IP Counsel, Transactions

About the Position

IP Counsel, Transactions

San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced and strategic transactional attorney to join the IP team within our growing legal department. In this role, you will be responsible for the IP side of Anthropic's transactions, partnering with the M&A and commercial counsel who lead each deal. You will conduct IP diligence and negotiate IP terms for our acquisitions and investments, help advise on IP terms in our most complex commercial and research agreements, and drive the playbooks and processes that make our processes scalable. You will partner closely with the Head of IP (direct manager), our M&A and Commercial Legal teams, and Corporate Development on questions and issues that are very often new.

Responsibilities

• Lead the IP workstream on acquisitions and strategic investments, from diligence through letters of intent, definitive agreements, closing, and integration, alongside our M&A counsel and outside counsel
• Partner with commercial counsel on the IP aspects of complex enterprise, partnership, research collaboration, and vendor agreements, advising on and negotiating IP terms
• Serve as the primary point of contact on IP terms for commercial legal and other colleagues, and help train them so they can resolve more IP questions on their own
• Drive the playbooks, templates, and processes that let a lean team handle IP terms across a high volume of deals
• Contribute to broader IP strategy, particularly where transactions intersect with open source, trade secrets, patents, or new business models

Requirements

• Hold a law degree (JD, LLB, or equivalent) and meet the local licensing requirements to work as in-house counsel where you'll be based
• Have substantial experience leading IP due diligence and negotiating IP terms in technology M&A
• Have first-chair experience negotiating IP provisions in complex commercial technology agreements, such as licenses, joint development agreements, and services agreements
• Have the ability to communicate IP risks and tradeoffs clearly to business leaders and non-specialist lawyers, and to exercise sound judgment about when to hold a position
• Have strong working knowledge of open source licensing, employee and contractor IP assignment obligations, and trade secret protection

Preferred Qualifications

• 10+ years of transactional IP experience at a nationally recognized law firm, a technology company, or both
• Experience building negotiation playbooks, templates, or diligence processes that other lawyers relied on
• Experience with AI, machine learning, data licensing, or other emerging technology
• Curiosity about AI and a commitment to its responsible development

We Offer

• Competitive salary range: $335,000-$385,000 USD
• Hybrid work location policy
• Visa sponsorship available

About the Company

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues.

How We're Different

We believe that the highest-impact AI research will be big science. At Anthropic we work as a single cohesive team on just a few large-scale research efforts. And we value impact - advancing our long-term goals of steerable, trustworthy AI - rather than work on smaller and more specific puzzles. We view AI research as an empirical science, which has as much in common with physics and biology as with traditional efforts in computer science. We're an extremely collaborative group, and we host frequent research discussions to ensure that we are pursuing the highest-impact work at any given time. As such, we greatly value communication skills.

The easiest way to understand our research directions is to read our recent research. This research continues many of the directions our team worked on prior to Anthropic, including: GPT-3, Circuit-Based Interpretability, Multimodal Neurons, Scaling Laws, AI & Compute, Concrete Problems in AI Safety, and Learning from Human Preferences.

Come Work with Us!

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a lovely office space in which to collaborate with colleagues. Guidance on Candidates' AI Usage: Learn about our policy for using AI in our application process.