eDiscovery and Outside Counsel Management Manager

Zillow

125d • $105,900 - $169,100

About The Position

Zillow’s Legal & Compliance (L&C) organization is a team of skilled, collaborative professionals dedicated to supporting Zillow’s mission with integrity, innovation, and excellence. Zillow is seeking an eDiscovery and Outside Counsel Management Manager to lead, manage and optimize the Legal and Compliance Team’s ediscovery, outside counsel management, and third-party subpoena operations programs. This role is critical to the operational integrity of the company’s legal and compliance teams helping to ensure the company is managing risk, cost, and data effectively at scale. Reporting to the head of litigation, you will collaborate closely with legal stakeholders, external counsel, vendors, and internal partners to oversee and optimize the company’s relationships with external law firm partners and ediscovery vendors, manage budgets, negotiate rates, ensure compliance with outside counsel guidelines and evaluate performance. This role will also include managing legal holds, developing and implementing retention policies, optimizing legal technology tools, and overseeing third-party subpoena responses.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in legal or litigation operations, managing e-discovery, third-party subpoena responses, and overseeing outside counsel management in-house or at law firm.
• Deep experience in outside counsel management, including pricing models and law firm pricing and billing practices, budgeting, and negotiation and evaluation of rates, including alternative fee arrangements.
• Extensive experience in legal data preservation practices, including managing legal holds and document collections and productions.
• Experience managing and overseeing all phases of responses to third-party subpoenas.
• In-depth experience with legal tech platforms (Logikcull or equivalent), subpoena management tools, and dashboard/reporting tools (e.g., Tableau, Power BI, Excel, Smartsheet).
• Strong financial acumen, experience with fiscal and budget management.
• Familiarity with Brightflag or other comparable legal e-billing systems and technological tools.
• Strong project management skills; highly organized, accountable, and responsive.
• Excellent communication skills and ability to distill complexity for executive audiences.

Nice To Haves

• Preferred experience supporting legal, regulatory, or federal agency investigations at a technology company or highly regulated environment.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary point of contact for law firm relationship management.
• Partner with Legal and Compliance stakeholders to interview and select outside counsel based upon matter specifics to match risk profile and desired outcome.
• Establish budgets, negotiate rates and optimize law firm use of legal technology tools, including AI, to drive efficiency and cost saving.
• Regularly review the panel of preferred firms based on performance, diversity, expertise, and cost competitiveness.
• Monitor outside counsel performance on active matters, conducting periodic reviews and performance evaluations of legal outcomes, service quality and rates.
• Support outside counsel CLE presentations to in-house counsel.
• Partner with Zillow’s legal operations team to set strategy and establish internal guidelines around the use of external counsel.
• Analyze legal spend to identify cost-saving opportunities and budgeting trends.
• Enforce legal department billing policies and guidelines and matter management protocols.
• Oversee the company’s internal e-discovery program and collaborate with outside counsel and vendors to provide company-wide e-discovery support.
• Own the end-to-end e-discovery lifecycle, from legal hold through collection, processing, review and production.
• Oversee the company’s legal hold platforms and partner with internal stakeholders on legal data preservation across systems.
• Support and implement the development of e-discovery policies, workflows and best practices in collaboration with Legal, IT, Security and Compliance teams.
• Provide guidance on data minimization, defensibility, and early case assessment to reduce review volume and legal risk.
• Develop and lead internal training programs on legal holds, data preservation obligations, and best practices for cross-functional teams.
• Act as a thought leader on e-discovery trends, compliance requirements, and litigation technology.
• Make recommendations with respect to litigation, e-discovery and subpoena-related technology tools and vendors to improve process and mitigate risk and cost.
• Primary point of contact for intake, tracking and management of third-party subpoenas to ensure timely and adequate responses.
• Review and analyze subpoena requests for legal sufficiency, scope and appropriate response strategy.
• Communicate with requesting counsel and/or government agencies to clarify or negotiate scope.
• Work with internal business units to collect and preserve responsive documents and data.
• Draft subpoena responses, including conducting review and production of records.
• Generate regular reports and metrics to track volume and trends.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life, and disability coverages.
• Parental leave and family benefits.
• Retirement contributions and paid time off.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: Bachelor's degree
• Number of Employees: 251-500 employees