About Us:
Notion helps you build beautiful tools for your life’s work. In today's world of endless apps and tabs, Notion provides one place for teams to get everything done, seamlessly connecting docs, notes, projects, calendar, and email—with AI built in to find answers and automate work. Millions of users, from individuals to large organizations like Toyota, Figma, and OpenAI, love Notion for its flexibility and choose it because it helps them save time and money.
In-person collaboration is essential to Notion's culture. We require all team members to work from our offices on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, our designated Anchor Days. Certain teams or positions may require additional in-office workdays.
About the Role:
As Head of Commercial Legal, you will lead and scale Notion's commercial legal function, owning the strategy, team, and execution for all commercial legal matters globally. You will manage a team of commercial counsel across multiple regions and serve as the senior legal advisor to our go-to-market functions, including Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing. This role demands a builder and player-coach who can operate at the strategic level while staying close to deals.
You will report to the General Counsel and serve as a key member of the Legal leadership team.
What You'll Achieve:
Team Leadership & Development
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of commercial counsel spanning the Americas, EMEA, and APAC
- Set the standard for how commercial legal work is done: speed, quality, business orientation, and use of AI tools to multiply output
- Recruit and develop attorneys who combine deep transactional expertise with business proximity, learning velocity, and a bias to action
- Foster a team culture of ownership, craft, low-ego collaboration, and continuous improvement
- Be a true player-coach: develop and elevate your team while stepping in personally to execute on deals and projects when the moment calls for it. Everyone on this team rolls up their sleeves
Commercial Transactions & Deal Strategy
- Serve as the senior commercial legal advisor on Notion's most complex and strategic customer transactions, including enterprise SaaS and AI agreements, multi-year deals, and global deployments
- Act as a trusted deal partner to Sales leadership, coaching account teams and commercial counsel on negotiation strategy, risk calibration, and creative deal structuring
- Drive procurement and vendor-side legal support, including negotiation of technology, professional services, and marketing vendor agreements
- Lead quarter-end execution with composure and focus, managing high deal volumes without losing sight of strategic priorities
- Support channel, reseller, and strategic partnership programs as part of the core commercial legal portfolio
Privacy, AI & Regulatory
- Own commercial legal's approach to privacy and AI regulatory matters that impact customer agreements, including GDPR, CCPA, EU AI Act, data privacy certifications (e.g., EU-US Data Privacy Framework), and related international frameworks
- Partner with Product Legal on product and operational developments that affect customer agreements and AI-related terms
- Monitor and proactively advise on evolving regulatory developments, including sanctions and export control compliance, auto-renewal laws, digital services regulations, and cross-border data issues
Operational Excellence & Scalable Systems
- Build and continuously improve the commercial legal operating model: playbooks, self-service tools, escalation frameworks, and process improvements that increase capacity and reduce cycle times
- Partner with Legal Operations on CLM improvements, optimization, and system enhancements
- Lead and inspire systems thinking across the function. The goal is not to solve one contract; it is to solve the process so the next hundred contracts move faster
- Invest in training and enablement at every level: onboarding, ongoing team development, and cross-functional training for sales and business partners on contracting fundamentals and rules of engagement
- Define and track success metrics to measure team effectiveness and efficiency, using data to identify bottlenecks and demonstrate impact
- Leverage AI tools and technology to reimagine how commercial legal work is done, from contract review to deal analytics to knowledge management
Cross-Functional Partnership
- Serve as a strategic partner to Sales, Finance, and Security leadership on go-to-market execution, forecasting, and legal capacity planning to ensure the function scales with the business
- Collaborate with Legal leadership peers across Product/IP, Employment/Litigation, and Corporate to ensure alignment and efficient coordination on multi-team matters
Skills You'll Need to Bring:
- Admitted to the California State Bar, New York State Bar, or Registered In-House Counsel, and in good standing
- 15+ years of combined experience as a commercial or technology transactions attorney in a law firm and in-house at a SaaS technology company
- Significant experience managing and developing teams of commercial attorneys across multiple regions and time zones
- Experience supporting a global sales organization, including familiarity with deal structures and legal considerations across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC
- Deep expertise in enterprise SaaS transactions, including complex customer agreements, data processing agreements, and AI-related terms
- Executive presence, strong relationship-building skills, and a proven ability to operate as a strategic business partner who earns trust and influences outcomes across Sales, Finance, Product, and executive leadership
- Track record of building scalable legal processes, playbooks, and systems that increase team capacity and reduce cycle times
- Resilience, resourcefulness, and the ability to make recommendations and decisions with imperfect facts
- Demonstrated curiosity about AI and a willingness to adopt AI tools to work smarter, move faster, and deliver better results. Developing your personal AI fluency is required for this role
- You don’t need to be an AI expert, but you’re curious and willing to adopt AI tools to work smarter and deliver better results.
Nice to Haves:
- Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP)
- Experience with contract lifecycle management system implementation and optimization
- Background working with financial services, government, or other highly regulated enterprise customers
- Familiarity using Notion
We hire talented and passionate people from a variety of backgrounds because we want our global employee base to represent the wide diversity of our customers. If you’re excited about a role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every bullet point listed in the job description, we still encourage you to apply. If you’re a builder at heart, share our company values, and enthusiastic about making software toolmaking ubiquitous, we want to hear from you.
Notion is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Notion considers qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Notion is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please let your recruiter know.
Notion is committed to providing highly competitive cash compensation, equity, and benefits. The compensation offered for this role will be based on multiple factors such as location, the role’s scope and complexity, and the candidate’s experience and expertise, and may vary from the range provided below. For roles based in San Francisco or New York City, the estimated base salary range for this role is $360,000 - $400,000 per year.
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