Senior UX Researcher

Location:
Chicago or Dallas (hybrid)
About The Company
We are a leading global law firm dedicated to excellence and innovation in serving our clients. Our culture emphasizes collaboration, continuous improvement, and forward-thinking approaches. We leverage advanced technology and data intelligence to drive operational excellence and deliver superior outcomes.
Job Summary
We are seeking a Senior UX Researcher who brings equal parts rigor and curiosity to every engagement. This is a practitioner role — someone who rolls up their sleeves, gets close to users, and produces research that genuinely influences how products are built. You will be an active participant across the full arc of product development, from early-stage exploration through concept validation, generating the evidence teams need to make smarter, faster decisions.
You will be most successful here if you are comfortable operating without a fully defined playbook, can earn trust quickly across disciplines, and take pride in research that is not just insightful but immediately useful. This role sits at the heart of our product process, working shoulder-to-shoulder with Product, Engineering, and Design to keep real user perspectives driving the work forward.
Key Responsibilities

• Scope and execute research studies — both generative and evaluative — that are calibrated to the questions that matter most at each stage of the product lifecycle.
• Get close to users through interviews, observation, and contextual inquiry to uncover the realities of how they work, what slows them down, and where they need the most support.
• Take an active role in workshops across discovery and definition phases — from preparation and facilitation to synthesis and follow-through — ensuring sessions produce artifacts that actually move work forward.
• Map the current user experience in a way that exposes where processes break down, where expectations go unmet, and where the greatest opportunities for improvement lie.
• Develop and maintain a growing body of shared research assets — personas, journey maps, pain point inventories, and session summaries — that keep the broader team grounded in user reality.
• Contribute to forward-looking design conversations by helping teams envision future user experiences, flows, and early concepts in collaboration with UX and Product partners.
• Run structured usability and validation sessions end-to-end, including study design, participant coordination, facilitation, and post-session analysis.
• Package research outputs into concise, prioritized findings that give stakeholders a clear view of what to act on and why.
• Stay engaged beyond the handoff — helping Product and Engineering understand and apply research insights as they move into iteration and build.
• Keep research organized and accessible so that findings can be traced back to decisions and reused as new questions emerge.

Requirements

• Education: A degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Design, or a related area; we will consider equivalent experience in lieu of a formal credential.
• Experience: A minimum of 3 years conducting UX research in a professional setting, ideally across a mix of discovery and usability-focused work.
• Skills: Demonstrated ability to make sense of messy, open-ended problems; hands-on experience with qualitative methods and usability evaluation; strong capacity for synthesis and structured thinking.
• Certifications: No certifications required; relevant credentials in UX or research practice are welcome.
• Other: Comfort facilitating workshops and working sessions with cross-functional stakeholders; experience navigating complex enterprise product environments; working proficiency with tools like Figma, Miro, or similar platforms.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior work in or meaningful exposure to professional services sectors — such as legal, financial services, or consulting — where user workflows tend to be complex and high-stakes.
• A track record of conducting research on sophisticated, process-intensive enterprise tools where usability challenges run deep.
• Comfort moving fluidly between qualitative and quantitative methods based on the needs of the research question.

Leadership Qualities

• Organized and detail-oriented, with habits that make your work easy for others to build on.
• Exercises good judgment in ambiguous situations and knows when to push for more information versus move forward.
• Communicates with clarity and empathy, whether presenting to a room of executives or debriefing with an engineering team.
• A genuine team player who makes the people around them better, not just the work product.
• Handles sensitive research data and internal business information with discretion and professionalism.
• Stays composed when priorities shift and brings a solutions-oriented mindset to competing demands.