Sr. Manager, Outside Counsel Management

Primary Job Responsibilities 

• Outside Counsel Management: 

• Create and implement PayPal’s outside counsel engagement strategy, influencing and aligning with legal leadership and internal stakeholders. 

• Oversee the law firm vendor lifecycle, including selection, negotiation, management and billing. 

• Manage law firm roster and optimization efforts, partnering with various legal teams and leadership to ensure proper support, expertise, and jurisdictional coverage as PayPal’s needs evolve. 

• Negotiate global law firm agreements, including outside counsel requirement terms, hourly rates and alternative fee agreements. Create competitive rate intelligence and benchmarking to aid in negotiations and ad hoc rate approval and establish processes to improve turnaround time. 

• Implement cost saving initiatives like the preferred firm program to consolidate spend, RFP program to drive increased competition and the AFA initiative to drive budget predictability. Develop improved reporting functionality around these initiatives.  

• Manage rapid response portfolio of high impact priorities from external and internal stakeholders.  

• Create outside counsel KPI’s and metrics as well as reporting functionality for Legal Leadership Team, matter managers and cost center owners.  

• Oversee monthly outside counsel forecasting process, working with each legal team to accurately track exposure, significant matters and budget impact for the various portfolios. Partner with Finance to provide updates to company leadership.  

• Lead the Legal Project Management Team to closely project manage PayPal’s largest matters with outside counsel. 

• Manage internal compliance program for law firm vendors, partnering with the various internal control teams. Ensure proper protections in place in standard law firm agreement language. 

• Assist with testing, training, implementation and adoption of technology solutions related to the law firm portfolio. 

• Legal Billing: 

• Lead the company’s legal billing team, managing the Legal Billing Manager 

• Implement best practices for legal billing to ensure protocols and savings and manage enforcements efforts. 

• Partner with tax and AP teams to put proper billing and payment procedures in place in accordance with global laws and regulations. 

• Improve technology capabilities around invoice review and bolster reporting capabilities to improve invoice review experience for users. 

• Oversee training program for new hires and their interactions with Onit.  

• Legal Operations: 

• Run the annual outside counsel legal budget exercise, partnering with the Legal Leadership Team. 

• Lead law firm diversity and inclusion initiatives to drive change in the legal industry and provide program support for pro bono program.  

• Manage alternative staffing vendors and work with teams to address staffing needs. 

• Support the implementation/roll-out of Company programs and practices to the function, promoting key leadership messaging. 

• Support monthly legal operations reporting needs including OpEx, headcount, pro bono and outside counsel metrics and department KPIs. 

• Proactively seek ways to improve current processes to maximize productivity, workflow, and maximize department’s efficiency. 

• Provide support for special projects as requested.  Support Sr. Director of Legal Operations with various ad hoc projects.  

Job Requirements 

• In-depth understanding of law firm pricing and billing practices and knowledge of outside counsel management programs for large, multi-national companies. 

• Demonstrable experience with designing, negotiating and evaluating fee agreements and rates, including alternative fee agreements.  

• Understanding of various matter types and lifecycles and understanding of legal industry. 

• High level of professionalism and emotional intelligence 

• Excellent written, communication, research, and presentation skills 

• Experience with fiscal and budget management 

• Strong project management skills - consistently completes projects on-time with great attention to detail. 

• Proven communication skills with partner-level outside counsel attorneys, directors and senior level stakeholders. Demonstrable track record of influencing senior level stakeholders (both internal and external).  

• A demonstrated understanding of how to develop, implement, and enhance processes. Eager to learn new things and apply knowledge to innovate, improve/simplify processes. 

• Thrives in a global, fast-paced, and dynamic work environment.  Ability to manage high job complexity and constant multi-tasking.  Well organized, able to prioritize well, work efficiently.  Shows flexibility as workloads fluctuate. 

• Demonstrated ability to influence and work effectively with global teams at all levels (including senior leadership) within a highly matrixed organization. 

• A genuine interest and ability to connect with, build and maintain relationships with people at all levels and across organizational and geographic boundaries. 

• Experience developing strategic or departmental planning materials that required consensus gathering from multiple constituents.  Strong business partnering skills. 

• An ownership mentality – sees tasks through to completion.  Goes the extra step to proactively seek out answers to problems that may fall outside his/her area of expertise. 

Basic Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree (B.A. or B.S.) with a focus in finance or economics preferred 

• 7-10 years of work experience in legal pricing environment.  Experience working with large, geographically dispersed team preferred. 

• Experience with people management and strong interpersonal skills; comfortable dealing with all levels of the organization and law firm organizations. 

• Strong technical skills; proficient in all Microsoft Office applications, especially Excel, Tableau, PowerBI; familiarity with Legal technology (e.g. Serengeti, TyMetrix T360, Onit or other eBilling tools). 

• Working knowledge of corporate finance/budgeting practices and legal billing systems 

• Proactive approach to recognizing needs, solving problems and anticipating issues.