Litigation Counsel

About the 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 Litigation 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, who do the day to day work of keeping the platform safe. You'll report to our Head of Litigation and sit at the operational heart of our legal function — keeping our disputes docket moving and translating Whatnot's real-time enforcement actions into defensible legal positions. 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.

Responsibilities

• Manage a docket of active litigation and arbitration matters involving Whatnot sellers and buyers end-to-end: responding to demand letters, initiating legal holds, 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.
• Investigate misconduct on the Whatnot platform and work with the team to develop our enforcement strategy, including pursuing offensive arbitration or litigation.
• 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 fraudulent activity, seller bans, payout holds, offboarding actions, and account restrictions.
• Support engagement with regulators and state AGs, including analyzing state AG complaints and drafting clear, consistent, and confident responses.
• Partner with our Trust & Risk and Customer Support teams to proactively update user communications to improve customer experience and minimize legal risk, develop complete and accurate documentation of enforcement decisions, and translate investigation outputs into legal positions and arguments.
• 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.
• Assess ongoing areas of risk surfacing through Trust & Risk and Customer Support in the docket and work collaboratively with those teams to implement process improvements and business-oriented solutions that reduce platform fraud and downstream legal exposure.
• Build the playbooks, escalation frameworks, and response templates that don't exist yet — you're energized by creating structure, not just working within it.

Qualifications

• J.D. degree
• Active bar membership in at least one US state

Requirements

• 8+ years of legal experience litigating at scale
• Significant complex litigation experience; ideally in-house at a tech platform, marketplace, or consumer-facing company litigating emerging legal issues
• Consumer dispute expertise: handled