Corporate Counsel
Job Description
We’re looking for a smart, self-motivated, creative, and organized attorney to own and run the company’s internal legal processes.
The legal team at Protocol Labs is a partner to our internal engineering and business units, which are inventing new open source technologies and new business models that include digital assets. Our world-class attorneys have deep expertise and many substantive wins in the fields of free speech and internet privacy, corporate and securities law, technology, policy, and more.
Just like the internet itself, we are a fully distributed team spread across the globe. We don’t let geography or borders define us — we want to work with talented and intellectually curious people of diverse backgrounds and different perspectives. This role will work with colleagues and collaborators across the globe.
Protocol Labs and its projects count investors including Sequoia, Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Polychain Capital. The company has raised more than $200 million to build technologies that improve and decentralize the Internet, using content-addressing, public blockchains, and novel cryptographic proofs.
As Corporate Counsel at Protocol Labs, you will…
As Corporate Counsel for Protocol Labs, you’ll be a trusted partner to each of Protocol Labs’ departments, handling issues that are critical to the company’s continued success. This is a great opportunity for someone to take on considerable responsibility, grow as a lawyer, and gain experience in all aspects of working as in-house counsel for a cutting-edge tech company.
Legal Leadership
- Developing and implementing frameworks for complex issues like cryptocurrency compensation and international operations
- Investigating R&D Lab-related Legal matters that align with Protocol Labs global, remote, and distributed mission, vision, and roadmap
- Proactively charting PL legal strategy
- Respond vigorously to challenges
Corporate Matters
- Working on transactions, including serving as an advisor and coach to business and software units, while drafting and negotiating our agreements for service providers, vendors, partners, licensees, users, etc.
- Corporate structuring including global entity strategy development and implementation
- Corp governance review & policy best practices
- Creating plain-language form agreements for transactions and educating/empowering relevant stakeholders on using these form
Employment Matters
- Supporting employment negotiations and answering relevant legal questions
- Addressing employment matters, including implementing policies and guiding compliance
Streamlining Operations
- Considerable responsibility as the front-line contact for the business on a day-to-day basis for legal issues and requests
- Implementing and maintaining our contract management systems.
- Project managing multiple complex cross-functional workstreams
- Interface with and optimize expert external counsel
You may be a fit for this role if you have…
- Track record of demonstrating good judgement
- Creative approach to solving challenging problems
- J.D. from an accredited U.S. law school
- Experience at a top corporate law firm
- Proven track record of learning and adapting quickly, thinking rigorously, and working proactively and independently
- Desire to create robust, responsive legal processes that balance the need to protect a company with the necessity of moving quickly in a startup
- Adept at critical thinking & analysis of risk as well as pragmatic approach to mitigation and management of risk
- You have deal experience including fundraising and / or financing, venture, Corp Dev / M&A, and deal structuring
- Keen attention to detail and passion for getting things right
- Ability to communicate and empathize with business, engineering, and legal colleagues alike
- Excellent writing skills
Bonus Points
- You’re interested in and and comfortable with technology
- You have in-house experience at a high-growth tech company
- You have one year of experience (or many more) drafting and negotiating contracts or working on litigation
- You have global tax experience or knowledge
Protocol Labs’ mission is to improve humanity’s most important technology, the Internet. We build protocols, systems, and tools to improve how it works. Today, we are focused on how we store, locate, and move information. Our projects include IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, and more.
