Associate Vice President, Legal & Workflow Management

Overview

Over the last 20 years, Ares’ success has been driven by our people and our culture. Today, our team is guided by our core values – Collaborative, Responsible, Entrepreneurial, Self-Aware, Trustworthy – and our purpose to be a catalyst for shared prosperity and a better future. Through our recruitment, career development and employee-focused programming, we are committed to fostering a welcoming and inclusive work environment where high-performance talent of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives can build careers within this exciting and growing industry.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Ares is seeking a former transactional attorney to join its Legal Strategy + Innovation (LSI) team as an Associate Vice President, Legal Knowledge & Workflow Management.

This role is responsible for building and operationalizing Ares Legal’s knowledge ecosystem across multiple geographies and lines of business—transforming institutional expertise, precedent and best practices into structured, reusable assets that drive consistent legal outcomes across the firm.

You will function as both architect and operator: defining knowledge standards, governance and taxonomy while actively capturing, curating and deploying legal content across matters and teams. Workflow design serves as the delivery layer for this knowledge, ensuring that internal legal teams and service providers engage with the right guidance and decision support. The objective is to create a connected, measurable operating model where legal judgment is codified, shared and continuously improved through data and playbooks.

This position directly supports Ares Legal’s long-term integrated service delivery strategy by aligning internal teams and external service providers around a common legal knowledge base, standardized guidance and feedback loops that reinforce quality, consistency and learning.

REPORTING

Reports to: Head of Legal Strategy + Innovation

• Design, document and optimize standardized end-to-end legal workflows that surface authoritative guidance, precedent and decision support at key points in the matter lifecycle.
• Define intake gates and data requirements that ensure complete, reliable information is captured at the right point in the process to enable systematic knowledge capture, reuse and analytics.
• Establish approval, escalation and routing logic that drives consistency, accountability and visibility across geographies and lines of business.

• Develop shared operating standards that allow internal teams and external providers to work from the same playbooks, systems and KPIs.
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to embed knowledge assets and data capture into CLM and related workflow systems.
• Support Legal Vendor Strategy & Management in embedding playbook adherence, knowledge reuse expectations, data access and insights and performance metrics into service provider governance.

• Translate legal and business experience into structured playbooks, templates and matter frameworks.
• Integrate playbook content into CLM and workflow tools to drive compliance and streamline execution.
• Maintain a single source of truth for process standards and legal guidance and continuously refine content based on user feedback, usage patterns and performance data.

• Lead pilots and rollouts for new workflows and playbooks, measuring adoption and effectiveness.
• Define and monitor KPIs such as cycle times, intake completeness and process compliance.
• Drive a continuous improvement loop using metrics, feedback and automation opportunities.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to standardize workflows and align legal knowledge structures and standards with technology implementation and reporting.
• Serve as a liaison between practicing attorneys, operations and technology teams to capture expertise and operationalize it at scale.

Education

• JD required. Member in good standing of a U.S. state bar.

Required Skills & Experience

• 7+ years total experience, including at least 5+ years as a practicing transactional attorney (corporate, finance, M&A, private equity or fund formations).
• Proven ability to design, document and improve legal…