Principal Legal Lead

Scissero • New York, NY

9d • Remote

About The Position

As a Principal Legal Lead, you will lead day-to-day legal delivery and own the client relationship for a portfolio of leading global investment firms, asset managers, and corporates across live private equity, M&A, and financing transactions. You will combine senior legal judgement with hands-on account management, taking ultimate responsibility for the quality of legal work and the overall health of the accounts in your allocated client group. You will draft, review, negotiate, and oversee NDAs and ancillary transaction documentation in accordance with client-approved playbooks, while acting as the senior escalation point for complex, sensitive, or novel matters. You will oversee and develop a team of Junior Legal Specialist, Legal Specialist, and Senior Legal Specialists, taking responsibility for their work product and for their ongoing training and development. This role carries direct account-management responsibility. You will be the day-to-day owner of client relationships within your allocated group, available on call to clients, tracking account health, hosting quarterly business reviews, handling complaints and issues end-to-end, and identifying opportunities to deepen and grow accounts in partnership with the Account Manager. You will be expected to blend commercial awareness with legal expertise, ensuring clients receive both technically excellent legal work and a trusted, responsive service relationship. You will leverage our proprietary AI-enabled platform to drive speed, consistency, and accuracy across document review, deviation identification, and playbook application, while maintaining full ownership and accountability for the final output of your team. You will also partner with our product and engineering teams, helping refine and improve the AI tools that underpin our delivery model. This is an opportunity to operate at the senior end of an AI-native legal services business, leading both the legal delivery and the commercial relationship for sophisticated clients on complex, real-world transactions.

Requirements

• Law degree (LLB or equivalent).
• Proven experience drafting, reviewing, and negotiating core transactional or commercial documents, including confidentiality agreements, engagement letters, and release letters.
• Demonstrable client-facing experience, including direct ownership of client relationships, client calls, and handling client issues or complaints.
• Demonstrable experience supervising, mentoring, or indirectly managing legal team members and reviewing their work product.
• A genuine blend of legal and commercial capability — technically strong in the practice of law and commercially astute in the management of client relationships.
• Excellent written and spoken English, including the ability to explain legal concepts clearly to lawyers, non-lawyers, clients, and senior stakeholders.
• Strong attention to detail and commitment to producing consistently high-quality work.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with private equity, asset management, hedge fund, or other alternative asset manager clients.
• Account management or customer success experience, including tracking account health and running client review meetings such as QBRs.
• Experience at legal tech, law firms, ALSPs, Big 4 legal teams, or in-house legal departments.
• Experience working with structured playbooks or standardised legal frameworks.
• Experience in a venture-backed technology scale-up environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead day-to-day delivery for your allocated client group, ensuring high-quality legal services, strong client experience, deadline compliance, and consistent execution.
• Draft, review, negotiate, and oversee complex NDAs and ancillary transaction documents across private equity, M&A, and financing transactions.
• Act as the senior point of escalation for difficult legal, commercial, client, counterparty, or workflow issues, identifying, challenging, and formulating high-quality solutions.
• Oversee and review the work product of junior, specialist, and senior team members, ensuring quality, consistency, legal substance, and readiness for client distribution.
• Lead, sign off, review, and refine client playbooks, templates, and precedents, ensuring consistency with internal guidelines, format, and structure.
• Serve as the day-to-day account lead and ultimate “responsible person” for allocated clients, owning the overall health of each account.
• Be available and on call to clients, hosting regular check-ins, negotiation calls, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to assess platform usage, service performance, and account direction.
• Track customer health across allocated accounts, proactively identifying risks to satisfaction, retention, or renewal and acting early to address them.
• Take ownership of client complaints and issues end-to-end, drafting competent responses and driving them through to resolution.
• Support customer outreach and account growth, identifying opportunities to expand or deepen relationships — including onboarding additional document types, new workflows, or changes to scope — in partnership with the Account Manager.
• Provide coaching, feedback, mentoring, and training to team members, identifying development needs and designing and delivering targeted training.
• Monitor capacity, workload distribution, SLA performance, and service quality across your allocated group, escalating resourcing or performance issues as appropriate.
• Contribute to hiring, interviewing, onboarding, performance calibration, and progression discussions.
• Identify opportunities to improve service delivery, legal technology adoption, workflow design, and managed services scalability.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of internal processes and delivery of workflows.
• Lead by example in the effective use of our proprietary AI tools across your allocated client group, modelling best practice for the team.
• Ensure team members use the tools consistently and appropriately across document review, playbook application, deviation identification, and quality control.
• Maintain full oversight of legal output, ensuring technology-assisted work is reviewed, validated, and aligned with client-approved positions.
• Provide structured feedback to product and engineering teams to support ongoing platform improvement.
• Work within an AI-native legal delivery model that combines legal expertise with technology

Benefits

• Hybrid and remote working options, with the ability to work from other countries (upon request)
• Paid Sick Leave days per year to recover or care for family.
• Confidential Support: Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) offering mental health and wellbeing support.
• Professional Development: 7 days per year of paid study leave annually for exams and structured learning.
• Annual Bonus: Discretionary and performance-based.
• Generous Paid Time Off: Annual leave + bank holidays

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal