Senior Legal Operations Manager

About 9fin 9fin is the AI platform powering global debt markets — the world’s largest asset class at over $145 trillion. Debt markets are vast, global, and mission-critical, yet still run on fragmented data, PDFs, and manual workflows. 9fin replaces this broken infrastructure with a single platform that centralises proprietary credit data, deep analysis, and high-value workflows across global markets. Today, 9fin powers teams at 300+ blue-chip institutions worldwide, including global banks, asset managers, private equity firms, law firms, and advisors. The business is scaling at exceptional speed, with rapid expansion in the US and best-in-class retention driven by deep workflow adoption. We’re at a defining inflection point. With proven product-market fit and strong, global market pull, 9fin is accelerating toward becoming the category-defining platform for debt markets worldwide. THE OPPORTUNITY We're hiring our first dedicated legal operations team member to sit at the heart of 9fin's growing Legal Affairs function. This is a broad, hands-on role and a rare opportunity to shape how a scale-up in-house legal team runs from the inside out. You'll own the operational engine of the team: our contract lifecycle platform (Ironclad, which is deeply embedded across sales, procurement and RevOps), our commercial playbook (and developing non-commercial playbooks), our tech stack (including AI implementation), our front-door (right now, ticketing is done in Linear), our knowledge management (currently spread across multiple systems), our reporting and KPIs, and the tracking and governance around outside counsel spend. You'll also be a project manager and a hands-on partner to the General Counsel. That includes co-drafting monthly and quarterly business reviews, leading and coordinating cross-functional initiatives (for example M&A diligence coordination, trademark portfolio work, or regulatory readiness workstreams), and holding a high bar for organisation so nothing on a small, fast-moving team drops. You'll report to the General Counsel and work alongside legal colleagues in London and New York. This is a London-based role and we typically expect the team to be in the office three days a week. WHAT YOU’LL WORK ON Below is the shape of the role, laid out as prioritised by Now, Next and Later so you can see the broad strokes of the path ahead - but by no means is this set in stone. Priorities will move as we learn what's most useful in practice and you’ll have a big hand in shaping this further. Now - Tune legal intake - help us build out the “front door” for legal requests across the business. - Partner with Sales, Finance, InfoSec and Procurement to streamline deal-desk and approval processes - Support on knowledge management and internal policy administration. Consolidate knowledge, templates, and other information in a clean accessible structure. - Build our external legal spend tracker from scratch. Categorise spend, log invoices and quotes, match to matter, and produce a monthly view for the General Counsel. - Own KPI reporting improvements against our Ironclad-fed dashboards. Expand coverage into intake, spend, cycle times, and other operational metrics. - Own operational and reporting support across the Legal function, including responses to internal stakeholders including Finance, RevOps, and the People team. Next - Get inside and own our tech stack and know it end-to-end - Ironclad, Linear, Google Workspace, Notion, and the AI tools we've adopted or are evaluating. - Build, maintain and roll out templates, playbooks and self-serve legal resources so the business can move quickly. - Own Ironclad workflow hygiene and adoption end-to-end. Work with the team to clean up metadata and archiving, tighten approvals and signatory workflows, and work with commercial counsel to roll out training across sales, procurement, RevOps and other frequent users. - Bring structure and visibility across the team. Keep track of open projects, drive follow-through, and make sure balls do not drop across a small team with a lot of surface area. - Maintain our sales contract playbook. Keep it current, propose updates as commercial patterns and RevOps feedback surface them, and make sure the team is actually using it. Later - Partner with the General Counsel to produce meaningful Exec-level reporting. - Assist with management of large legal projects on GC instruction. Recent examples include M&A diligence coordination, and trademark portfolio work. - Support company secretarial administration. ABOUT YOU We're looking for a highly organised operator who is energised by building order out of scale-up complexity. You do not need to be a lawyer, but you do need to have run legal operations end-to-end before. The essentials come first below, followed by preferred experience and the traits we care about most. - Highly organised with a systems mindset: You keep the plates spinning and notice when one wobbles. You see the workflow behind the task and design for repeatability. - Commercial, action-biased, comfortable with ambiguity: You understand what the business needs from legal, get things over the line without waiting to be asked twice, and you're comfortable being the first hire writing the map as you go. - Ironclad or equivalent CLM: Hands-on experience with Ironclad or a directly comparable enterprise CLM (for example Juro, LinkSquares, Icertis, Agiloft, Leah). We are deeply embedded in Ironclad and you will own it. - Legal operations track record: At least five years' experience running legal operations, contracts operations or a closely adjacent function (compliance operations, legal project management, or legal chief-of-staff), ideally in a scale-up or in-house legal team that is fast paced and where you can demonstrate ownership. - End-to-end project delivery: You have owned legal or cross-functional projects on your own steam, including timelines, risks, stakeholders and outcomes. - Reporting and data fluency: You can build clean dashboards, work with a KPI framework, and translate metrics into a story someone can act on. - Outside counsel spend or panel exposure: Experience setting up spend tracking, panel management or legal project management would be useful, but we're also open to someone with the capability and appetite to build this from scratch. - Builder mentality: Experience as a team’s first or only legal-ops hire, or a member of a small team in the early stage of the build-out of a legal ops function, would be a strong advantage. Benefits We’re a scaling start up, and we enjoy sharing our success, when the company succeeds, we always reinvest that in our people. We also offer huge amounts of responsibility, an abundance of opportunity for growth and a platform to truly excel. Financial & Insurance - Competitive Salary (our salary bands are benchmarked at the top end of the market) - Equity - Pension (your minimum contributions are 4% with 9fin matching up to 7%) - Private Medical Insurance - Paid sick leave with Income Protection for long periods of illness - Group Life Assurance - Season Ticket Loan & Cycle to Work schemes Time off - 25 holiday days per year - Local public holidays (with the ability to exchange them for alternative days) - Hybrid working model, to allow you the flexibility to decide how, where and when you do your best work - Work abroad for up to 3 months a year - 1 month paid sabbatical after 5 years of service - Enhanced parental leave & flexible working arrangements available Training & Culture - Professional learning and development budget - AI experimentation budget of £800 (UK) per employee to trial AI tools - Quarterly team socials - Summer and Winter company social events 9fin is an equal opportunities employer At 9fin we are dedicated to building and promoting a fair and inclusive workplace where everyone can reach their full potential and truly belong. We recognize that building diverse teams enables a more creative and productive environment. If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t perfectly align with the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You might just be who we’re looking for — either for this role, or perhaps another.