Head of Legal / Counsel

JDI Legal are currently instructed on an exclusive basis by a major player in the B2B Gas and Power markets to recruit a senior in house Counsel / Head of Legal.

This is their first role with a view to growing their business and retaining their legal services by recruiting aHead of Legal who can build, grow, and lead their legal department. This role will dealwith a regularly changing caseload, which will require the needto implement a strategy to protect the business, its people and its customers.

Responsibilities of the role include, but are not limited to:

# Advise and manage issues relating to a range of mainly contentious issues such as commercial litigation, debt recovery, employment law, supporting with continuous development of our employee life-cycle and ensuring we are employment law compliant.

# There will also be a medium term target to grow the existing team to ensure we are prepared for our forecasted increase in cases and workloads within the team across the group.

# Drive a culture of winning. Create and continually develop SLAs and KPIs for output and performance from the Compliance & Legal Operation.

# Budget Management.

# Support the launch of new products, technology and services by implementing commercial agreements and ensure the terms of the agreement are understood and followed by all parties involved.

# Lead the development of our implementation of our internal legal and compliance policies and procedures

# Continuously identify risks and gaps, specify internal governance policies and regularly monitor compliance

# Communicate and negotiate with external parties (regulators, external counsel, public authority etc.), creating relations of trust.

# The successful candidate will be responsible for ensuring we reduce our external legal spend.

# The successful candidate will be required to review our use of legal partners and existing terms to harmonise and ensure add value output.

# Lead strategies for effective risk management techniques and offer proactive advise on possible legal issues

# Provide clarification on legal language or specifications to everyone in the organisation - in particular the Executive team and Board of Directors.

# Maintain current knowledge of alterations in legislation. You will be required to keep up to date with changes - on a global scale.

# The ideal candidate will be responsible for ensuring we have effective policies and processes within the business, group wide and globally which avoid any risks.

The Person

Candidates will be considered if they can demonstrate the following:

# Proactive and solutions driven, working under pressure

# An expert on transformation and strategy development

# A proven leader who is driven, results orientated and very organised.

# General Legal experience at a Senior Level, gained either in-house or within a commercial practice in a leading firm. The ideal candidate may have already operated at Partner level in a private firm. Experience of managing a legal team of multiple disciplines would be useful.

# Strong commercial awareness and acute business judgement.

# The ability to communicate from the sales floor to the Board room.

# An ability to identify opportunity to remove process barriers and improve efficiencies

# Effective communicator with experience of dealing with a range of internal stakeholders. Candidates who have had exposure to the energy industry, sales of good act legislation and consumer law would be preferred.

There is a 'sleeves rolled up' culture and all roles, from Director down, are expected to be willing to help out anywhere the business has a requirement.

Should you be considering a move in house and wish to discuss this role in confidence do get in touch in touch with our Jillian McKenzie.