Senior Commercial Counsel

Summary

Join Nova Credit's legal team as a Senior Commercial Counsel and help navigate contract negotiations as the company scales globally. You will be a key legal partner, working with various stakeholders, from startups to Fortune 100 financial institutions. This role requires strong negotiation skills, the ability to translate complex legal concepts into easily understandable terms, and strategic thinking to support responsible growth. The position is remote-friendly and reports directly to the General Counsel. You will influence across departments, requiring strong relationship-building and problem-solving abilities. The role involves a variety of responsibilities, including contract negotiation, legal review, and training.

Requirements

• 7+ years of relevant commercial and corporate law experience, with a strong preference for experience in-house and negotiating with big players
• You're admitted to a state bar (or eligible to register as in-house counsel)
• You're curious about (or already using) generative AI tools - we want someone who's excited about the future of legal tech
• You’ve partnered with Sales/Go To Market before, hopefully by embedding in the team
• You can take something complex and make it simple. You know how to pause, take a breath, and translate from lawyer-speak (e.g., all those acronyms) to something the audience in front of you will grasp
• You've been in the SaaS trenches with financial institutions, negotiating enterprise deals with banks, and knowing exactly why they obsess over data security addendums and compliance frameworks
• You have experience with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), including negotiating agreements with or for Credit Reporting Agencies (CRAs)
• You've wrestled with data supply agreements - negotiating with aggregators and understanding the unique headaches (and opportunities) these partnerships create
• You’re curious, like a cat. Maybe your friends even call you “Whiskers.” You hear about something you don’t know, and you feel a need to learn it. You don’t need to know everything, but you will need to know how to use your resources (regulatory guidance, your network, Slack, journals, books, Bing, law firms) to find the answer to just about any question

Responsibilities

• Get the lay of the land - understand our business model, key relationships, product offerings, and how we got here
• Understand Nova Credit’s business development lifecycle, legal involvement at various stages, and ongoing agreement negotiation
• Familiarize yourself with key regulatory and compliance frameworks (e.g., Fair Credit Reporting Act, CCPA)
• Get to know our working style, goals, mission, and values
• Get to know the people
• Dive deep into Nova Credit’s legal agreements and organizational structure
• Take the lead on customer negotiations, partnering closely with our business development team
• Lead review and negotiation of supplier and vendor agreements, translating lawyer-speak into sales-speak
• Structure, draft, review, and negotiate license agreements, letters of intent, term sheets, or other contractual documents to support complex commercial initiatives
• Review, edit, and negotiate documents like NDAs and vendor information forms
• Get to know the credit reporting and analysis industry (including bureaus, financial institutions, credit providers, and other fintechs)
• Independently quarterback negotiations with major financial institutions
• Become a go-to person for "Hey, quick legal question..."
• Design and deliver training, teaching sales teams about caps, supercaps, data rights, IP, and why these things matter
• Build processes that make legal less of a bottleneck and more of an accelerator
• Experiment with GenAI tools to make our legal operations more efficient

Benefits

• Comprehensive and generously subsidized medical, dental, and vision insurance options
• A company-sponsored 401k plan
• 16-week parental leave of absence
• Sick time off
• Paid time off vacation
• Flexible PTO
• Tenure rewards