Legal Operations

Job description

ABOUT COLUMN For companies building financial technology and transforming the financial services space, the biggest bottleneck to their growth and innovation is often the underlying banks and infrastructure stack they rely on. We have spent our careers founding and scaling companies like Plaid, Square, Meta, Blend, and Affirm, and have seen this problem firsthand — builders and developers needing to partner with traditional banks, and creating API and abstraction layers over the patchwork that is the bank, its core, and many other vendors. All of this results in a complex (and often expensive) banking supply chain involving a user, fintech, BaaS middleware provider, bank, core and the Federal Reserve. At Column, we set out to simplify and fix this. We are a bank and a software company built from the ground up, offering builders and developers technology-forward banking solutions that cut out the hundreds of vendors, middleware providers, and abstraction layers. This means a safer, more transparent, and less costly banking supply chain. Come build with us! THE OPPORTUNITY: Many banks treat Legal as a cost center. Column treats it as a competitive advantage — the team’s ability to move at the speed of the business is why it can be so impactful. We are a lean team that punches well above our weight, with access to the best AI tools available, and we need to 10x our impact without growing headcount. That’s where you come in. We’re looking for the Bank’s first Legal Operations hire to serve as the team’s thought leader on what a modern, AI-native Legal function looks like at a regulated financial institution. We are not a SaaS company with standard contracts and plug-and-play provisions – the products we build are highly regulated and multi-jurisdictional, and the fintech partnerships we launch are bespoke. If a question has an easy answer, it doesn’t make it to the Legal team – this means the tooling that supports our lawyers requires creativity, a deep appreciation for the complexity of our regulatory and compliance obligations, and a willingness to think beyond standard legal ops solutions. This is a high-ownership, hands-on role for someone who has built or significantly transformed a Legal Ops function and knows how to turn a lean Legal team into a force multiplier. You will work hand-in-hand with the General Counsel to push the team to be faster and smarter, eliminating routine tasks and generating capacity to tackle the complex challenges and support growth. This role reports directly to the Bank’s General Counsel and is in-person at our Presidio-based office in San Francisco (3–4 days/week). WHAT YOU'LL DO: - Build the Legal Operating Model - Assess the current state of Legal’s operations, define the target operating model, and build toward it with urgency. - Build and run the operational cadences — intake SLAs, approval gates, cross-functional handoffs with Growth, Compliance, and Finance — that keep the function fast and accountable. - Develop KPIs, dashboards, and reporting mechanisms that give the General Counsel and leadership actionable insight into team performance, deal volume, cycle times, and operational health. - Identify operational bottlenecks proactively and implement scalable process improvements — if a task takes days today, it should take minutes after you’re done with it. - Own Legal Technology & AI - Audit existing tools, identify gaps, and develop a legal technology roadmap covering intake and workflow, CLM, e-billing, knowledge management, and AI-assisted workflows. - Design and build AI-assisted and agentic workflows. You will not be onboarding dozens of vendors, you will use the Bank’s tools to build your own dashboards, playbooks, redlining tools, and databases. - Partner with the Bank’s Business Operations team to drive the same rigor and tech-forward approach within Legal as everywhere else in the Bank. - Own adoption, training, and change management for new tools and processes — the best system is only as good as the team’s ability to use it. - Contract Lifecycle & Knowledge Management - Own the legal side of contract lifecycle management — intake, routing, templates, repository, and reporting — in close coordination with Growth and Finance. - Design and run the legal intake and triage workflow, continuously improving how requests are classified, drafted, reviewed, and closed. - Own knowledge management: keep playbooks, briefs, and templates current, versioned, and findable; make them the source of truth for the team and the business. - Develop and maintain processes for documentation management and retention, including operational guidelines, best practices, and training materials. - Outside Counsel & Financial Operations - Manage outside counsel operations and the legal budget. - Review, modify, and enforce billing guidelines; audit spend and drive cost rigor across external legal relationships. - Collaborate with Finance on budgeting, forecasting, and spend reporting; surface actionable insights from legal spend data. - Develop frameworks for strategic firm and vendor selection, utilization, and performance management. WHAT YOU'LL NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL: - 7+ years in legal operations at a high-growth technology company or financial institution - A builder’s mentality. AI-native, first principles approach to building tools and systems - Creativity. We are not looking for someone to build a cookie-cutter Legal Ops engine that works well elsewhere – you will need the skills to evaluate what we do today, what’s important to the business, and what will make us better. - Hands-on experience with CLM systems, knowledge management, outside counsel management - Strong data and analytics skills — you can build the dashboards and metrics that leadership actually uses, and you make decisions from data. - Strong cross-functional operator who can work across Legal, Risk, Compliance, Finance, Engineering, and Growth and drive adoption without direct authority. - Hyper-organized project manager: comfortable juggling multiple concurrent workstreams, surfacing tradeoffs early, driving accountability, and knowing when to escalate. - Scrappy, roll-up-your-sleeves attitude with zero ego about getting hands dirty — and a positive, get-it-done disposition that inspires the people around you. WHAT YOU'LL GET FROM US: - 🏥 Comprehensive health, dental, and vision plans, including options that are 100% covered by Column for you and 100% covered for your dependents! - 🐣 Comprehensive family planning and fertility benefits via partnership with Carrot, including reimbursement of up to $20,000 in qualified expenses - 🏡 Up to $2,000 (post-tax) monthly rent subsidy for employees living within 2 miles of Column’s office - 💳 FSA and HSA account options to enable use of pre-tax money for medical and dependent care expenses - 📈 401k plan, including self-directed brokerage options - 🌴 Flexible time-off policy - take the time off that you want and need to relax and recharge - 👶 100% paid parental leave, including 16 weeks for birth mothers, 12 weeks for primary caregivers, and 8 weeks for secondary caregivers - 😇 Up to $4,500 in annual reimbursements for backup childcare - 🍽️ Catered lunches and dinners for SF employees - 🚆 Commuter benefits, including paid transportation to-and-from the office - 🎉 Regular team building events, including annual offsite PAY TRANSPARENCY: Compensation packages at Column include base salary, equity, and benefits. New hire offers are made based on a candidate's experience, expertise, geographic location, and internal pay equity relative to peers. The annual US base salary range for this role is $180,000 - $235,000 + equity. WE LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING FROM YOU Column is committed to working with the best and brightest people from the broadest talent pool possible. We value bringing together a team with different perspectives, educational backgrounds, and life experiences, and believe a diversity of ideas is what allows us to develop the best solutions. All qualified individuals are encouraged to apply. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation during the application and recruiting process, please reach out to accommodations@column.com. We participate in the E-Verify program in certain locations as required by law. Learn more about the E-Verify program here https://e-verify.gov.