Founding Legal Director
About Kyra Law
Kyra Law is an AI-native commercial law firm focussing on high-growth UK startups and scaleups, from pre-seed through Series B and beyond.
Our belief is simple: the efficiency AI creates should be passed on to our clients. By building a firm from scratch in the age of AI, we have designed an operating system which means our clients pay a fraction of what they would elsewhere, and our lawyers are still paid exceptionally well.
Every matter is fixed-fee, quoted before we start, and most of our work is delivered to clients in hours rather than weeks. Qualified solicitors are available to clients on Slack, email or WhatsApp and they oversee every piece of work, exercising judgment and speaking with clients, while AI handles all the heavy lifting.
We cover the commercial legal work any early-stage company needs, including fundraising, commercial contracts, data & privacy, employment, share options and more. We are constantly pushing towards increasingly complex and novel work.
We have developed our own proprietary AI platform which is the core operating system of the firm. It is constantly learning, building context and refining its output, meaning that we become more efficient with every matter we do.
We are profitable, we have built this without outside funding to date, and we are growing extremely fast. Our clients include startups backed by the likes of a16z and Antler, and we are onboarding multiple new clients every day.
The role
This is our first full-time hire and the most senior role at the firm outside the founders.
As Founding Legal Director, you will be a fee earner — you will work directly with clients, use our platform to complete work, and set the bar for what Kyra’s output looks like by producing it yourself.
However, your full capacity will not go entirely on your own caseload, as you will also be responsible for setting and enforcing the quality standards at Kyra. More than anything else, we are committed to always ensuring that we are delivering the absolute highest standards of legal output to our clients.
Traditional firms protect quality with layers of people, and the client pays for all of them. We have taken those layers out, which is most of why we can price the way we do.
Our quality will come from having excellent precedents and knowhow, clearly documented house positions, rigorously training our AI platform and having a firm-wide overview of when any piece of work is drifting outside of house positions.
What you will do
- Run your own matters end to end, at volume, to the standard you are asking of everyone else. This will include a lot of client-facing work, and we’ll expect you to develop deep, trusted relationships with our key clients. You will likely take on the most complex or novel matters at the firm, laying the foundations for future lawyers to learn from your work.
- Build upon Kyra’s precedent bank. You will own every document in it, and you will keep it current as legislation and market practice move.
- Document our house positions so that any deviation from them is immediately obvious.
- Design the operating system for quality. This will include deciding which matters can run fast against a Kyra precedent and which need separate reviews and building the process that catches the difference before drafting starts. You will be a POC for other lawyers at the firm to discuss complex points of drafting.
- Shape the platform. Your feedback on what the AI gets right and wrong is what makes it better, and that loop is the core of the business.
Who we are looking for
- England and Wales qualified, 7+ years PQE, trained and practised at a major firm, ideally in the Corporate Department. You will have drafted and stood behind client-facing documents for many years. You will be deeply familiar with corporate structures, share-based transactions, investment agreements, commercial terms, consumer protection laws, standard MSA structures, data & privacy and more.
- Experience with high-growth companies. The ideal candidate will also have run VC transactions.
- Unusually diligent. You read the whole document. You notice when a defined term is no longer used or where formatting is slightly off somewhere in a document.
- A real view on where AI is taking this profession, and a recognition of both the opportunities and the limitations of the technology.
- Someone who wants to build. You are joining at the ground floor, and the ambition is to take a small firm to being a leading global one.
Compensation
- £150,000 to £210,000+ depending on experience and caseload, made up of a guaranteed monthly floor plus a variable revenue-based component (paid monthly rather than as an annual bonus).
- Meaningful equity vesting over four years.
- Fully remote.
Process
Send your CV to hiring@kyralaw.co.uk. We will come back quickly.
- 01Intro call with Joey Irwin, co-founder
- 02Technical assessment
- 03Conversation with the wider founding team
- 04Offer