Principal Legal Lead

Role Overview

• Lead day-to-day delivery for your allocated client group, ensuring high-quality legal services, strong client experience, deadline compliance, and consistent execution.
• Draft, review, negotiate, and oversee complex NDAs and ancillary transaction documents across private equity, M&A, and financing transactions.
• Act as the senior point of escalation for difficult legal, commercial, client, counterparty, or workflow issues, identifying, challenging, and formulating high-quality solutions.
• Oversee and review the work product of junior, specialist, and senior team members, ensuring quality, consistency, legal substance, and readiness for client distribution.
• Lead, sign off, review, and refine client playbooks, templates, and precedents, ensuring consistency with internal guidelines, format, and structure.
• Serve as the day-to-day account lead and ultimate “responsible person” for allocated clients, owning the overall health of each account.
• Be available and on call to clients, hosting regular check-ins, negotiation calls, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to assess platform usage, service performance, and account direction.
• Track customer health across allocated accounts, proactively identifying risks to satisfaction, retention, or renewal and acting early to address them.
• Take ownership of client complaints and issues end-to-end, drafting competent responses and driving them through to resolution.
• Support customer outreach and account growth, identifying opportunities to expand or deepen relationships — including onboarding additional document types, new workflows, or changes to scope — in partnership with the Account Manager.
• Provide coaching, feedback, mentoring, and training to team members, identifying development needs and designing and delivering targeted training.
• Monitor capacity, workload distribution, SLA performance, and service quality across your allocated group, escalating resourcing or performance issues as appropriate.
• Contribute to hiring, interviewing, onboarding, performance calibration, and progression discussions.
• Identify opportunities to improve service delivery, legal technology adoption, workflow design, and managed services scalability.
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of internal processes and delivery of workflows.
• Lead by example in the effective use of our proprietary AI tools across your allocated client group, modelling best practice for the team.

Requirements

• Law degree (LLB or equivalent).
• 6+ years of experience drafting, reviewing, and negotiating core transactional or commercial documents, including confidentiality agreements, engagement letters, and release letters.
• Demonstrable client-facing experience, including direct ownership of client relationships, client calls, and handling client issues or complaints.
• Demonstrable experience supervising, mentoring, or indirectly managing legal team members and reviewing their work product.
• A genuine blend of legal and commercial capability — technically strong in the practice of law and commercially astute in the management of client relationships.
• Excellent written and spoken English, including the ability to explain legal concepts clearly to lawyers, non-lawyers, clients, and senior stakeholders.
• Strong attention to detail and commitment to producing consistently high-quality work.

Benefits

• Hybrid and remote working options, with the ability to work from other countries (upon request)
• Paid Sick Leave days per year to recover or care for family.
• Confidential Support: Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) offering mental health and wellbeing support.
• Professional Development: 7 days per year of paid study leave annually for exams and structured learning.
• Annual Bonus: Discretionary and performance-based.
• Generous Paid Time Off: Annual leave + bank holidays