Legal Counsel

Legal Hire No. 2 at OpenArt AI

AGC? Counsel? Senior Counsel? Head of Legal Ops? — we'll pick a title together after we figure it out together. Remote in the US, perhaps with extra credit for San Francisco or Chicago or LA or NYC affinity.

One lawyer exists at OpenArt. John Belcaster. We’re looking for a second one.

About OpenArt
We built OpenArt for people who have a vision but not a studio, and creators who have a story but not an entire production team.

Today, OpenArt is one of the fastest-growing AI creative platforms, helping millions of people create images, videos, stories, ads, and other creative content with AI.

OpenArt is #12 on a16z’s Top 50 Consumer AI Apps by Monthly Revenue, was selected as one of just five companies in the 2026 Disney Accelerator, and was recognized by Notable Capital’s Prosumer AI 40 as one of the 40 most innovative AI-native companies.

We’re a small, ambitious team that moves fast, takes ownership, and builds without waiting for a playbook.

Job Description?

See pages 1-339 of David Epstein's Range. The book posits that generalists triumph in a specialized world.

Here’s a sample of the generalism that’s crossed the [g]eneral [c]ounsel's desk [lower-case ‘g’ and ‘c’ purposely placed]: licensing agreements across countries and continents; patent preparations; immigration issues; corporate governance matters; invitations to speak at law schools and conferences; collaboration deals with film directors, musical artists, and creative studios; agency actions from the U.S. trademark office; creation of AI-powered legal workflows; state and global taxation swirls; enterprise sales contracts; data privacy and information security screenings; financings; and on and on.

You can join in some, all, or none of that (because loads of other things rise and fall!)

But if all of that simply creates a paradox of choice, you could focus on something concrete, such as……Contracts: customer, vendor, partner, creator. You could, for example, own that end-to-end — intake, draft, negotiate, close, file. Tune the templates, playbooks, and systems so that the fourth time something happens, nobody needs us.

Or you could choose to focus on whatever you're good at, or whatever you’re interested in, or whatever you want to know about, or, perhaps like John, something you know nothing about! Privacy? IP? Product counseling? Employment? Legal operations? The job exists to fit how you exist.

How we work

Tiny team, direct access, no layers. Unlike Aaron Burr, you’d sit in the rooms where it happens. We run legal on AI tools — drafting, review, research, triage. If you think AI will make lawyers faster but not obsolete, you'll be at home here. But if you think AI will make lawyers faster and obsolete, you’ll also be at home here.

Who’s a good candidate?

• Someone who recognizes that this – the world’s only morally defensible inequality – tells a powerful story: CQ + PQ > IQ. Our ‘curiosity quotient’ plus our ‘passion quotient’ outweighs our ‘intelligence quotient’. Or, to put it differently, it’s the curious and the passionate among us, not the blindly intelligent, who move our worlds to better places.
  

• Someone with 25 years, or 25 months, or 25 weeks of experience. Someone who’s three decades out of law school or three hours out of law school.
  

• Someone who doesn’t know what’s next, isn’t discomforted by not knowing what’s next, and, in many ways, prefers not knowing what comes next!

What we won't ask for

A cover letter. A resume formatted for an applicant-tracking system. A ranking of your "preferred qualifications" against ours.

Instead, here’s how to apply

Send John an email: JohnBelcaster@openart.ai. CC sultan@openart.ai. In the email, using no more than one sentence, tell him what you dislike most about artificial intelligence. Then, in no more than three sentences, tell him why you dislike what you dislike. Also in the email, again using no more than three sentences, tell him why you’re sending him the email. Finally, if you have a Linked bio, or a personal website, or a presence on a work website, send him a link to that. And if you don’t have any such link, that’s not a disqualifier (it can even be an amplifier!)

Pay

The law in some states (California and Illinois, for example) requires us to list a salary range. We'll be more precise than that. John’s base pay is $250,000. Let’s use that as the median.

OpenArt is an equal opportunity employer.