Legal Operations

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.

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  Assess the current state of Legal’s operations, define the target operating model, and build toward it with urgency.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

   

• 🏥 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

   

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.

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.