Principal Legal Associate

Unlock Employer

Posted Sep 18, 2026

Remote · US Full Time
Est. $140K – $190K/yr

Overview

This role is for a Principal Legal Associate position supporting U.S. remote operations.

  • Location: U.S., Remote
  • Hours: 9am–6pm (EST hours, U.S.)

The organization provides AI-enabled legal services for financial institutions, combining expert legal support with intelligent automation to deliver transactional legal work.

Responsibilities

  • Lead day-to-day delivery for an allocated client group, ensuring high-quality legal services, strong client experience, deadline compliance, and consistent execution.
  • Draft, review, negotiate, and oversee complex NDAs and ancillary transaction documents across private equity, M&A, and financing transactions.
  • Act as the senior point of escalation for difficult legal, commercial, client, counterparty, or workflow issues; identify, challenge, and formulate high-quality solutions.
  • Oversee and review the work product of junior, specialist, and senior team members to ensure quality, consistency, legal substance, and readiness for client distribution.
  • Lead, sign off, review, and refine client playbooks, templates, and precedents to ensure consistency with internal guidelines, format, and structure.
  • Serve as the day-to-day account lead and ultimate responsible person for allocated clients, owning the overall health of each account.
  • Be available and on call to clients, including regular check-ins, negotiation calls, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to assess platform usage, service performance, and account direction.
  • Track customer health across allocated accounts, proactively identifying risks to satisfaction, retention, or renewal and addressing them early.
  • Take ownership of client complaints and issues end-to-end, drafting responses and driving issues through to resolution.
  • Support customer outreach and account growth, identifying opportunities to expand or deepen relationships in partnership with the Account Manager (e.g., onboarding additional document types, new workflows, or changes to scope).
  • Provide coaching, feedback, mentoring, and training to team members; identify development needs and design and deliver targeted training.
  • Monitor capacity, workload distribution, SLA performance, and service quality across the allocated group; escalate resourcing or performance issues as appropriate.
  • Contribute to hiring, interviewing, onboarding, performance calibration, and progression discussions.
  • Identify opportunities to improve service delivery, legal technology adoption, workflow design, and managed services scalability.
  • Contribute to continuous improvement of internal processes and delivery of workflows.

Legal Technology & AI Integration

  • Model best practice in the use of the organization’s proprietary AI tools across the allocated client group.
  • Ensure team members use the tools consistently and appropriately across document review, playbook application, deviation identification, and quality control.
  • Maintain full oversight of legal output, ensuring technology-assisted work is reviewed, validated, and aligned with client-approved positions.
  • Provide structured feedback to product and engineering teams to support ongoing platform improvement.
  • Work within an AI-native legal delivery model combining legal expertise with technology.

Requirements

  • U.S. qualified attorney with a valid bar license to advise on NY law; those with 5 years of practice in reciprocity states will be considered.
  • Proven experience drafting, reviewing, and negotiating core transactional or commercial documents, including confidentiality agreements, engagement letters, and release letters.
  • Demonstrable client-facing experience, including direct ownership of client relationships, client calls, and handling client issues or complaints.
  • Demonstrable experience supervising, mentoring, or indirectly managing legal team members and reviewing their work product.
  • Strong blend of legal and commercial capability: technically strong in the practice of law and commercially astute in managing client relationships.
  • Excellent written and spoken English, including the ability to explain legal concepts clearly to lawyers, non-lawyers, clients, and senior stakeholders.
  • Strong attention to detail and commitment to producing consistently high-quality work.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience working with private equity, asset management, hedge fund, or other alternative asset manager clients.
  • Account management or customer success experience, including tracking account health and running client review meetings such as QBRs.
  • Experience at legal tech, law firms, ALSPs, Big 4 legal teams, or in-house legal departments.
  • Experience working with structured playbooks or standardized legal frameworks.
  • Experience in a venture-backed technology scale-up environment.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Paid Sick Leave: days per year to recover or care for family.
  • Employee Assistance Programme (EAP): confidential support for mental health and wellbeing.
  • Professional Development: 7 days per year of paid study leave annually for exams and structured learning.
  • Annual Bonus: discretionary and performance-based.
  • Paid Time Off: annual leave + bank holidays.
  • 401(k) Retirement Plan: access to a company-sponsored 401(k) plan.
  • Health Insurance: company-contributed medical, dental, and vision coverage.

Location

  • U.S., Remote

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