Litigation Counsel

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

Anthropic's Legal team is looking for an experienced litigator to join our Litigation and Regulatory team. You'll manage a broad docket of litigation files and pre-litigation disputes with a high degree of autonomy, advise the business on litigation risk, and help build the systems and processes that let a growing litigation function operate well at scale.

The matters you'll handle span intellectual property (particularly copyright), class actions, commercial disputes, and could include securities and shareholder disputes, in both first-party and third-party matters, in the U.S. and abroad. You'll partner closely with colleagues across Legal and teams throughout the company to resolve matters thoughtfully and with minimal disruption to the business. You may also support regulatory investigations and inquiries as needed.

Key responsibilities

• Manage a broad range of litigation matters that could include intellectual property (particularly copyright) matters, class actions, regulatory and commercial disputes, and securities cases
• Direct outside counsel across all stages of litigation, from pre-suit response through discovery, dispositive briefing, trial or resolution and appeal, with a focus on strategic decision-making and filing excellent legal briefs
• Manage small disputes and escalations to limit business friction and minimize risk
• Advise company leadership and cross-functional partners on litigation risk, and develop appropriate strategic litigation plans, including matter-resolution proposals
• Design and implement processes, policies, and tools that help the litigation and regulatory team handle matters efficiently and at scale, such as matter intake, outside counsel budgeting, contingency reporting, and pre-litigation escalation run books
• Work cross-functionally to gather information efficiently and evaluate risk
• Support responses to regulatory investigations and inquiries as needed
• Stay up to date on relevant laws, litigation trends, and AI-related case law, and share developments with key stakeholders
• Mentor and develop team members through hands-on work on active matters

Minimum qualifications

• Hold a JD and are an active member of at least one U.S. state bar (California preferred)
• Have litigated some combination of copyright, class action, securities, and regulatory matters
• Have broad experience handling complex civil litigation, with deep knowledge of litigation practice and procedure, discovery, and federal and/or CA state court rules
• Have managed litigation matters with significant independence, including setting case strategy, managing discovery, writing and improving legal briefs, and directing outside counsel
• Write and communicate clearly, with the ability to explain litigation risk and strategy, particularly for non-legal audiences at all levels of seniority
• Exhibit poise and judgment under pressure while balancing legal risk with business priorities

Preferred qualifications

• At least 12 years of litigation experience with a combination of experience at a global-focused law firm and in-house
• Experience representing technology companies, particularly companies working in emerging technologies
• Experience building systems, processes, or tools for an in-house legal team, such as matter management, outside counsel budgeting, or litigation reporting
• Experience managing regulatory responses or investigations, including both first-party and third-party responses
• Creativity and openness to novel solutions when advancing business priorities while addressing legal risk
• Ability to think and work quickly, have a flexible risk tolerance, and a good sense of humor
• Low ego and a real willingness to roll up your sleeves to solve problems whether mundane or complex
• A thoughtful and empathetic colleague who works well with legal colleagues, outside counsel, and business partners
• A genuine interest in the development of AI that is both innovative and trustworthy, including the opportunities it creates and the risks and limitations that must be addressed

Role-specific policy: For this role, we expect all staff to be able to work from our San Francisco office at least 3 days a week, though we encourage you to apply even if you might need some flexibility for an interim period of time.

The annual compensation range for this role is listed below. 

For sales roles, the range provided is the role’s On Target Earnings ("OTE") range, meaning that the range includes both the sales commissions/sales bonuses target and annual base salary for the role.

Annual Salary:

$385,000—$460,000 USD

Logistics

Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience

Required field of study:  A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position

Location-based hybrid policy: Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time. However, some roles may require more time in our offices.

Visa sponsorship:  We do sponsor visas! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, and we retain an immigration lawyer to help with this.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification. Not all strong candidates will meet every single qualification as listed.  Research shows that people who identify as being from underrepresented groups are more prone to experiencing imposter syndrome and doubting the strength of their candidacy, so we urge you not to exclude yourself prematurely and to submit an application if you're interested in this work. We think AI systems like the ones we're building have enormous social and ethical implications. We think this makes representation even more important, and we strive to include a range of diverse perspectives on our team.

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, remember that Anthropic recruiters only contact you from @anthropic.com email addresses. In some cases, we may partner with vetted recruiting agencies who will identify themselves as working on behalf of Anthropic. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate Anthropic recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before your first day. If you're ever unsure about a communication, don't click any links-visit anthropic.com/careers directly for confirmed position openings.

How we're different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact - advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI - rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come work with us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage:  Learn about  our policy for using AI in our application process.