Norven
Fractional General Counsel — AI & Financial Services (Founding Team)
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The role in one line
A senior commercial/regulatory lawyer — in practice or in-house — to be Norven's founding legal mind on a fractional basis: build the contracting architecture for a new category of professional review work, coordinate specialist external counsel, and keep an ambitious founding team honest about what may and may not be claimed.
Why this role exists
Norven is building independent, evidence-backed review of consequential AI deployment decisions — work whose entire value depends on legal precision: what is reviewed, who may rely on it, within what boundaries, with what cover behind it. For a company like this, legal architecture is not overhead. It is the product's skeleton. We are engaging specialist external counsel for the professional instrument itself; this seat is the internal owner who instructs them well, converts their advice into working templates, and builds the legal operating system a regulated-market business needs from day one.
What you will do
- Own the legal build. NDA suite, engagement letters, design-partner agreements, expert/consultant agreements, IP assignments — drafted, negotiated, versioned, controlled. Build it domain-portable. The contracting architecture is a domain-neutral master chassis with domain modules: financial services first, designed to extend to healthcare, robotics and physical AI, government and public sector, sovereign AI programmes and frontier AI labs as each domain is deliberately activated — different regulators, different data regimes, different reliance questions, one disciplined legal core. (Civilian use only, always.)
- Instruct and manage specialist counsel on the reliance and liability architecture of the review product, corporate structure, and insurance interface — and translate their advice into things the business can execute.
- Guard the claims line. Norven maintains a strict published list of things it never claims. You enforce it in every external document.
- Corporate hygiene. Three UK entities, a group structure in formation, statutory calendar, board minutes, option/equity paperwork with tax advisers.
- Be the pragmatic "no". Early-stage speed with regulated-market judgement.
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Who this is for
- 8+ years PQE (England & Wales), with meaningful time in financial services, professional services or technology — private practice, in-house, or both.
- Comfortable across commercial contracts, professional liability concepts, IP and corporate housekeeping — a builder-generalist, with the judgement to know when specialists are needed.
- Range beyond one sector: you design legal architecture that travels — across regulated domains and, in time, jurisdictions — rather than drafting for a single regulator's world.
- Startup-fluent: you produce usable documents fast and iterate, rather than perfect memos slowly.
- Available fractionally (1–2 days/week to start), growing with the company; the seat can become the first General Counsel role as the practice scales.
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Who this is NOT for
- Lawyers who need a precedent bank and a support team behind them.
- Anyone uncomfortable telling a founder "you cannot say that" — the company is designed to reward that sentence.
Terms
- Fractional engagement, per-day or per-package, plus meaningful early-team equity; full transparency at first conversation.
- London/hybrid.
How to start the conversation
Apply here — with a note on the most commercially useful legal architecture you have built, not the largest deal you sat near.
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