Legal Counsel

Legal Counsel

Circa GBP65,000 + benefits

Permanent

35 hours per week (happy to talk flexible working)

Wimbledon (hybrid working)

We're the CIPD – the professional body for HR and people development. We are the voice of a worldwide community of nearly 160,000 members committed to championing better work and working lives. We've been setting the benchmark for excellence in people and organisation development for more than 100 years, helping members build their professional expertise and organisations build their HR and leadership capability.

There has never been a more interesting or important time to join us. We offer an inclusive and stimulating culture and a wide range of professional development opportunities, as well as excellent benefits such as 28 days' holiday with an option to buy and sell days, GBP125 personal development allowance, access to an award winning pension scheme and a commitment to wellbeing including a cashback health scheme.

The Role

As a Legal Counsel, you will be part of the Legal & Governance team and you will delivering effective and efficient legal services across all parts of the organisation. You will be responsible for providing business focussed advice on a wide range of contracts and commercial issues with a particular focus on data protection.

What You'll Be Doing

• Leading on reviewing, drafting and negotiating a broad and diverse range of contracts with our service partners and suppliers
• Sharing responsibility with the Legal team for managing the CIPD's data protection compliance framework including, leading a network of data champions across the organisation, advising on data privacy issues, drafting, and reviewing data processing agreements to ensure compliance reequipments are met
• Providing timely, practical and commercially sound legal advice on contentious and non–contentious issues to internal stakeholders and helping to enable decision–making and formulate strategy
• Providing briefing papers and updates to internal stakeholders and to be the legal lead in project teams set up for specific issues
• Recognising the need for external advice when it arises; obtaining estimates on potential costs and communicating these to the budget holder, achieving best value for money and cost savings where possible
• Advising on intellectual property matters including trademark and copyright infringement issues;
• Promoting best practice internally by providing training on matters such as contract management, contract law, data protection, intellectual property and any other relevant legal issues.

What You'll Need To Be Successful

• Qualified solicitor (England & Wales) with extensive post qualification experience.
• Good working knowledge of contract & commercial law with significant experience of drafting and advising on a wide variety of general commercial contracts.
• Experience of advising on data privacy and compliance issues. CIPD has offices in UAE, Singapore and Ireland and experience advising on privacy issues in multiple jurisdictions.
• A keen interest in company secretarial matters and charity legislation.
• Good working knowledge of rights relating to and dealings in soft Intellectual Property, particularly copyright and data (non–contentious).
• Excellent communication skills with stakeholders at all levels
• Good commercial acumen; ability to use own initiative and technical expertise to provide practical solutions.
• Business focused and risk aware, demonstrable ability to be pragmatic while balancing legal and other risks consistent with achieving CIPD's objectives.
• Ability to explain legal terms in a digestible format.
• A strong team player with the ability to work flexibly and to tight deadlines.

Please note, this advert is due to close on Monday 20 March 2023.

If this role describes you and your career aspirations, then click APPLY.

CIPD: valuing everyone as an individual! The CIPD define diversity as valuing everyone as an individual – we value all our employees, customers and clients as people. Harnessing these differences creates a productive environment in which everybody feels valued, where their talents are fully utilised and organisational and personal goals are met.

We are committed to employment practices that promote diversity and inclusion in employment regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, sex, marriage and civil partnership status, pregnancy and maternity status, race, religion or belief.

Please note, we reserve the right to close or extend this position depending on application numbers. Therefore, we would urge you to submit an application as soon as possible.