Sr. Director

The Role

As Senior Director, Legal Operations at Cedar, you will be a critical member of the Legal & Compliance Team, responsible for driving efficiency in Cedar’s legal and compliance operations. You will serve as a strategic operational partner focused on increasing legal and compliance operational efficiency, including planning, solving process and technology challenges that come with rapid growth, outside counsel management, and legal budget development and tracking. This role is well suited for a tech-savvy, proactive, hands-on, and experienced operations-focused professional who is excited by creating structure and insight through collaboration, data and technology, and who thrives in building strong cross functional relationships and being a company-facing liaison for the Legal & Compliance team. This position will report to the General Counsel.

Responsibilities

• Drive a multi-year operational and technology roadmap for the Legal & Compliance team, partnering with internal stakeholders to ensure those priorities become reality.
• Act as a key liaison between legal and cross-functional stakeholders, e.g. Procurement, Finance, People, Compliance, Engineering, Product, Commercial, etc. Be an active and accountable member of Cedar’s cohort of operation leads across the organization.
• Own the optimization of key systems (such as intake, e-billing, contract management, ediscovery, document collection and hold management, entity management), refine processes, manage projects, and develop triage systems.
• Define, with the broader Legal & Compliance team, the objectives and key results operational strategy, providing support and ensuring alignment with Cedar’s OKRs and business priorities. 
• Drive the Legal and Compliance team’s OKR process from planning to tracking, ensuring accountability and progress against key initiatives. 
• Act as thought partner and execution lead to the General Counsel, preparing materials, strategizing leadership meetings, onsite planning, and managing cross-functional priorities. 
• Be a thought leader for how to improve Legal & Compliance Team operations and processes as we grow, staying abreast of latest legal technology developments and assessing capabilities of solutions. A plus if you already participate in legal operations communities, webinars, conferences, or are willing to.
• Develop, implement and iterate on appropriate metrics and benchmarking through data analytics to measure the Legal & Compliance Team’s performance and efficiency.
• Manage all legal budgeting, forecasting, and budget variance analysis and, in this capacity, will need strong expertise in budgeting, outside counsel management, resource planning, cost efficiency, and e-billing systems.
• Lead continuous improvement projects, change management efforts,  including the ongoing ownership of long term programs.
• Partner with the Compliance team to support regulatory readiness efforts, audits, and governance projects. 
• Coordinate company-wide communications from the Legal & Compliance department.
• Maintain Cedar’s Legal knowledge base, manage templates, contract playbooks, FAQs, and team onboarding and offboarding efforts. 
• Partner with Procurement, Legal, Compliance, and business stakeholders to streamline the buy-side contracting workflows.
• Comfortable developing use cases, building requirements, designing  rollout plans, putting on trainings, and defining success metrics for any legal technology rollout, this may or may not include AI products.
• Identify opportunities to automate repetitive legal tasks, e.g. legal triage, approvals, redlining, etc.
• Comfort partnering with technical stakeholders, e.g. engineers, product managers, security, to align on technology enhancements and legal service delivery.
• Lead the exploration and vetting of generative and agentic AI tools relevant to legal and compliance needs ( e.g. contract review, knowledge management, questionnaire completion, playbook generation, FAQ bots). 

Nice to Have:

• CLOC, ACC Legal Ops, LINK or other community engagement
• Experience or interest in AI tools, particularly in the legal and/or compliance context 
• Previous experience working in highly regulated companies (healthcare, fintech, etc.)
• Previous experience in a startup or scaling company environment  

Required Skills & Experience

• BA/BS degree from an accredited university.
• At least 8 years experience of relevant operations experience (can be a combination of experience in a major law firm and in-house experience); minimum of 3 years at the management level for a technology company.  
• Deep working knowledge and hands-on experience with legal technology tools and applications; demonstrated ability to lead and execute on large-scale projects and technology implementations and change management (such as contract lifecycle management systems, knowledge management, e-billing, and counsel management tools).
• A proven ability to use data and data-driven methods to drive better decision making. You are comfortable with metrics and working in spreadsheets and slides.
• Prior experience developing playbooks, policies, and process documents.
• A strong ability as a natural problem solver and strategic thinker. You're comfortable with changing priorities and ambiguity and able to bring structure to chaos. You effectively identify and articulate implications up and downstream, taking action or escalating as appropriate.
• A genuine passion for building relationships cross-functionally.
• Experience developing strategic or departmental planning materials requiring consensus gathering from multiple constituents (including finance, accounting, operations, IT and human resources) and have strong business partnering skills.
• Ability to work effectively and collaboratively within a growing team and cross-functionally with members at all levels of the organization, including executives, board members and investors.

Compensation Range and Benefits

• Salary Range* in CA, NY, NJ, CT: $212,500 - 250,000
• Salary Range* NOT in CA, NY, NJ, CT: $191,300 - $225,000
• This role is equity eligible
• This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package

*Subject to location, experience, and education

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