RoleThe Legal team protects the platform, enables the business to move fast, and keeps Whatnot ahead of the legal risk that comes with hypergrowth. We're hiring a sharp, detail-oriented Disputes Paralegal and Project Manager to work directly with our Litigation Counsel and own the day-to-day engine behind a high and growing volume of disputes - demand letters, pre-litigation matters, arbitration threats, small claims, subpoenas, and related notices.
The core of the job is running intake end to end - logging, triaging, and routing every new matter, drafting first responses to users, and keeping matter tracking airtight so nothing slips. Just as importantly, you'll improve the systems behind that work as the function scales. We use AI as a core part of how the team works, and we expect you to use it to do more, faster, and to catch what manual tracking misses. If your instinct when something breaks is to redesign the process rather than just work harder, you'll thrive here.
This role has real room to grow as our disputes and legal operations functions mature.
- Own intake end to end across every channel - logging, categorizing, and routing each new matter to the right attorney with a clear summary of the claim, claimant, type, and any immediate deadlines.
- Triage and manage accurately and consistently across claim types (demand letters, pre-litigation disputes, arbitration threats, small claims, subpoenas) - making defensible first-line calls under time pressure.
- Draft and send initial responses to users, working from templates and escalation protocols, and calibrating tone for sensitive or adversarial situations.
- Maintain case tracking system and disputes files to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. You love consistent matter folders, proactive deadline reminders, calendar invites for hearings and filing dates.
- Administer legal holds and preservation - issue and track hold notices under Counsel's direction, maintain custodian lists and acknowledgments, partner with IT/People to prevent deletion for held custodians, and release holds at matter close.
- Improve the system as you go - intake workflows, response playbooks, decision trees, trackers, and escalation paths - and audit legacy trackers for active matters that haven't been migrated, rather than relying on personal heroics to stay afloat.
- Use AI tools (Claude CoWork, Glean, GC AI) to drive efficiency, build templates and workflows, and create a safety net so matters don't get missed.
- Partner cross-functionally with Trust & Risk, Customer Experience, and Legal Operations to gather facts and documentation, and communicate matter status to non-legal stakeholders without over-lawyering.
We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our San Francisco, New York, Seattle, or Los Angeles hubs. YouPeople who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it.
As our next Paralegal, you should have 7+ years of legal experience, plus:
- A bachelor's degree (required), plus 7+ years of legal support, legal project management, or paralegal experience in litigation, disputes, or a high-volume legal environment.
- In-house litigation, legal project management, or regulatory experience is strongly preferred. Ideally you have previous experience at a marketplace, fintech, or consumer tech platform - though high-volume litigation or project management experience at a large law firm is also a plus.
- Strong Communication Skills. Both oral and written communication are important in this role; you can write clearly and concisely, and know how to calibrate tone for sensitive situations.
- Demonstrated AI tool fluency. You have used AI (e.g., Claude, Glean, GC AI, Harvey) to build real workflows - not just as an occasional chatbot - and you actively look for ways to use tooling to improve speed, consistency, and coverage. Comfortable learning new platforms fast.
- A builder, not just an operator. You have identified gaps in an intake or response workflow and fixed them structurally - templates, automations, tracking systems - so the same problem doesn't recur. You are comfortable creating process where none exists.
- Intake Experience. You have prior experience with demand letter intake and response drafting, or other structured legal correspondence workflows, and a sense for when to escalate versus when to use a template.
- Organizational skills and a positive attitude. Excellent organizational skills and the ability to manage a large volume of matters simultaneously without losing track of details. Comfortable working cross-functionally and ramping quickly in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment.
- Genuine interest in Whatnot. You've used the app (or are excited to), and you get what it means to support a two-sided marketplace community.
- Tooling. We run on Slack, Google Docs, Streamline (matter management), and DocuSign (execution); experience with a comparable matter-management or case-tracking system (e.g., LawVu, Ironclad, ServiceNow, Salesforce/CaseCloud, Smartsheet, Jira) transfers well.
Benefits- Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
- Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
- Work From Home Support
- Home office setup allowance
- Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
- Care benefits
- Monthly allowance for wellness
- Annual allowance towards Childcare
- Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
- Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
- Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
- All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).
- Parental Leave
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.
