Director, Legal Operations

The role

The Director, Legal Operations will serve as the centralized owner for Legal's operations, technology, data, and execution. This person will lead Legal AI strategy, manage the legal technology stack, and oversee financial, resourcing, and demand management foundations.

What you will do

• Serve as DRI for Legal Operations, Legal Technology, and Legal AI strategy, execution, and governance.
• Own Legal's operating model across workflows, processes, resourcing, and service delivery.
• Own budget planning, forecasting, accruals, and cost modeling with Finance.
• Manage legal billing and outside counsel.
• Lead resourcing, capacity planning, headcount modeling, role design, and make/buy/automate decisions.
• Manage the legal technology stack including CLM, matter management, AI tools, knowledge management, intake, and spend management.
• Evaluate AI tooling, drive build-vs-buy decisions, and translate requirements into technical roadmaps.
• Establish metrics, dashboards, and controls for workload, demand, spend, cycle times, efficiency, risk, and outcomes.
• Design and operate intake, triage, and demand-management frameworks.
• Optimize vendor and contractor management, spend controls, billing review, performance measurement, and work allocation.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years in Legal Operations, legal technology, process design, finance-adjacent operations, or operational leadership.
• Experience scaling legal operations, legal technology, financial management, and data-driven execution.
• Experience driving automation and AI initiatives from strategy through deployment, governance, adoption, and ROI measurement.
• Understanding of legal workflows (contracts, regulatory, litigation, investigations, intake, outside counsel management) and process redesign.
• Hands-on experience optimizing legal technology platforms (CLM, matter management, spend management, intake, knowledge management, AI tools).
• Ability to translate requirements into technical roadmaps and operational plans.
• Experience establishing metrics, dashboards, controls, and OKRs.
• Communication skills to influence legal leaders, executives, and technical teams.
• Experience operating in ambiguity and leading transformation in high-growth environments.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, crypto, financial services, or regulated industries.
• Background in enterprise AI governance, model risk management, or secure AI deployment.
• People management experience in Legal Operations or adjacent functions.
• Experience benchmarking Legal Operations practices, tooling, and cost structures against industry standards.

Before you apply

• We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process.

About the company

Payward is the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks. Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions.