 

Through innovation, we make the law understandable and accessible. We mobilize people with plain-language, 24/7, self-help tools - in three languages - so they can understand and assert their legal rights. ILAO helps people, who are unable to find or afford attorneys, overcome legal barriers and open opportunities for justice.