Commercial Counsel

About this role

About the Job:

👋 I’m Kelly https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-fish-52116924/, Senior Legal Counsel at Ashby. I joined Ashby recently as our first dedicated legal hire and I’m now building the legal team to support our next phase of growth.

After 12 years building and scaling in-house legal teams, I was drawn to Ashby for its ambition, product vision, and the exceptional talent across the company. Working alongside smart, low-ego, high-ownership operators every day is energizing and inspires you to bring your best ideas forward. The leadership team is decisive and thoughtful, making intentional choices that balance speed, customer focus, and long-term growth.

This is our first commercial counsel hire, and depending on the caliber of the candidates we meet, we may bring on more than one. You would join as a founding member of the commercial arm of our legal team at an exciting inflection point: revenue is outpacing plan, deal volume and size are growing, and our global footprint is expanding, bringing more sophisticated enterprise customers, new regulations, and deeper cross-functional complexity.

The role is hands-on and execution-focused, primarily focused on sales commercial contracting, with a meaningful procurement blend. At the core of this opportunity is building best-in-class, in-house support for our sales contracting and the foundations that let it scale as we grow. You will be in commercial contracts every day, partnering closely with Sales to close deals and drive revenue, while building the scalable processes and playbooks that unblock commercial negotiations and focus on operational efficiency.

Commercial contracting is the heart of this role and where we need your focus and passion to ramp quickly and make the impact needed. For someone who excels at that core, and as our bandwidth and reach grow, there will be room to get involved in broader initiatives across the legal function and cross-functionally, based on where you show genuine passion and aptitude.

Strong candidates will bring demonstrable commercial contracting experience with a heavy focus on sales and GTM, and be equally comfortable in vendor and procurement work. You have succeeded in a lean, scaling legal team, and you pair sound judgment and business acumen with the ownership and soft skills to proactively bring ideas and drive solutions through to implementation. You earn trust through responsiveness, clarity, and pragmatism, advocate firmly and thoughtfully with customers and internal stakeholders alike, and protect key risk positions while keeping negotiations constructive. If you are energized by growth, low-ego, excited to work alongside exceptional talent, and motivated by the chance to shape and scale a high-impact commercial function from the ground up, I would love to meet you.

Responsibilities

- Be the go-to reviewer for all things commercial contracting, with a primary focus on sales and a strong secondary focus on procurement, plus other opportunities such as partnerships and cross-functional work.

- On the sales side, be an early, high-impact part of establishing full suite in-house sales support.

- Review, draft, and negotiate customer NDAs, MSAs, Order Forms, and DPAs with a focus on speed, commercial pragmatism, and scalability.

- Develop best-in-class sales enablement, internal guidance, and external collateral.

- Build efficient processes and smart workflows that make commercial contracting scalable, including playbooks, cross-functional enablement, and new SOPs and workflows across a wide variety of repeatable tasks, partnering with our Legal Ops Manager where appropriate.

- Be a responsive, reliable partner to the sales team and other internal stakeholders, someone they want to work with, not around.

- On the procurement side, manage a steady flow and wide variety of procurement and vendor requests, reviewing and negotiating contracts in partnership with business owners to keep marketing, events, and tooling moving quickly and to meet turnaround expectations, while iterating on our procurement process as we grow.

- Partner closely with security, IT, and product to ensure prospect and customer questionnaires are answered accurately and promptly, and to build scalable solutions.

- Help shape and improve legal operations, including the workflows, technology, and tools relevant to contract work such as CLM and CPQ. You should be excited about what AI and new tools bring to the practice of law, with proven experience driving adoption internally.

- Identify and get involved in other areas as our legal team's bandwidth grows, bringing clarity, insight, and an ownership mentality to everything you touch.

- Exercise solid judgment and business acumen, including knowing how to balance ownership with flagging issues and escalating appropriately, and knowing when to pull me in.

Qualifications

- JD from an accredited law school and active license to practice law in the US (or equivalent qualification in a relevant jurisdiction).

- 6-8 years of legal experience,with at least 4 years in-house experience at a start-up or a company going through a significant period of growth, ideally as an early hire.

- Experience at a Saas or high-growth tech company, familiar with SaaS business models and SaaS contract terms.

- Demonstrable experience in commercial contract negotiation (customer-side and vendor-side) contributing directly to strong growth.

- Excellent interpersonal skills; you genuinely enjoy working with sales teams and and other cross-function partners, and are adept at build trusted relationships.

- Good judgment and ability to balance legal risk with business objectives.

- Exceptional written communication: able to explain legal concepts, net-new processes, and internal communications in plain, precise language and develop playbooks and GTM-facing enablement materials. We hold a high bar for written communication across the company, and expect legal to set

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