The Comic Relief legal team is a full-service legal team which deals with an incredibly diverse and interesting workload; from negotiating for content rights, facilitating innovation, enabling and protecting our philanthropic investments, charity law and governance issues and everything else in-between. The legal team provide high quality and responsive counsel and legal advice as enablers to our fast-moving social agency for change.

The General Counsel leads the legal team and is responsible for the provision of legal services to the organisation, quantifying and managing risk, ensuring legal compliance whilst enabling and future proofing the organisation from a legal perspective.

Recognising the breadth of the role and welcoming all applications, we anticipate that the successful candidate will most likely come from a media/technology background, with previous in-house experience in a high-profile organisation.

Key responsibilities

• Provide counsel to trustees, executive directors, the senior team and the organisation and advise on legal issues, risk, reputational management and regulatory matters.

• Legal business partner to the executive directors.

• Provide end to end legal advice for the organisation (including in relation to media, intellectual property, contracts and commercial, employment, fundraising, grants and corporate and charity governance)

• Champion “work smart” for the legal function (focus on process and policies to enable the organisation to self help on legal issues where is appropriate, with the provision of training and support to the organisation to enable this)

• Lead, manage and support the legal team and manage legal resource (internal, external) to ensure responsive and effective delivery of legal services

• Delivery of major contracts and involvement in major projects

• Be an ambassador for collaborative cross-functional working

Essential Education and Competencies

• Significant post qualification experience as a lawyer, including in-house

• Broad legal experience (with anticipated expertise in media/technology/commercial and commercial and ideally also experience of charity law)

• Experience at senior team/board level

• Leadership and management of high-performance teams

• Collaborate and build relationships -work effectively across all levels of the organisation

• Flexible, adaptive thinker, with an evolved and nuanced approach to the quantification and management of risk

• Confident decision maker who owns their remit and responsibilities, is pragmatic and solution focused, but will say “no” if required and escalate appropriately

• Able to effectively prioritise, multi-task and deliver

• Proactive, positive and fun professional with high resilience

• Bias for process, simplification and the use of technology to provide solutions

We are aiming to interview in the first week of October.