We’re revisiting our competition law workflow and I’ve been asked to scope a new hire to handle first-line compliance reviews. Right now it’s about 20 vertical agreements per month plus Section 8 interlock checks and the occasional HSR clean team protocol, with a 72-hour SLA. For those who’ve hired recently, are you seeing better outcomes with a senior paralegal/analyst profile or junior counsel, and what title/comp range has worked in practice?
We’ve had better results with a senior paralegal who owns a “triage matrix” in Airtable and pre-baked checklists for verticals and Section 8, with anything fuzzy kicked to a 15‑minute attorney review inside the 72‑hour window. If HSR clean teams start popping more often, I’d swap to a junior attorney lead since privilege hygiene and quick NDA tweaks can outpace an analyst. Kind of like air traffic control — one experienced controller, counsel as the tower supervisor.
I hired a mid-level analyst with some BigLaw antitrust exposure and built a ‘one-pager intake’ that forces the business to label the vertical type and auto-flags RPM/exclusivity for escalation — TSA PreCheck for contracts. We keep a living ‘decision log’ for repeat counterparties and, when HSR or thorny Section 8 pops up, spin up a fractional counsel about 10 hrs/week to protect the 72-hour SLA. For clean teams, we maintain a small kit and sanity-check it against Premerger Notification Program | Federal Trade Commission.