The Head of Legal & Assurance will provide expert advice, and hold overall responsibility on all legal, risk, assurance, safeguarding and compliance matters. The postholder will lead the Legal and Assurance teams and work closely with the Executive Leadership and the Board of Comic Relief.

Key responsibilities:

Legal Counsel

• Provide accurate, relevant, and timely end-to-end legal advice for the organisation, including managing resource (internal, external) to ensure effective, timely delivery of legal services.

• Provide legal input into organisational strategy and ensuring legally effective implementation of agreed strategy.

• Lead on identifying, advising on and mitigating legal risks arising from the charity’s operations to protect the charity’s reputation and assets, in particular around contracts, IP, data protection, marketing and advertising, charity, fundraising and corporate laws.

• Maintain and apply appropriate legal policies for processes across the business.

• Employ legal protocols and toolkits as necessary to ensure practices are effective and compliant with regulations.

• Ensuring compliance with all laws and regulations that apply to the organisation

• Maintain and develop strategic organisational relationships in undertaking day-to-day tasks.

Risk and Assurance

• Oversight and management of the internal audit function and internal audit providers.

• Oversight of all compliance, fraud related and regulatory investigations.

• Ensure that our practices and processes around fraud prevention, detection and response are modern and rigorous.

• Oversight and leadership of organisational information governance and data protection, including serving as Data Protection Officer.

• Support the organisation and management to ensure they have a full picture of Comic Relief’s risks and that there are appropriate plans in place to mitigate and manage these risks in such a way as to safely facilitate the objectives of the charity.

• Ensure that safeguarding is at the heart of all our activities, that the framework is adhered to and good practice embodied by all our staff and partners.

• Ensure that our practices and process that underpin compliance with all relevant regulations including GDPR, Fundraising and BBC Editorial Policy are fit-for-purpose.

Strategic Management and Coordination

• Provide Comic Relief with visible and responsive operational leadership with the core aim of enabling, facilitating and developing all staff within the organisation to play their part in achieving our strategic and annual objectives.

• Ensure shared understanding and knowledge between all departments and teams, including lessons learnt, and that staff are collaborating and co-operating with each other to ensure shared ownership of relevant outcomes

• Ensure there is quality management information for all organisational areas that enables knowledge sharing and proactive decision making.

• Build strong, effective and well-led enabling departments and operational teams, with the necessary capability, expertise, systems and processes to deliver the organisation’s strategic and annual plans.

Person specification

Essential criteria

• Qualified solicitor, with post qualification experience as a solicitor, including in-house.

• Significant senior level experience within legal, internal audit, assurance, compliance, fraud, safeguarding, data protection and risk.

• Broad commercial legal/assurance experience within the charity, media or tech sectors

• Strong analytical skills and demonstrated ability to understand complex legal concepts and analysis and translate those to non-lawyers to create practical processes, guidance and training.

• Experience advising senior management of complex organisations.

• Proven leadership and management of high performing departments.

• Strategic, solution focused thinker that can create, evaluate and develop ambitions into success by connecting the dots.

• Confident decision maker, with high resilience that can motivate teams and thrives in cross-functional and collaborative working.

• Effective relationship builder with strong emotional intelligence and political awareness to proactively challenge and persuade senior stakeholders and partners and with ability to build effective relationships and networks across organisational boundaries.

• Exceptional communicator that knows how to engage and inspire teams the ability to present complex and technical issues simply and effectively.

• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to work through challenging situations.

Desirable criteria

• Knowledge of compliance and rules applicable to non-profit, charitable organizations in the UK and in foreign jurisdictions.

• In-house experience.

We recognise diversity and inclusion are a source of strength in achieving our mission. We therefore welcome everyone, trusting what makes us different brings creativity, styles and experiences to help us collectively do our best work. That’s regardless of your gender, age, ethnicity, disability, religion, sexual orientation, and cultural identity. We especially welcome those from under-represented groups in modern grant-making and fundraising. We are on a journey, but if you join our team you will be part of a community that is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment where we want you to:

• Be valued for being yourself

• Do your best work, and be supported to break down barriers so you can succeed

• Be heard, respected, and treated as an equal, whatever your level, experience or background

• Be part of a team that is committed to making this happen – with our colleagues, partners, and contributors.

Comic Relief is committed to preventing and protecting all people from harm in their interactions with us. We expect all those that act in our name to uphold our approach to doing no harm.