Overview
The organization is seeking a Senior Counsel, Commercial Transactions to serve as a senior legal advisor supporting commercial contracting and strategic business initiatives.
This role involves drafting, reviewing, and negotiating customer-facing and strategic commercial transactions, with primary focus on SaaS, software licensing, strategic partnership and go-to-market arrangements, cloud services, AI-enabled offerings, data processing, and other commercial agreements. The position also supports cross-functional teams to manage legal risk and help develop scalable contracting processes.
Responsibilities
- Lead customer, procurement, and strategic commercial negotiations and technology-related legal work, including drafting, reviewing, and negotiating software, SaaS and hybrid, cloud services, AI-related offerings, and strategic partnership agreements.
- Collaborate with stakeholders including Sales, Finance, Security, IT, Compliance, and others to deliver on timelines, clarify expectations, and solve problems, including managing stakeholder and customer communications.
- Serve as a trusted internal advisor by providing creative, strategic legal advice and business counsel on commercial, operational, and strategic legal issues.
- Handle a challenging volume of contracts, ranging from straightforward to complex, by identifying issues and solving for them.
- Engage with customers to ensure they feel listened to and supported and to deliver expected outcomes.
- Propose and work on process improvements, including developing new standard forms or variations to improve efficiency and align with business and product requirements.
- Use AI legal technology tools effectively, identifying which tools work for which purposes and remaining open to testing new solutions.
- Lead and support strategic pricing initiatives, pricing governance projects, and commercial model optimization efforts in partnership with Finance, Global Business Operations, and business stakeholders.
- Participate in internal contract approval workflows, prioritize contracts, and respond to questions from stakeholders and clients.
- Demonstrate practical proficiency with AI tools (including legal technology tools), Microsoft O365, Salesforce, and Ironclad.
Minimum Qualifications
- Juris Doctor from an accredited law school.
- Active bar membership in good standing.
- Strong organizational skills and attention to detail.
- Intelligence, flexibility, creativity, diligence, responsiveness, and strong communications skills.
- Reasonable exposure to computer and software technology concepts.
- Solid proficiency with MS Office, Salesforce, and Contract Management Software.
Preferred Qualifications
- Eight (8) or more years of relevant experience in-house and/or at a law firm supporting technology transactions.
- Extensive experience negotiating SaaS, software, cloud services, professional services, data processing, strategic partnership, and enterprise commercial agreements.
- Experience supporting complex commercial contracting environments.
- Strong understanding of technology, including legal technology, cloud services, software licensing models, information security, privacy, intellectual property, and regulatory considerations.
- Experience supporting AI-enabled products and emerging technology issues.
- Strong organizational skills and attention to detail.
- Intelligence, flexibility, creativity, diligence, resourcefulness, responsiveness, and strong communications skills.
- Required: Trained in and experience with contract negotiations, including commercial contracts, SaaS contracts, and related services and support agreements.
- Required: Complex software, SaaS and hybrid cloud agreements, master agreements, professional services agreements, and software development agreements.
- Desirable but not required: Basic knowledge of data privacy laws and practices in a SaaS context involving the security and processing of customer data that may include personal information.
- Desirable but not required: Experience with government technology procurement contracting, including at state, federal and local levels, and with regard to GSA, SEWP, and FAR; basic knowledge of FedRAMP and application to SaaS offerings and operations.
- Desirable but not required: Understanding of software development, computer technology, SaaS infrastructure and services, open-source communities, and intellectual property concepts and laws.
- Ability to research and analyze legal issues.
- Solid proficiency with AI tools, legal technology tools, MS Office and legal research platforms and tools. Familiarity with Salesforce, Ironclad and Asana.
Compensation & Benefits
This position is eligible for total compensation which includes a competitive base salary, an annual performance bonus, and long-term incentives.
- Expected salary range: $183,000 to $275,000
- Final offered salary will be based on factors including depth of experience, skill set, qualifications, and internal pay equity. Hiring at the top end of the range would not be typical to allow for future meaningful salary growth in this position.
Location
Remote/Hybrid