Sr. Legal Counsel

About the Job:

👋 I’m Katie, the Chief of Staff at Ashby. I am thrilled to be hiring our first in-house Legal Counsel to join our team.

I joined Ashby almost a year ago to partner with our CEO, Benji, and our leadership team on our ambitious growth plans. The Ashby team is customer obsessed, focused on a high level of execution and product velocity (over meetings) and is a team of incredible, thoughtful people who live by Ashby’s Operating Principles.

As part of my role, I have enjoyed building the foundations of Ashby’s in-house legal practice as my experience spans corporate law and technology startups. I’ve been able to partner with many stakeholders at Ashby on a breadth of legal matters, raised our series D with Shane Gallaher, negotiated with our incredible customers, helped launch products and protect our data and privacy, protected Ashby’s IP and have worked on our global expansion plans.

Ashby’s 100%+ year over year growth and exciting plans ahead make now the right time for us to hire our first dedicated in-house Legal Counsel.

We are looking for a motivated Sr. Legal Counsel to be a key contributor to Ashby’s growth by providing the Ashby team with day to day legal support and shape and scale our legal framework. As our Senior Legal Counsel, you’ll work closely with me and collaborate with our leadership and wider teams to provide incisive, commercial and solutions-oriented advice across a breadth of areas including commercial contract negotiation, data & privacy, AI regulation, employment, corporate and IP. We are looking for a Legal Counsel that has experience in rapidly scaling organizations, can strongly advocate to both customers and to internal leaders, is highly organized and thrives in a dynamic environment. You must be able to balance both timely execution and setting the long term legal foundations for Ashby to minimize risk while scaling.

Responsibilities

• Review, draft and negotiate a wide range of commercial agreements including customer agreements and Order Forms, vendor contracts, SaaS agreements, and help to proactively develop and iterate Ashby’s Terms of Service.

• Lead international privacy law compliance process, including reviewing and negotiating DPAs for vendors, and Ashby customers. Provide advice on privacy and data protection issues with demonstrated experience complying with GDPR and CCPA obligations.

• Work closely with our product team to proactively advise on legal and compliance considerations for new products and features. Collaborate with our PMM team to create external facing collateral, clearly outlining Ashby’s approach to compliance and FAQ for new products.

• Partnering closely with the Ashby Security team to respond to security incidents, including drafting relevant security related communications.

• Provide proactive advice by staying up to date on relevant industry regulations and developments, particularly in the regulation of the use of AI in the hiring process across our key regions and privacy law developments (GDPR and CCPA).

• Work on a wide range of legal matters as they arise or are proactively identified, including IP, employment, global expansion and fundraising.

• Help identify and advocate for solutions that proactively address legal risks across the business as we continue scaling and develop internal legal training and FAQ.

• Manage relationships with external counsel across commercial, privacy, corporate and employment areas.

• Help shape the legal function’s operations and structure as Ashby continues to grow, including identifying opportunities for innovation through technology.

Qualifications

• Juris Doctor from an accredited law school and active license to practice law in the US

• 6 - 8 years of legal experience across a top tier law firm and in-house experience at a fast growing startup

• Strong understanding of and experience in advising on privacy laws: GDPR and CCPA

• Demonstrated ability to handle diverse legal matters independently while maintaining excellent judgment and managing multiple priorities.

• Clear communication style that translates legal advice into plain english and next steps for our team to clearly understand and action.

• Bonus: Prior experience as an early legal hire in a fast growing SaaS or AI company