Searce
Website:
searce.com
Job details:
Head of Legal
Legal here is a profit function, not a review desk — and you're the one who prices it that way. The paper prices value, wins faster, and protects the assets that compound: outcome contracts, partner paper, marketplace terms, IP architecture, and your own Locked numbers.
What are we looking for
Solver? Absolutely. But not the usual kind. Contracting, done right, isn't a defense function — it's how value gets priced, protected, and compounded. If you read a deal the way an architect reads a structure — where the risk sits, where the margin sits, and how to build paper that holds under both negotiation and audit — we want to connect.
- Principal, not custodian.
- Reads risk the way an engineer reads load-bearing steel.
- Builds the paper once, so it holds — not the paper you redraft every time someone pushes back.
- Comfortable being the last signature before something becomes real.
- Thinks in systems: this clause, this precedent, this margin, for years — not just this deal.
This Isn’t for Everyone. But if you’ve ever redlined a contract and thought about the deal it should have been — not just the risk it should have avoided — we’d love to chat with you.
Your Mission: The Role
solving for better.
This firm sells outcome contracts — fixed, at-risk, and gainshare against verified numbers. It admits partners on profit points, lists products on CSP marketplaces, and deploys engineers into partner programs on tour terms. Every one of those is a contracting innovation, and each one either generates margin or blocks it. The paper is the pricing instrument. You own the paper.
You build the function from an empty seat: three people, live in six months, chartered like every other squad here — a Locked number, an eval discipline, agents as the workforce, humans on judgment. If your instinct is to steer an outcome fee back to time-and-materials, or to say no before you've priced the yes, this isn't your seat.
If you read a P&L as fluently as a clause, treat a term sheet as a pricing instrument, and don't lose energy in a hostile counterparty round — this is your seat at the table.
Your Responsibilities
what you will wake up to solve.
Price the Value
- Own the Outcome Paper: Structure fixed, at-risk, and gainshare contracts against verified numbers — every clause a pricing instrument, not boilerplate. Gainshare converts delivery excellence into revenue that hourly paper never captures.
- Clear the Marketplace: Get listing terms cleared on both CSP marketplaces so commit-burn purchasing becomes procurement-free revenue. Paper that isn't cleared is revenue that doesn't exist.
- Write the Moat's Legal Layer: Partnership deeds, vesting, and clawback mechanics validated across India, the US, the UK, and Singapore; an IP and two-brand trademark architecture that protects the patterns and agents that compound.
- Cut the Cycle: Every day removed from paper cycles is pipeline conversion. NDA turnaround under 24 hours; MSA and SOW under 5 days — by month 6.
Build the Agentic Function
- Agents Draft First, Always: Stand up drafting agents grounded in a versioned clause library so no contract starts from a blank page; humans redline and decide. 80% of routine paper agent-first-drafted by month 6.
- Playbooks as Code: Codify negotiation positions, fallback ladders, and escalation thresholds per contract type. Review agents enforce them; only deviations reach a human.
- Run the Eval Harness: A gold-standard contract set with known issues; every agent measured on catch rate and false-positive rate per clause type before deployment and on every model refresh. Legal is not exempt from evaluation.
- Hire Above Your Own Bar: Hire the talent required to achieve the function's objectives — a three-person team, not a growing headcount. Make self-serve standard paper cover 50% of requests so hiring above the bar, not adding more of it, is how you scale.
Hold the Judgment Line
- Human-Only Gates, Non-Negotiable: Signatures, novel structures, regulatory filings, disputes, and anything touching the verification instrument or partner admission stay with you. Zero agent-drafted paper is signed without human review.
- Zero Ambiguity Restatements: No verified-number restatement is ever traceable to contract ambiguity. The paper is precise enough that the number holds.
- Buy Depth, Don't Hire It: Run outside counsel across the US, UK, Singapore, and the Middle East as an elastic layer, bought per matter and managed against a spend-per-matter number — down 40% against the month-1 baseline.
