Director of Legal

Director of Legal, Emergence | Remote, U.S.-based | Full-Time

Who We Are

Emergence is a thematic holding company backed by the Pritzker Organization focused exclusively on acquiring and scaling category-defining software businesses. We invest in focused portfolios, specialized operating groups with deep domain expertise and proven playbooks. Emergence combines operational rigor with a growth equity mindset, driving sustainable ARR growth, profitability improvements, and industry-leading customer outcomes.

About the Role

Emergence is hiring its first dedicated legal hire. This is a foundational role: you will build the company's day-to-day legal function from the ground up, serving as the primary point of contact for legal matters across our entire portfolio. You will work closely with a fractional General Counsel who will mentor you and a curated bench of outside specialist counsel who handle deal work, litigation, and matters requiring deep subject-matter expertise.

You are not expected to be a specialist in every area — you are expected to know the business well enough to triage correctly, resolve what's routine, and route what isn't to the right place.

What You'll Do

• Portfolio legal operations and support
• Serve as the first point of contact for legal questions across all portfolio companies, using an AI-assisted intake and triage system
• Build and operate the infrastructure this function currently lacks: centralized matter intake and tracking, legal playbooks, escalation protocols, and portfolio-wide reporting.
• Coordinate the collection, organization, implementation, and ongoing administration of contract templates; partner with senior legal leadership and specialist outside counsel on substantive template design, negotiation positions, and risk parameters.
• Support the development and ongoing management of an outside-counsel panel, including matter routing, performance tracking, and coordination around pricing and engagement terms.
• Commercial, corporate, and post-acquisition support
• Review and negotiate routine vendor and customer commercial contracts within approved playbooks and escalation thresholds.
• Manage entity and subsidiary governance across the holding structure.
• Support legal workstreams following new acquisitions, including coordinating legal intake, tracking remediation items, and escalating material issues to senior legal leadership and business stakeholders.
• Help establish repeatable post-acquisition legal integration processes across the portfolio.
• Specialist coordination and risk escalation
• Route M&A, intellectual property, labor and employment, litigation, tax, and specialized regulatory matters (including healthcare privacy) to appropriate outside counsel.
• Develop sound judgment about when to escalate matters, which specialist to engage, and when issues require senior legal review.
• Coordinate with HR on employment-related legal matters and support consistent documentation, approvals, and follow-through.

What We're Looking For

• Must-haves
• J.D. from an accredited law school and active bar membership in at least one U.S. state
• 3-5 years of legal experience, ideally with meaningful time at a smaller company or an early-stage in-house function, not exclusively at a large law firm or a large corporate legal department
• Comfortable operating without an established process already in place — you build the playbook rather than execute one handed to you
• Strong commercial contract instincts and the judgment to know what's routine versus what requires outside counsel or escalation
• A bias toward finding the path that lets the business move, while being clear-eyed about the risk
• Ability to apply legal judgment across multiple industries simultaneously without deep expertise in each regulatory regime.
• Nice-to-haves
• Prior experience in a small, still-forming legal function where you helped build process rather than inherited one
• Experience working across multiple business lines or subsidiaries simultaneously
• Experience coordinating with specialist outside counsel on equity, incentive-compensation, or corporate-governance matters
• Familiarity with legal matter-management, intake, contract-lifecycle, or AI-assisted legal-operations tools