Vice President, Legal Strategy + Innovation

Job Description

Over the last 20 years, Ares’ success has been driven by our people and our culture. Today, our team is guided by our core values – Collaborative, Responsible, Entrepreneurial, Self-Aware, Trustworthy – and our purpose to be a catalyst for shared prosperity and a better future. Through our recruitment, career development and employee-focused programming, we are committed to fostering a welcoming and inclusive work environment where high-performance talent of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives can build careers within this exciting and growing industry.

Reports to:

Head of Legal Strategy + Innovation

• Serve as the day-to-day operating leader for the LSI function and a strategic thought partner to the Head of LSI.
• Translate LSI strategy into a sequenced, executable roadmap across priority programs, including data intake and workflow orchestration, contract lifecycle management, GC dashboard, vendor governance, spend and performance and next-generation law firm collaboration.
• Own portfolio management across LSI initiatives, including prioritization, interdependencies, resource planning, risk management and executive reporting.
• Establish governance structures, decision rights, working groups and operating cadences that drive accountability and execution across stakeholders.
• Prepare materials and recommendations for senior legal leadership and other cross-functional stakeholders on roadmap progress, key decisions, risks and resourcing needs.
• Help shape LSI’s priorities, organizational design and resource model as the function grows.

• Design and continuously refine Ares Legal’s target operating model for how work is requested, triaged, routed, executed, measured and improved.
• Lead the design and implementation of standardized legal workflows, intake models, approval logic, escalation paths and service delivery rules across geographies and lines of business.
• Partner with legal, technology and business stakeholders to define requirements and drive implementation for LSI-enabled platforms and tools.
• Partner with the Knowledge & Workflow Management team to embed legal knowledge, playbooks, templates and decision frameworks into workflows and systems in ways that improve effectiveness, consistency and efficiency.
• Drive a pilot-learn-scale execution model across new processes, tools and operating practices.

• Drive the development of management reporting and dashboards that provide visibility into operational and substantive performance measures.
• Establish data standards, metadata requirements and process controls that improve the reliability, accessibility and usability of legal operational data.
• Help define the KPI framework and data requirements needed to measure legal activity, legal performance and value realization across the function.
• Use metrics and feedback loops to identify gaps, optimize workflows, improve service delivery and inform strategic decision-making.

• Partner with the Legal Vendor Strategy & Management team to design and operationalize an integrated service delivery model in which work is routed to the right resource across internal teams, outside counsel, alternative providers and automation.
• Support governance mechanisms that improve cost discipline, performance transparency, knowledge transfer, data access and accountability across Ares’ legal service providers.
• Ensure that vendor-related initiatives are integrated into LSI’s broader data, workflow and performance architecture.

• Lead cross-functional implementation efforts that require alignment across business priorities, technical requirements and legal judgment.
• Drive stakeholder adoption through training, communications, change management and operating support.
• Build credibility with senior attorneys, business stakeholders and technical partners by combining strong judgment with practical execution capability.

• Help shape the future-state…