Vacancy: Interim Legal Counsel

Overview

For over 500 years, we’ve been a constant in London’s ever-changing landscape, at the leading edge of health. We’re looking for an adept and enthusiastic Interim Legal Counsel, 2 years PQE, to work closely with our team focused on creating innovative partnerships to reduce health inequity in Lambeth, Southwark and beyond, advising on a variety of legal issues and negotiating agreements with our partners. This role is vital to delivering on our ambitious goals by providing invaluable support to colleagues across the Foundation as a whole.

As an independent foundation, we invest, partner, engage and influence to come at big health challenges from all angles. We collaborate with our communities, partners and hospitals, and use our assets to transform lives. In this role, you will join the Foundation’s legal and governance team to assist our work in making an impact across all these areas, supporting Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and empowering your colleagues to improve health. 

You will be working with a dynamic and highly motivated team at a time when supporting the NHS and other health focused initiatives are never more important. You’ll primarily be advising colleagues around structuring of projects and will be putting together new contracts documenting our project work across our four innovative impact-led health programmes (Impact on Urban Health). In addition, you will be providing legal advice and guidance to colleagues across the Foundation, including in respect of our work with Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust.  We are looking for an approachable self-starter with commercial contracts experience and a keen interest in working as part of an ambitious in-house team.

About us

At Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation, our mission is clear – to build the foundations of a healthier society.

As part of our team, you will work alongside talented people from a mix of personal and professional backgrounds. We are a Living Wage employer and support flexible working, part-time roles and job shares. Though our ambitions are serious, this is a friendly place to work with lots of opportunities to meet and socialise with colleagues. We believe there is immense power in diversity and aim to recruit and nurture talent who think and act differently.

There is more information about working with us on our website, where you can read about:

·         how we approach recruitment

·         our team, culture and values

·         the benefits of working with us

·         and our approach to diversity, equity & inclusion, health & wellbeing, and learning & development

The team:

The Legal and Governance team sits within the Operations directorate at the Foundation. We are a small, agile unit, looking to turn our hands at anything that comes our way to assist the organisation and our colleagues to achieve our charitable mission.  As a team, our work covers a broad spectrum of legal and governance matters, from commercial contracts and grant agreements, to advising on intellectual property, charity law requirements around restricted funds, fundraising, campaigning and political activity through to commissioning and collating Board and committee meeting materials and company secretarial duties. This new role is key to the development of our team and the support we are able to give across the Foundation.

Key

responsibilities:

Charitable partnerships (Impact on Urban Health)

·         Structure, assist colleagues with drafting and negotiate agreements for a wide variety of partnerships and projects, including commercial contracts, grants, IP licenses, novel investment models, revenue-sharing arrangements and data agreements

·         Act as a thought partner with the team to advise on the structuring, legal risks and strategic implications of partnerships and future opportunities

·         Maintain and appropriately file correspondence and documentation relating to commercial contracts.

Procedure and policy efficiencies

·         Draft, maintain and update our internal guidelines, policies and standard-form documents

Tailored partnerships

·         Consider legal considerations, and appropriate processes, for collaborating with certain partners (e.g., regulatory, private gain, data protection, policy), including advising on due diligence procedures and tailoring our standard form templates

·         Work with cross-functional stakeholders on longer-term projects to change our partnership models to cede power to the communities we work with, whilst balancing this against our charity law obligations

Cross-functional work

·         Work with cross-functional stakeholders, including communications, policy and influencing, evaluation and the Executive Team to advise on cross-team collaboration, opportunities, issues and risks relating to our charitable partnerships

·         Support teams such as property, endowment and HR on their legal needs, including drafting, negotiating and agreeing documents

Governance and legal

·         Support the Foundation’s Legal Counsel & Company Secretary in advising colleagues on legal and governance matters

·         Undertaking research into specific legal issues or matters of best practice.

·         Identify need for, organise and run training sessions on key legal and compliance issues to Foundation staff

Person specification

What we’re looking for

Skills and experience:

Knowledge and qualifications:

Abilities and attributes:

-       Experience in drafting and reviewing commercial contracts (Essential)

-       Legal research skills (Essential)

-       Preparation of guidance notes and training materials (Essential)

-       Experience using the Microsoft Office suite (Essential)

-       Sound knowledge of the law of England and Wales (Essential);

-       Familiarity with commercial contracts and contract law (Essential);

-       Sound working knowledge of intellectual property and data protection matters (Desirable)

-       Familiarity with the charity sector and charity law (Desirable);

-       Some familiarity with basic financial and grants related terms and concepts (Desirable).

-       Self-starter who is adaptable, works with integrity, and exhibits the Foundation’s enterprising, collaborative and delivery-minded cultural and behavioural values

-       Excellent verbal and written communication skills

-       Detail oriented

-       Good interpersonal skills and able to effectively liaise with both internal and external communities

-       Problem solving skills, able to use initiative and actively seeks pragmatic solutions

-       Good planning and organisational skills, able to work to multiple prioritised tasks, targets and deadlines, with careful attention to detail.

-       Team player, with an ability to support effective working relationships.

-       Committed to embedding diversity, equity and inclusion in everything we do.