Associate General Counsel

ASSOCIATE GENERAL COUNSEL

Summary

Wikimedia envisions a world where the sum total of human knowledge is available to everyone.  The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit home of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and other free educational projects, serves as the hub of a global movement of hundreds of thousands of contributors collaborating to collect and share the sum of all human knowledge with the world. Protecting the privacy of Wikimedia readers, contributors, and donors is a key element of our work as an organization.

Our Legal team counsels Foundation engineers as they create tools and features for Wikipedia, secure the websites, and collaborate with volunteer developers to design and build the future of the projects. We are looking for an Associate General Counsel to support the Deputy General Counsel in leading key functions in the Legal team, with specific focus on further refinement of our privacy and product counseling workflows.

The Associate General Counsel will be a hands-on leader with significant management experience, who will help to oversee and develop a highly talented and collaborative team of lawyers and legal professionals. The Associate General Counsel will also work closely with the Legal department leadership team, the Foundation’s Senior Leadership and executive teams, and with external stakeholders. We are looking for expertise and experience leading teams that advise online platforms, with a particular focus on counseling technical teams, and providing guidance on matters relating to privacy and security. Candidates should have a track record of enabling successful cross-departmental collaboration, and developing both early career and more experienced lawyers. Additional relevant experience includes past direct work with online communities.

Essential Functions:

• Advise the Deputy General Counsel, General Counsel, and Senior Leadership team on legal and regulatory matters, especially pertaining to privacy and security.
• Work collaboratively with legal department staff members to define and shape a renewed vision and strategy for the Foundation’s privacy team. Help set priorities and evolve the infrastructure to deliver on that vision and strategy.
• Manage a team providing strong transactional and product counseling support for engineers/technologists; this will include direct counseling, setting organizational policy, and risk assessment/mitigation.
• Strengthen and improve internal workflows and collaboration relating to product counseling and engineering-related legal advice.
• Each year, oversee an annual refresh of the Wikimedia Foundation Privacy Policy to keep pace with applicable regulation, the protection of user data, and new and evolving features on the Wikimedia projects; support internal and external communication campaigns to educate staff, users, and other stakeholders on the evolution of the policy.  
• Develop and lead a strong, diverse, and collaborative team serving Foundation programmatic goals and the Wikimedia movement.
• Oversee the work of various privacy workflows and manage assigned lawyers; mentor high-performing legal staff.  
• Provide advice and counsel on other areas of the law, which, depending upon our needs and your experience, may include regulatory compliance frameworks, open source licensing, and more.

Requirements:

• J.D. from accredited U.S. law school or equivalent foreign degree preferably paired with significant U.S. legal experience.
• Current membership in good standing with at least one U.S. state bar.
• Approximately 10+ years or significant experience practicing law and advising a user-facing digital technology or internet company (e.g., as in-house counsel), preferably with global reach.  
• Significant management experience including managing other high-performing, senior lawyers.
• Significant experience working with engineering colleagues as a counselor and advisor to achieve organizational goals.
• Experience with, and deep technical understanding of, tools and methods related to digital privacy and security.
• Ability to work with a wide range of professionals including lawyers, engineers and data analysts, and communications specialists. 
• Experience with large, diverse, online user communities.
• Comfortable in a highly collaborative, multicultural, transparent environment.
• Ability to assess and manage complex risks.
• Mission-driven with a public service orientation and high personal integrity.
• An u