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Legal Operations Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Cognition

Legal Operations

San Francisco, CA · On-site

This is not a traditional legal operations role. You will design how Legal operates: how work comes in, how decisions get made, how knowledge is captured, where AI and automation can replace ...

New

Column

Legal Operations

San Francisco, CA · On-site

We're looking for the Bank's first Legal Operations hire to serve as the team's thought leader on what a modern, AI-native Legal function looks like at a regulated financial institution. We are not a ...

Earthjustice

Legal Operations Manager

San Francisco, CA · On-site +1

The Legal Operations Manager reports to the Director of Legal Operations & Innovation and is responsible for overseeing the effective creation and functioning of information and administrative ...

Earthjustice

Legal Operations Manager

San Francisco, CA · On-site +1

The Legal Operations Manager reports to the Director of Legal Operations & Innovation and is responsible for overseeing the effective creation and functioning of information and administrative ...

Earthjustice

Legal Operations Manager

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$107 - $125.50/hr

The Legal Operations Manager reports to the Director of Legal Operations & Innovation andis responsible foroverseeing the effective creation and functioning of information and administrative systems ...

Earthjustice

Legal Operations Manager

San Francisco, CA · On-site +1

The Legal Operations Manager reports to the Director of Legal Operations & Innovation andis responsible foroverseeing the effective creation and functioning of information and administrative systems ...

Monograph

Legal Operations Partner

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$113 - $160/hr

We are seeking a hands-on Legal Operations Partner to join the Legal & Compliance team. In this role, you will own the systems, tools, and processes that enable our Legal & Compliance teams to build ...

PubMatic

Legal Operations Manager

Redwood City, CA · Hybrid

As a key member of the Legal Operations team, you will oversee critical systems such as contract lifecycle management (CLM), digital signature, and legal billing solutions. You will collaborate cross ...

PubMatic

Legal Operations Manager

Redwood City, CA · On-site

As a key member of the Legal Operations team, you will oversee critical systems such as contract lifecycle management (CLM), digital signature, and legal billing solutions. You will collaborate cross ...

Replit

Legal Operations Manager

Foster City, CA · On-site

$145K - $190K/yr

As a Legal Operations Manager at Replit, you will be the central point of contact for legal requests across the company and the operational backbone of our contract lifecycle. You will triage and ...

New

JM Eagle

Legal Operations Assistant

Los Angeles, CA · On-site

Job Summary We are seeking a highly organized and detail-oriented Legal Operations and Administrative Support professional to join our legal team. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in a fast ...

Epirus

Legal Operations Manager

Torrance, CA · On-site

Scale the legal operations function, which may include team leadership, as Epirus grows and expands geographically. Identify and implement tools to support multi-site contract and compliance ...

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All JobsLegal Operations JobsLegal Operations Jobs in California

Legal Operations information

See California salary details

$22.2K

$83K

$126.3K

How much do legal operations jobs pay per year?

As of Sep 3, 2026, the average yearly pay for legal operations in California is $83,043.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $62,700.00 and $101,200.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is legal operations?

Legal operations professionals help manage legal departments and organizations, focusing on strategies for increasing efficiency. As a legal operations manager, your responsibilities include assisting legal, administrative, and other teams to make improvements to processes and technology. You analyze financial documents, oversee the budget, plan training programs for employees, maintain records and legal systems, and correspond with stakeholders and legal teams. Your duties also include facilitating teamwork among employees, identifying areas that need improvement and proposing solutions, and executing technology and other initiatives. You make observations, create reports, and advise departments on using performance metrics to cut costs and improve processes.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive in legal operations?

To thrive in Legal Operations, you need a strong understanding of legal processes, project management skills, and often a background in business or law. Familiarity with contract management systems, legal spend management tools, and certifications like CLOC or Lean Six Sigma are commonly required. Strong analytical thinking, communication, and organizational skills help you collaborate across departments and drive efficiency. These competencies are vital to streamline legal workflows, control costs, and support the overall effectiveness of the legal department.

What are some of the most common challenges faced by professionals in legal operations?

Legal Operations professionals often encounter challenges such as managing multiple priorities across legal technology, vendor relationships, and process optimization. Balancing the needs of legal teams with business objectives, ensuring compliance, and driving efficiency can be complex in fast-paced environments. Additionally, integrating new legal tech tools and fostering collaboration between attorneys, finance, and IT requires strong communication and change management skills. Overcoming these challenges often leads to opportunities for significant impact and career advancement within legal departments.

What is the difference between Legal Operations vs Legal Analyst?

AspectLegal OperationsLegal Analyst
Required CredentialsBachelor's degree, legal or business certifications often preferredBachelor's degree in law, legal studies, or related field
Work EnvironmentCorporate legal departments, law firms, legal service providersLaw firms, corporate legal teams, government agencies
Employer & Industry UsageUsed in corporate legal departments to streamline operationsUsed to analyze legal data, support case strategies

Legal Operations professionals focus on managing legal department processes, technology, and vendor relationships to improve efficiency. Legal Analysts primarily analyze legal data, conduct research, and support case preparation. While both roles require legal knowledge, Legal Operations emphasizes process management, whereas Legal Analysts focus on legal research and analysis.

Is legal operations a good career?

Legal operations is a growing field that involves managing legal department processes, technology, and data to improve efficiency. It often requires skills in project management, legal technology tools, and strategic planning, making it a valuable career path for those interested in law and business operations.

What do legal operations do?

