Litigation, Trust & Risk Counsel

Job description

🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot! Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. Whether it's trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants, our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories. We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West, and there's no playbook to copy. The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops. As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact. We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce. 💻 Role The 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 looking for a litigation attorney who understands how platform enforcement decisions and consumer complaints become legal disputes. As our Litigation and Trust & Risk Counsel, you'll manage active disputes matters across our growing docket while serving as the embedded legal advisor to our Trust & Risk and Customer Support teams. You'll report to our Head of Litigation and sit at the operational heart of our legal function — translating Whatnot's real-time enforcement actions into defensible legal positions and keeping our disputes docket moving. There's no playbook for what we're doing — you'll be creating the processes and infrastructure as we go. That means real ownership early, but it also means you need to be comfortable operating with ambiguity and creating structure where none exists yet. This role has real room to grow as our disputes and legal operations functions mature. Litigation • Manage a docket of active litigation and arbitration matters involving Whatnot sellers and buyers end-to-end: driving litigation and resolution strategy, coordinating with outside counsel, reviewing briefs and submissions, and keeping matters moving under the supervision of our Head of Litigation. • Analyze demand letters and state AG complaints and draft clear, consistent, and confident responses, leveraging technology to improve efficiency and response time. • Own IP/DMCA takedown workflow, including scaling process as Whatnot grows, and working closely with our Trust & Risk teams to implement related enforcement actions. • Manage the legal hold process, including identifying matters, drafting legal holds, managing tracking, and coordinating with internal stakeholders on execution. • Work with our Trust & Risk Lead to translate investigation outputs into legal positions and arguments and further hone our investigation process. • Use AI tools (such as Claude CoWork, Glean, GC AI) to drive efficiency, build templates and workflows, and create a safety net so matters don’t get missed. • Identify systemic issues in the docket and identify business-oriented solutions — you read patterns, not just individual matters, and you bring solutions not just observations. • Build the playbooks, escalation frameworks, and response templates that don't exist yet — you're energized by creating structure, not just working within it. Trust & Risk Counseling • Serve as the real-time legal advisor and partner to our Trust & Risk and Customer Support teams on account enforcement decisions with legal exposure, including seller bans, payout holds, offboarding actions, and account restrictions. • Partner with our Trust & Risk, Customer Support, and Communications teams to proactively update user communications to improve customer experience and minimize legal risk. • Develop complete and accurate documentation of enforcement decisions, closing the gap between operational actions and defensible legal positions. • Assess ongoing areas of risk surfacing through Trust & Risk and Customer Support and work collaboratively with those teams to implement process improvements that reduce downstream legal exposure. • Support engagement with regulators and legislators on safety issues • Investigate fraud concerns on the Whatnot platform and communicate legal demands as needed 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 Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, or Seattle hubs. 👋 You People 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 Litigation and Trust & Safety Counsel, you should have 5+ years of legal experience plus: • A J.D. degree, and active bar membership in at least one US state. • 5+ years of litigation experience, with prior in-house experience owning a high-volume docket strongly preferred. Ideally you have spent time in-house at a tech platform, marketplace, or consumer-facing company, though complex commercial or product liability litigation experience at a large law firm is also a plus. • Fluency in trust, safety, and risk operations. You have first-hand experience with platform enforcement actions and understand how these decisions are made and how they create legal exposure downstream. New situations surface every day that no policy fully anticipates — good judgment in the grey matters more than waiting for the perfect rule. • Consumer dispute expertise. You have handled high-volume consumer-facing disputes and understand balancing customer experience with keeping the platform