Overview

• Contract: Asap through the end of September 2027

• Reporting to: Chief of Staff

• Visa sponsorship: Unfortunately, we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role. Applicants should have the right to work in the UK at the time of application.

• Background checks: Due to the non-partisan nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history, and right to work. To ensure we maintain high standards of political neutrality, we also perform media and social media checks.

• You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by:  14th October 2026

• Salary expectations: We aim for transparency on salary bands. If our range is misaligned with your expectations, we’d welcome an open conversation as early as possible.

About Apolitical

Apolitical's mission is to make governments smarter for people and the planet and we reach over 40 million public servants through our partnerships with governments globally. We are the largest global network for governments, used by 500,000+ public servants in 170 countries to find and share best practices and gain skills on critical topics from AI to climate change to emerging technologies.

Role

We’re looking for a Legal Operations Manager (or candidate with a similar job title) to help Apolitical run an effective, commercially-minded legal function while a member of our team is on maternity leave.

Apolitical works with governments, foundations, multilaterals and other organisations around the world. As we build partnerships and commercial relationships, we need to move quickly while making sensible decisions about contractual and commercial risk.

You’ll take ownership of much of our day-to-day contracting and legal operations: progressing agreements, supporting negotiations, identifying and escalating risk, coordinating external counsel, and improving the systems behind our legal work.

This is a senior individual contributor role, not a Legal Counsel position. We need someone who can confidently progress appropriate matters themselves, while recognising when something requires a senior decision or specialist legal advice.

Team

You’ll sit within our Operations Team, where Legal is a specialist sub-function, and report to our Chief of Staff.

This is a highly collaborative role. You’ll work particularly closely with our Partnerships and Commercial teams, helping them navigate contracting and legal questions in the context of what they’re trying to achieve. You’ll also work across Operations and with colleagues in Product, Finance and senior leadership.

Tasks and remit

• Draft, review and amend contracts, MoUs, NDAs, scopes of work, pilot agreements, terms and conditions and other commercial documents.

• Independently progress routine and lower-risk agreements within established parameters.

• Review proposed changes and distinguish between standard points, genuine commercial trade-offs and issues requiring escalation.

• Support and lead routine negotiations with partners and their legal or commercial teams.

• Ensure agreements are accurate, consistent and ready for external sharing or signature.

• Identify relevant contractual and commercial risks, including around IP, confidentiality, data, payment, liability, termination and financial or reputational exposure.

• Turn complex issues into clear options, recommendations and next steps for colleagues.

• Apply judgement about which risks we can sensibly manage internally and which require escalation.

• Brief and coordinate external counsel where specialist advice is needed, making sure advice translates into action.

• Help us use external counsel proportionately to the risk, complexity and value of a matter.

• Maintain visibility across active legal matters, priorities, owners, deadlines and next steps.

• Develop our contract repository and tracking so relevant colleagues can easily find agreements, obligations and key dates.

• Improve templates, guidance and workflows so recurring legal work becomes quicker and more consistent.

• Help colleagues understand how and when to involve Legal and what information is needed to progress their request.

• Use Harvey, our legal AI tool, to explore better approaches to areas such as contract review, drafting, clause comparison, summarisation and legal knowledge management.

• Identify where AI and automation genuinely improve our work — and where confidentiality, data protection, commercial sensitivity or the need for human judgement mean they shouldn’t be used.

Around 20% of your role will support wider Operations priorities and cross-functional projects. This could include governance, compliance, documentation or process improvement where your skills are particularly useful.

Onboarding milestones

• Understand Apolitical’s key commercial relationships, legal workload and approach to contractual risk.

• Build strong working relationships across Operations, Partnerships and Commercial.

• Become familiar with our contracts, templates, legal processes, Harvey and external counsel relationships.

• Begin independently progressing appropriate day-to-day legal matters.

• Confidently manage the majority of routine and lower-risk contracting within agreed parameters.

• Be a trusted first point of contact for day-to-day contracting questions across Partnerships, Commercial and Operations.

• Manage competing legal priorities effectively, making blockers, trade-offs and escalation points clear.

• Have identified and begun implementing improvements to our legal processes, contract management or use of Harvey.

• Demonstrate consistently good judgement about what to progress, escalate or refer to external counsel.

• Have measurably improved the speed, visibility or consistency of legal and contracting work.

• Make contracts, key obligations and legal information easier for relevant stakeholders to find and understand.

• Have embedded at least one meaningful improvement to our legal workflows, whether through process, templates, guidance, Harvey or other tooling.

About you

• Have strong hands-on experience with commercial contracts and can confidently review, amend and progress agreements.

• Have worked in legal operations, commercial contracting, as a senior paralegal/legal associate, or in another role that has developed comparable skills.

• Can distinguish between a drafting preference, a manageable commercial risk and something that genuinely requires escalation.

• Give people clear recommendations and rationale rather than simply identifying problems.

• Are highly organised and can keep multiple matters moving without losing sight of detail, deadlines or dependencies.

• Communicate legal concepts clearly to colleagues who aren’t lawyers.

• Enjoy working collaboratively with commercial teams and understanding the objective behind an agreement.

• Know the limits of your expertise and are comfortable involving specialist counsel when appropriate.

• Look for ways to improve systems rather than repeatedly solving the same problem.

• Are curious about the potential of legal AI and keen to experiment thoughtfully with tools like Harvey.

• Are comfortable with the changing priorities and ambiguity that come with working in a scale-up.

You don’t need to be a qualified solicitor to apply. We’re interested in the skills and judgement you’ve developed rather than a particular route into legal work.

• Worked with government, foundation, multilateral or other institutional partners.

• Experience contracting across multiple jurisdictions.

• Worked in a start-up, scale-up or another organisation with a lean legal function.

• Built or improved contract-management or legal-operations processes.

• Used legal AI, contract automation or other legal technology.

• Want to practise as senior in-house counsel or be Apolitical’s ultimate legal authority. 

• Prefer to escalate most contractual questions rather than independently progressing appropriate matters.

• Want a narrowly defined legal role without involvement in the commercial or operational context behind the work.

• Prefer an established legal department with mature systems and specialist lawyers covering every area.

• Want a predictable queue of legal tasks. Priorities can move quickly as partnerships and commercial opportunities develop.

• Aren’t already using AI as part of your legal workflow. We’ll expect you to experiment with AI and automation while applying appropriate judgement and safeguards.

Don’t meet every single expectation? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. Apolitical is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Application Process

Apolitical uses Applied in our recruitment. Applied aims to overcome unconscious bias in recruiting. Instead of using your CV alone, we'll be asking you to answer questions to test skills needed for the role. The answers are then anonymised, and reviewed in a random order by members of our team. 

The Applied platform also asks some demographic questions before you start your application.  These answers are never visible to the hiring team and don’t affect your application in any way. We only see summary statistics to help us check if our candidate pool is balanced and if everyone has an equal chance to get hired irrespective of their background. If you prefer, you can easily opt out of answering these questions.

Using AI in your application answers

At Apolitical, we embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work. AI helped us write this job advert! However, as AI becomes more prevalent, it can be difficult to distinguish between machine-generated content and the unique perspectives of candidates. We’re excited to see how you use AI tools to structure and refine your answers, but we value your unique insights above all else. Ensure your application reflects your voice and how your skills align with our mission.