Director – Legal Counsel

Why This Role is Exciting

AuditBoard is seeking an experienced and highly motivated, self-starter attorney to help lead its growing global Go-To-Market (“GTM”) enterprise and partner legal teams. This attorney will (i) help build and lead AuditBoard’s GTM legal team, a team responsible for negotiating AuditBoard’s sales, partnership, and vendor transactions; and (ii) provide legal support to AuditBoard’s sales and partnership teams helping negotiate contracts and support them through the entire contract lifecycle.

Working in a fast-paced, rapidly evolving, high-volume environment, this GTM legal leader will partner with the head of the legal department and cross-functional stakeholders to ensure the GTM team has the right legal support to provide exceptional sales enablement and accelerate deal velocity. This is a tremendous opportunity to leverage a passion for technology and deep knowledge of commercial SaaS contracts to provide practical and solutions-oriented advice to clients, effectively calculate and communicate potential risks, manage workloads, and prioritize multiple client demands.

*This role requires 10+ years of experience focused on commercial law with at least five years in a corporate legal department.

Key Responsibilities 

As a direct report of the Head of Legal, this person will be responsible for key areas of the business including the following:

• Commercial legal work:
  • Manage and scale a team of legal professionals who can continue to successfully partner with and support the expanding sales and partnership organizations, eventually overseeing all transactional work for Auditboard
  • Draft, review and negotiate complex commercial and SaaS sales agreements (e.g., MSAs/subscription service agreements, term of use, public sector commercial agreements, professional services agreements, channel agreements, partner agreements, data processing agreements, assignment and assumption agreements, statements of work, order forms, NDAs and other commercial agreements)
  • Provide practical, commercial advice to global sales executives and internal stakeholders on a variety of Sales- and support-related legal issues, balancing business objectives with legal risks, including identifying, managing, and communicating risks and opportunities in revenue transactions and analyzing and interpreting complex business and legal contractual provisions
  • Advise internal clients regarding legal issues, including identifying, managing, and communicating risks and opportunities in commercial transactions
  • Onboard, train, and manage outside counsel that augments the commercial legal team, as needed

• Legal trainings and documentation:
  • Create and manage education, information, and training programs for the sales and success organization related to negotiation best practices and relevant legal issues/business forms
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with AuditBoard’s business teams to ensure agreements are consistent with internal corporate policies and processes
  • Maintain and continuously refine forms, playbooks, fallback guides, guidelines, research files, FAQs, policies, processes, procedures, and other tools essential to the efficient and effective functioning of the GTM legal function

• Provide executive-level counsel as needed:
  • Partner with key leaders on their GTM strategy and planning and proactively advise on any foreseeable, material legal risks
  • Advise on areas where AuditBoard can set up a partner program that aligns with other durable growth SaaS businesses
  • Advise on potential impacts of new and proposed relevant law developments, industry trends, and best practices in the markets in which AuditBoard operates
  • Help shape business and legal terms, deal structures and help improve transaction processes and practices to support innovation, achieve better outcomes and enhance transaction velocity without material increase in risk

• Meeting performance metrics:
  • Be accountable to the sales and partnerships teams ensuring GTM legal’s continuous high performance through internal SLAs and KPIs while leveraging and implementing world class systems and processes

Attributes for a Successful Candidate 

• Ability to practice law in the State you reside
• Minimum of 10 years of experience focused on commercial law 
• Minimum of 5 years of people leadership experience in building, running and/or developing high-performing teams required; preference for having managed global teams of 5+ professionals
• Experience: Demonstrated experience negotiating (i) complex commercial transactions, specifically with large enterprises involving issues related to data protection, security and intellectual property; and (ii) transactions involving SaaS.  Also has a solid working knowledge of business models, relative bargaining power, sales motion, global commercial negotiation practices and revenue recognition standards, and has the ability to quickly and accurately recognize areas of risk/opportunity. Well-organized and able to work on tight timelines while handling multiple projects.
• Communication Skills: Ability to provide practical legal advice to business personnel at all levels of an organization; effectively present ideas and has exceptional negotiation, client-counseling skills and interpersonal skills.  
• Leadership: A confirmed ability to effectively influence, lead, collaborate with and motivate others at all levels, and does this with a positive attitude.  Strong team, business, project and people management skills that includes the ability to connect with people and truly make them feel like part of a team.  Also has a proven track record of being a team player who is willing to pitch in anytime, providing assistance to everyone on the team with all tasks, big and small.
• Innovation: Bring experience and ideas to a fast-growing business who can help streamline, build efficiency and allow for steady growth.  In addition, this candidate should be a creative thinker with the ability to solve complex problems while balancing legal risks with business needs.
• Flexibility: As with any growing start-up, things change.  Brings a demonstrated ability to change directions (whether it be a change in agreement terms or a change in the entire business model) and re-prioritizes work to meet the new proposed outcome.
• Kindness: Brings compassion, sensitivity, dignity and a positive attitude to work.     
• Ethical: Has high personal standards of excellence and ethics, as well as the ability to act with discretion and strict confidentiality.
• Be curious: Brings a desire to learn about the business, the teams with whom we partner, the customers we support and an ability to learn rapidly, along with a resiliency and comfort serving as a trusted business partner to those teams and customers.  

Nice to Have 

• CIPP/E
• Proven record of building bridges with opposing counsel, even in tough transactions 
• Able to explain company technology to non-lawyers