Associate Vice President, Legal & Workflow Management

Associate Vice President, Legal Knowledge & Workflow Management

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Job Description

Ares is seeking a former transactional attorney to join its Legal Strategy + Innovation (LSI) team as an Associate Vice President, Legal Knowledge & Workflow Management. This role is responsible for building and operationalizing Ares Legal’s knowledge ecosystem across multiple geographies and lines of business—transforming institutional expertise, precedent and best practices into structured, reusable assets that drive consistent legal outcomes across the firm.

You will function as both architect and operator: defining knowledge standards, governance and taxonomy while actively capturing, curating and deploying legal content across matters and teams. Workflow design serves as the delivery layer for this knowledge, ensuring that internal legal teams and service providers engage with the right guidance and decision support. The objective is to create a connected, measurable operating model where legal judgment is codified, shared and continuously improved through data and playbooks.

This position directly supports Ares Legal’s long-term integrated service delivery strategy by aligning internal teams and external service providers around a common legal knowledge base, standardized guidance and feedback loops that reinforce quality, consistency and learning.

Reports to: Head of Legal Strategy + Innovation

Key Responsibilities

• Workflow & Process Architecture
  • Design, document and optimize standardized end-to-end legal workflows that surface authoritative guidance, precedent and decision support at key points in the matter lifecycle.
  • Define intake gates and data requirements that ensure complete, reliable information is captured at the right point in the process to enable systematic knowledge capture, reuse and analytics.
  • Establish approval, escalation and routing logic that drives consistency, accountability and visibility across geographies and lines of business.
• Integrated Service Delivery
  • Develop shared operating standards that allow internal teams and external providers to work from the same playbooks, systems and KPIs.
  • Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to embed knowledge assets and data capture into CLM and related workflow systems.
  • Support Legal Vendor Strategy & Management in embedding playbook adherence, knowledge reuse expectations, data access and insights and performance metrics into service provider governance.
• Playbook & Process Documentation
  • Translate legal and business experience into structured playbooks, templates and matter frameworks.
  • Integrate playbook content into CLM and workflow tools to drive compliance and streamline execution.
  • Maintain a single source of truth for process standards and legal guidance and continuously refine content based on user feedback, usage patterns and performance data.
• Execution & Continuous Improvement
  • Lead pilots and rollouts for new workflows and playbooks, measuring adoption and effectiveness.
  • Define and monitor KPIs such as cycle times, intake completeness and process compliance.
  • Drive a continuous improvement loop using metrics, feedback and automation opportunities.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to standardize workflows and align legal knowledge structures and standards with technology implementation and reporting.
  • Serve as a liaison between practicing attorneys, operations and technology teams to capture expertise and operationalize it at scale.

Qualifications

• Education
  • JD required. Member in good standing of a U.S. state bar.
• Required Skills & Experience
  • 7+ years total experience, including at least 5+ years as a practicing transactional attorney (corporate, finance, M&A, private equity or fund formations).
  • Proven ability to design, document and improve legal workflows and processes.
  • Strong understanding of legal service delivery, knowledge management and matter governance.
  • Experience collaborating across legal, business and technology teams to operationalize legal knowledge, standards and decision frameworks.
  • Excellent communication,…