Head of Legal

Incredible opportunity for a commercially minded lawyer to join this start–up business as Head of Legal.

This role will suit someone who wants to truly embed themselves into a business and work collaboratively and commercially across the global business.

You will be comfortable providing strategic advice to drive the commercial agenda and be solutions focused.

What the Job Involves

• Fundraising and acquisitions – driving the legal aspects on all things M&A. This role will manage the process from term sheet to completion – running due diligence, advising on deal structure, partnering in negotiations, and executing transactions that fuel our mission.
• New market expansion – identifying and actioning all legal aspects of new market entrance. This role will be tasked with entity set–up, balancing permanent establishment risks, and creating the jurisdiction–specific legal infrastructure to enable the commercial machine.
• Customer acquisition – negotiating critical agreements with new customers. You'll partner with our sales and go–to–market teams to support deal velocity, while adequately managing risk.
• Strategic regulatory support – enabling our regulatory operations team by providing pragmatic advice. You'll need to be comfortable in the "grey", and your output should be founded in first principles thinking, while considering the bigger picture.
• Corporate governance – supporting the board and engaging with investors on all legal matters. We'll need someone who can provide strategic, commercial updates + advice on legal and compliance risk.
• Employment and people – facilitating recruitment and people strategy. You'll be managing our adherence to labour laws across the (currently) nine jurisdictions that we hire in.
• Equity and incentives – managing all aspects of the Employee Share Option Program. You'll oversee pool usage, company valuations (to support tax requirements across multiple jurisdictions), options grants, exercise requests, and associated cap table management.
• IP and value protection – protecting and defending the business portfolio. We'll need your support on attack and defence in respect of our trademark registrations, and the highly valuable outputs of our employees and contractors.
• Insurance and risk – managing our portfolio to ensure our coverage scales with new market expansions. We operate in a high risk environment, and our policies need to support that.
• Data protection and GDPR – ensuring compliance with cross–jurisdictional data processing legislation.

Please note, it is not essential that you have previous experience across all of the above – our client are open–minded as to suitable candidates and appreciate that you might not be doing all of above already.

Previous experience could be across commercial, corporate or a different technical specialism; but you will need to be able to demonstrate the ability to take on the duties listed above.

It would be highly advantageous if candidates have previously worked in a start–up or supported start–up clients whilst in private practice and can therefore operate at pace and work well with change.

For a private and confidential conversation about this incredible opportunity please don't hesitate to reach out.

Robert Walters Operations Limited is an employment business and employment agency and welcomes applications from all candidates