Legal Operations

Cognition • San Francisco, CA

4d

About The Position

Cognition is looking for an exceptional operator to help build an AI-native legal function for an AI-native company. This is not a traditional legal operations role. You will design how Legal operates: how work comes in, how decisions get made, how knowledge is captured, where AI and automation can replace repetitive work, and how a small team can support a rapidly growing company without recreating the large, siloed legal departments of the past. You will own the systems, technology, budget, outside counsel relationships, and operating processes that allow the Legal team to move quickly while maintaining extremely high standards. The goal is simple: build a legal organization that operates with the speed, leverage, and ambition of Cognition itself.

Requirements

• You are an unusually strong operator who is comfortable moving between strategy and execution.
• You have significant experience in legal operations, business operations, or another environment where you were responsible for making a complex organization work better.
• Experience inside a rapidly growing technology company is strongly preferred.
• You understand the mechanics of running a sophisticated legal function—budgets, outside counsel, legal technology, contracting systems, planning, and metrics—but you aren't attached to the way legal departments have traditionally done those things.
• You are deeply curious about AI and already thinking about how it changes professional work.
• You have excellent judgment and a bias toward action. You can take an ambiguous problem, figure out what actually matters, and drive it to resolution.
• You communicate clearly, have low ego, and can work effectively with everyone from engineers to executives.
• Most importantly, you are a builder. When you encounter a broken process, your instinct isn't to manage around it. It's to fix it.

Nice To Haves

• Degrees are nice. A JD, MBA, or equivalent experience can be helpful, but we care much more about what you've built and how you think.

Responsibilities

• Build an AI-Native Legal Function: Design and continuously improve the operating model for Legal. Identify work that should be handled by lawyers, work that should be automated, and work that should disappear altogether.
• Build intelligent intake, triage, workflow, and knowledge systems that allow routine legal questions to be resolved quickly and consistently while directing the hardest problems to the right people.
• Work with our technical teams to experiment aggressively with Devin, AI agents, and other tools that can materially change how legal work gets done. We don't want to add AI to traditional legal processes. We want to rethink the processes themselves.
• Make Legal Easy to Work With: Build systems that make it easy for people across Cognition to get good legal answers quickly.
• Work directly with Sales, Product, Engineering, Security, Finance, People, Communications, and other teams to identify friction and remove it.
• Create scalable processes without creating bureaucracy. The best legal process is often the one people barely notice.
• Measure what matters—speed, outcomes, recurring sources of friction, outside spend, and where the team's time is actually going—and use that information to continuously improve how we operate.
• Own Legal Technology and Automation: Own the technology strategy for the Legal team, including contracting, knowledge management, matter management, e-billing, entity management, and other systems where appropriate. But don't assume we need traditional legal technology simply because other legal departments use it.
• Start with the problem. Determine whether software, AI, automation, a better process—or eliminating the process entirely—is the best answer.
• Build and deploy AI-enabled workflows that meaningfully increase the leverage of every person on the Legal team.
• Own the Business of Legal: Own the Legal team's budget, outside counsel relationships, vendors, technology, and operational planning.
• Develop a deliberate approach to when we use outside counsel and when we build expertise internally. Negotiate fees and alternative arrangements aggressively and make sure external lawyers are delivering expertise rather than work we can do better ourselves.
• Build simple, useful operating rhythms and dashboards that give us a clear view of the team's priorities, workload, spending, and performance.
• Help Build the Legal Team: Help us build a Legal team where exceptional people have unusually high levels of ownership.
• We expect people here to understand the business, exercise judgment, solve problems outside narrow job descriptions, and use technology to multiply what they can accomplish.
• You'll help turn those principles into the everyday operating culture of the team.

Benefits

• We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: No Education Listed