HEAD OF COMMERCIAL LEGAL

Location: Weybridge

Hours of work: 40 Hours Per Week

Contract Type: Permanent

Our client has an exciting opportunity for a qualified private or in-house lawyer to lead a dynamic and busy team of commercial lawyers.

With a high level of interpersonal skills, you will work closely with the Commercial and Operations teams, supporting negotiations for key accounts and playing an active role in developing the commercial legal function. You will also enhance collaboration with the Global Commercial Legal Team.

Reporting to the General Counsel (UK & Ireland), this is a full-time hybrid role, with a requirement to work from our Weybridge office three days a week.

Responsibilities include:

• Leading the commercial legal function to ensure a consistent approach to identifying and assessing commercial legal risks and advise the business and all relevant stakeholders to ensure that risks are reduced, mitigated, and factored into contract positions and financial business cases.
• Managing the commercial legal team of 5 Senior Commercial Lawyers.
• Contributing to the strategic direction, management, and leadership of a world-class Commercial Legal function for the ISS UK&I business.
• Building, managing and maintaining effective relationships with key internal stakeholders, and enable team members to do the same, through effective influence.

Providing commercial legal support for key accounts by:

• Managing the Commercial Legal team’s workloads and priorities
• Ownership (from a Legal perspective) of the Internal Commercial Bid Sign Off Process
• Managing stakeholders
• Drafting and capturing the key commercial objectives in the contract for new key accounts e.g., around price adjustment and benchmarking, liability, payment terms, employee transfer, due diligence vs. baseline verification, technical maintenance, termination, and exit.
• Understanding the "commercial model" to the customer and ISS e.g., fixed price model, cost-plus model, guaranteed maximum price model (GMP/TCC/FMP).
• Identifying and articulating compliance requirements, to avoid costly overpromises, to bridge the gap between customer requirements and ISS standard delivery.
• Navigating and advising on bid and negotiation process support.
• Providing hands-on negotiation assistance and leadership to close the deal e.g., leveraging the dealmaker vs. advisor role, understanding the underlying concerns, driving towards solutions in a creating a sense of progress and collaboration.
• Navigating internal stakeholders and establishing mandates managing approval processes, signoffs, and internal alignment meetings to drive towards one common view.
• Supervising all BAU contractual queries on active accounts, including across the PFI portfolio.

About you:

• Law degree or equivalent from English or international well reputed university.
• 10+ years of PQE experience as Business Lawyer (ideally for a first-class business law firm or in-house).
• Experience of large complex and strategic outsourcing contracts. Prior exposure to outsourcing contracts is essential. Knowledge of PFI sector beneficial.
• Experience of managing a team.
• Experience of working with matrix-structured companies.
• Track record of interacting with senior sales and bid teams, top executives, and key stakeholders on the customer side.
• High proficiency of English
• Experience in drafting English language contracts (preferably including NEC4 and JCT).

In return, we can offer a competitive salary, company car/car allowance, annual bonus, life assurance, private medical insurance plus many other benefits.