Public Interest Law Expert (Civil / Environmental)

Role Overview

Mercor is partnering with leading AI labs on Project Atlas — an initiative to build realistic enterprise environments that frontier AI agents are trained and evaluated in. We're seeking experienced public-interest attorneys from major legal-aid organizations, public-interest law firms, and government offices (e.g., Legal Services Corporation grantees, ACLU, NRDC, Earthjustice, Public Counsel, state AG offices, DOJ Civil / ENRD) to recreate the digital workspaces they run every day and design the tasks that genuinely challenge state-of-the-art AI.

You'll bring your expertise in civil-rights, civil-legal-aid, consumer protection, environmental, or impact litigation to build a high-fidelity environment that mirrors the tools, files, and case-management workflows of a serious public-interest practice — and then author tasks grounded in the matters you actually handle today.

Key Responsibilities

• Build a realistic digital workspace centered on the Drive folders you use day-to-day — the intake notes, case-summary memos, pleadings, advocacy letters, policy briefs, grant reports, amicus drafts, and email threads that reflect how you actually organize your work — with some representation of the platforms that support it (e.g., Westlaw / LexisNexis, Clio / MyCase, Socrata / ArcGIS Hub)
• Design multi-step tasks grounded in your real workflows that require navigating multiple apps, files, and stakeholders in a way that meaningfully challenges frontier AI agents
• Collaborate with other public-interest attorneys in your field to design the environment, shape task scope, and review each other's scenarios for realism and rigor
• Work asynchronously with research teams to refine task designs and evaluation criteria for public-interest-law agent benchmarks
• Contribute to frontier AI research and benchmarking — the work you produce directly informs how leading labs train and evaluate the next generation of AI systems

Ideal Qualifications

• JD and active bar admission
• 3+ years of full-time public-interest experience at a major legal-aid organization, public-interest law firm, state AG / DOJ office, or impact-litigation nonprofit
• Background in one or more areas such as:
  • Civil-rights or civil-legal-aid (housing, family, immigration, public-benefits)
  • Environmental law (CAA, CWA, NEPA, CERCLA, environmental-justice)
  • Consumer-protection or affirmative enforcement
  • Impact litigation or amicus / policy advocacy
  • Administrative / rule-making advocacy
• Day-to-day use of Westlaw / LexisNexis, Clio / MyCase, and Socrata / Esri ArcGIS Hub
• Strong analytical thinking and writing — able to translate public-interest workflows into structured task specs

Compensation Note

• Task Completion Pay: Competitive and based on task quality (~$1,250 – $1,750 per completed task, subject to change as the project evolves)
• Performance Bonus: Top performers receive a weekly bonus incentive on top of their per task rate!
• Hourly Opportunity: Top performers may be invited to transition to an hourly compensation model based on sustained quality and throughput.