Legal Counsel – 12 month FTC

Location: London, Hybrid (2-3 days per week in the office)

Contract: Full time, 12 month Fixed Term Contract

Salary: £90,000-£100,000 per annum

Start date: between Feb- April 2025 (Depending on notice periods)

About our client:

Our client opens the doors to discovery for researchers, educators, clinicians and other professionals. Every day, around the globe, their imprints, books, journals, platforms and technology solutions reach millions of people. For over 175 years their brands and imprints have been a trusted source of knowledge to these communities and today, more than ever, they see it as their responsibility to ensure that fundamental knowledge can be found, verified, understood and used by their communities – enabling them to improve outcomes, make progress, and benefit the generations that follow.

Our client help authors to share their discoveries; enable researchers to find, access and understand the work of others and support companies and institutions with innovations in technology and data. One of the group’s Education division has a local presence in over 120 countries, and they work closely with students, teachers, institutions and educational authorities to advance learning.

About the Role

An exciting opportunity for an individual seeking a one year, fixed term mid-level position within their well established and global Legal Department. Their team in London look after UK centric work but often partner with US and German legal team on international commercial and wider legal matters.

Role Responsibilities:

• Lead legal business partner supporting the Global Procurement function with a range of Indirect/IT, Pre-press, Printing and Warehousing, and Transportation
• Strictly private and confidential procurement matters, including full life cycle tender processes, one-off contract negotiations and day-to-day supplier management.
• Providing legal support for their Global Technology function, as the lead legal business partner supporting the Global Technology department.
• Providing ad hoc legal support across the Education division and Healthcare divisions, working closely with counterparts in Spain, Asia, South America, southern Africa, Germany and the US.
• A particular focus is advising on technology contracts, and in particular third party SaaS contracts, software licensing, cloud based data hosting agreements and professional services consultancy contracts.
• Reviewing, drafting, negotiating and advising on a wide range of commercial contracts and IP-related agreements
• Pro-actively considering and implementing continuous strategic improvements to legal business partnering processes, efficiencies and Legal Ops, including through the use and development of standard contracts, minimum terms and legal review thresholds.
• Working largely autonomously, with a range of colleagues, providing objective analysis of risks relating to commercial and consumer law, copyright and other intellectual property matters, and providing solutions to satisfy legal and business requirements.
• Leading projects with notable risk and complexity, and developing strategies for project execution.
• Communicating with and managing diverse stakeholder groups inside and outside of the group.
• Acting as mentor to more junior colleagues across the General Counsel’s Office.

Key relationships:

• In-house clients in the business and international departments (including Procurement, Technology, Data Protection, Editorial Rights, Tax and Finance);
• Colleagues in the General Counsel’s Office and Group Compliance.
• External advisers.

Experience we are looking for:

• Minimum 4 years’ PQE with a general commercial background, with an IT, procurement would be ideal.
• In-house experience (may include secondments) or private practice with the relevant technical experience in commercial, IT, procurement or working with publishing houses.
• Experience in intellectual property matters, especially copyright and licensing, however this is not essential.
• Experience and interest in publishing/media, particularly academic/scientific publishing.

Please note: whilst this is a FTC, there are hopes that they can offer a permanent role in 2026. There are no guarantees of this but the role does have good potential for the right candidate.

Please note our advertisements use PQE/salary levels purely as a guide. However we are happy to consider applications from all candidates who are able to demonstrate the skills necessary to fulfil the role.

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