Report a Number, Not a Cost Line
- Legal's Own Ledger: Report a revenue-enabled number to the Betting Table — contract-cycle days removed from pursuits, gainshare clauses executed, marketplace revenue unlocked — not only a spend line.
- Own Every Locked Number: You are accountable for each target above and for the human-only gates. Not the team. You.
The DNA of a ‘Searcian’
superpowers we value.
The ‘happier’ core
- happier-at-heart: humble, adaptable, positive, passionate, innovative, excellence-minded, responsible.
- happier-in-action: Not just a poster on the wall; It's how we make decisions, treat each other, show up for clients & hire or promote people.
- Thinks like a founder. Acts like an owner.
- Always in Beta: Relentless curiosity. Openness to learn, un-learn, and re-learn.
- Real Optimist: Views all setbacks as opportunities.
- Believes in truth over comfort. Ideas over titles. Learning over knowing.
- Embraces chaos with calm. Evolves faster than the market.
The ‘evlos’ mindset
This is the "how" behind your work. It’s a deep-seated drive to improve, discover, and own.
- Solver-core: Problem-solving is not just a default setting for a Searcian, it is our genuine passion and makes ‘our eyes light up’. We actually solve problems to unwind & relax.
- Real improver: Searcians are built to push for better, not just settle for done. Real solvers Iterate to become better everyday and remain self-driven.
- Under-promise & over-deliver. We love to create pleasant surprises.
- Authentically original thinking: Asks the "why" that unlocks what's next. Brings unique, valuable perspectives to every discussion.
- Built-to-last + engineered-to-scale: We don't lead with tools. We lead with foundations. Process-first, AI-second.
- Super-Learner: Learns faster, adapts smarter, levels up relentlessly. What you can do tomorrow matters more to us than what you did yesterday. Your learning curve beats experience.
Functional Skills
- P&L Fluency: Reads a P&L and models gainshare economics live — treats a contract as a pricing instrument, not a risk register.
- Deal-Room Presence: Holds the room with Partners, CSP sellers, and clients through a collapsed structure or a hostile round. Energy is a working tool here, not a personality note.
- Principal's Judgment: Thinks like an owner of the business, not a service provider to it — knows which risks are worth carrying for margin.
- Buy vs. Build Judgment: Knows when jurisdictional depth is worth buying per matter versus building in-house — a capital-allocation call, not a staffing default.
- Function-Builder Instinct: Designs a legal function as a system — clause library, playbooks, agents, people — not as a headcount request.
Tech Superpowers
- AI-Native Legal Practice: Uses LLMs in your own legal workflow today — drafting, review, research — with an explicit quality-control method, not just a prompt habit.
- Agentic Legal Stack Literacy: Understands drafting agents, review agents, versioned clause libraries, and eval harnesses well enough to specify what the Legal Engineer builds and judge whether it's working.
- CLM & CRM Systems Fluency: Has run contract lifecycle on enterprise CLM tooling (Ironclad, Sirion, Icertis, Agiloft, or equivalent) integrated with a CRM — knows what routing, attribution, and audit trail look like in software.
- Eval-Minded: Treats catch rate and false-positive rate as the language for whether legal automation is trustworthy. Evaluation, not vibes.
Experience & Relevance
- 12+ years, India-qualified, with personal ownership of US or UK enterprise commercial paper.
- Outside-Counsel Command: Has run outside counsel across three or more jurisdictions.
- Business-First Record: Has structured outcome-based, gainshare, or at-risk commercial paper — not just reviewed it. A business background or business-family exposure is preferred.
Bonus Points (you will thrive if you have)
- The "Founder" Bias: You've built a function, team, or practice from zero — not inherited one already running.
- Cross-Domain Judgment: You've applied your expertise somewhere outside your formal training — a deal, a structure, a risk call outside the textbook.
- Startup Grit: You've worn multiple hats in a resource-constrained environment and solved "0→1" problems.
- Public Voice: You've written, spoken, or taught publicly in your domain — not just practiced it privately.
Click on Apply to know more.