Legal operations professionals manage and improve the efficiency of legal departments by overseeing processes, technology, and data management. They handle tasks such as contract lifecycle management, legal project management, and implementing legal tech tools to support legal teams and ensure compliance.
More about Legal Operations jobs

What are the most commonly searched types of Legal Operations jobs in California?

The most popular types of Legal Operations jobs in California are:

What are popular job titles related to Legal Operations jobs in California?

For Legal Operations jobs in California, the most frequently searched job titles are:

What job categories do people searching Legal Operations jobs in California look for?

The top searched job categories for Legal Operations jobs in California are:

What cities in California are hiring for Legal Operations jobs?

Cities in California with the most Legal Operations job openings:

Legal Operations jobs near you
Infographic showing various Legal Operations job openings in California as of August 2026, with employment types broken down into 83% Full Time, 14% Part Time, 1% Temporary, 1% Contract, and 1% Nights. Highlights an 93% Physical, 3% Hybrid, and 4% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $83,043 per year, or $39.9 per hour.

Legal Operations

Cognition

San Francisco, CA • On-site

Full-time

Posted 2 days ago

New

Job description

We are an applied AI lab building end-to-end software agents.
We're the makers of Devin, the first AI software engineer.
Our team is extremely talent-dense. Among our founding team, we have world-class competitive programmers, former founders, and leaders from companies at the cutting edge of AI including Scale AI, Palantir, Cursor, Waymo, Tesla, Lunchclub, Modal, Google DeepMind, and Nuro.
Building Devin is just the first step-our hardest challenges still lie ahead. If you're excited to solve some of the world's biggest problems and build AI that can reason on real-world tasks, apply to join us.
About The Role
Cognition is looking for an exceptional operator to help build an AI-native legal function for an AI-native company.
This is not a traditional legal operations role. You will design how Legal operates: how work comes in, how decisions get made, how knowledge is captured, where AI and automation can replace repetitive work, and how a small team can support a rapidly growing company without recreating the large, siloed legal departments of the past.
You will own the systems, technology, budget, outside counsel relationships, and operating processes that allow the Legal team to move quickly while maintaining extremely high standards.
The goal is simple: build a legal organization that operates with the speed, leverage, and ambition of Cognition itself.
What You'll Do
Build an AI-Native Legal Function
  • Design and continuously improve the operating model for Legal. Identify work that should be handled by lawyers, work that should be automated, and work that should disappear altogether.
  • Build intelligent intake, triage, workflow, and knowledge systems that allow routine legal questions to be resolved quickly and consistently while directing the hardest problems to the right people.
  • Work with our technical teams to experiment aggressively with Devin, AI agents, and other tools that can materially change how legal work gets done. We don't want to add AI to traditional legal processes. We want to rethink the processes themselves.

Make Legal Easy to Work With
  • Build systems that make it easy for people across Cognition to get good legal answers quickly.
  • Work directly with Sales, Product, Engineering, Security, Finance, People, Communications, and other teams to identify friction and remove it.
  • Create scalable processes without creating bureaucracy. The best legal process is often the one people barely notice.
  • Measure what matters-speed, outcomes, recurring sources of friction, outside spend, and where the team's time is actually going-and use that information to continuously improve how we operate.

Own Legal Technology and Automation
  • Own the technology strategy for the Legal team, including contracting, knowledge management, matter management, e-billing, entity management, and other systems where appropriate. But don't assume we need traditional legal technology simply because other legal departments use it.
    Start with the problem. Determine whether software, AI, automation, a better process-or eliminating the process entirely-is the best answer.
  • Build and deploy AI-enabled workflows that meaningfully increase the leverage of every person on the Legal team.

Own the Business of Legal
  • Own the Legal team's budget, outside counsel relationships, vendors, technology, and operational planning.
  • Develop a deliberate approach to when we use outside counsel and when we build expertise internally. Negotiate fees and alternative arrangements aggressively and make sure external lawyers are delivering expertise rather than work we can do better ourselves.
  • Build simple, useful operating rhythms and dashboards that give us a clear view of the team's priorities, workload, spending, and performance.

Help Build the Legal Team
Help us build a Legal team where exceptional people have unusually high levels of ownership.
We expect people here to understand the business, exercise judgment, solve problems outside narrow job descriptions, and use technology to multiply what they can accomplish.
You'll help turn those principles into the everyday operating culture of the team.
Who You Are
  • You are an unusually strong operator who is comfortable moving between strategy and execution.
  • You have significant experience in legal operations, business operations, or another environment where you were responsible for making a complex organization work better.
  • Experience inside a rapidly growing technology company is strongly preferred.
  • You understand the mechanics of running a sophisticated legal function-budgets, outside counsel, legal technology, contracting systems, planning, and metrics-but you aren't attached to the way legal departments have traditionally done those things.
  • You are deeply curious about AI and already thinking about how it changes professional work.
  • You have excellent judgment and a bias toward action. You can take an ambiguous problem, figure out what actually matters, and drive it to resolution.
  • You communicate clearly, have low ego, and can work effectively with everyone from engineers to executives.
  • Most importantly, you are a builder. When you encounter a broken process, your instinct isn't to manage around it. It's to fix it.
  • Degrees are nice. A JD, MBA, or equivalent experience can be helpful, but we care much more about what you've built and how you think.
What Success Looks Like
A year from now, Cognition should not simply have a more efficient version of a traditional legal department. It should have a legal function that looks fundamentally different: smaller, faster, more automated, more deeply integrated with the business, and capable of doing substantially more than its headcount would suggest.
You will have helped build it.
Equal Opportunity
Cognition is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any.

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