Legal Counsel

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Experience has taught us that when our customers thrive, we thrive. As a team, we always start with what customers need. Through the good… and more challenging times. Innovating at pace so customers can manage their finances, operations and people. Every one of us shapes our culture at Sage - doing what’s right and succeeding together, united by our commitment to each other. We encourage each other to grow in our roles, in our careers and as individuals.

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Description

To provide structured, pragmatic and risk based legal support and act as a legal business partner to those business areas supported by the AME team including the Strategic Alliances, Marketing, Corporate Development, Product, Privacy and Commercial Sales.

Responsibilities

Under the direction of the Regional Legal Director, AME:
• As a valued business partner as a collaborative business partner, deliver end-to-end legal advice to those business areas supported by the AME legal team.
• Demonstrates a sound understanding of Sage's key strategic and functional areas.
• Work collaboratively with other teams within Legal Services to ensure effective and fully aligned end-to-end legal support to wider business colleagues.
• Ensure that governance is adhered to and collaborate with other functional colleagues (e.g. Procurement; Tax; Finance; HR, Risk, Assurance , Compliance and Company Secretarial) to ensure that legal risk is managed in accordance with Sage risk tolerances.
• Advise, influence and support key stakeholders at all levels across our operations to ensure close alignment between Legal Services and business areas.

Skills, know-how and experience:
Must have:
• Extensive experience of working with businesses to solve their commercial challenges in an effective, practical way.
• Experience in technology and telecommunications industries and experience of negotiating technology contracts is required.
• A track record of delivering commercially sound legal advice to business
• Positive, pro-active, ‘can-do’ attitude; solutions-orientated; execution focussed.
• Bright, articulate and commercially astute
• Self-motivated; excellent organisation and time management skills.
• Ability to manage a demanding workload according to competing business priorities; goes the extra mile and does what is necessary to get the job done
• Capable of co-ordinating multi-territory legal support.
• Excellent at building trusted and strong working relationships.
• High level of integrity with a desire to do the right thing and maintain ethical standards within applicable laws.
• Drive and determination to deliver outstanding results every time.
• Excellent communicator and able to explain complex legal matters clearly
• Solid analytical and commercial legal skills
• Works unsupervised producing consistent high quality deliverables
• Provides pragmatic legal solutions to complicated commercial challenges
• Good understanding of data privacy and other regulation relevant to Sage
• Drive and determination to deliver outstanding results in a fast-paced environment.
• A detailed understanding of commercial law is required. In-depth knowledge of other relevant legal disciplines (e.g. data protection; ecommerce; marketing; technology) is also highly desirable.

Technical / professional qualifications:
• A qualified lawyer (Admitted Attorney) with a minimum of between 3- 5 years’ post articles qualification experience within private practice or within a commercial environment.
• Fluent English speaker, additional languages advantageous

Key performance indicators:
• Effective delivery of all required legal accountabilities to a consistently high standard, on time.
• Contribution to success of overall Legal services delivery by identifying and delivering pragmatic solutions.
• Colleagues evangelise about the added value Legal Services brings to Sage.
• Strong relationships built with wider business colleagues.
• Consistently positive feedback from key legal and business stakeholders.

Like the business builders we serve, Sage began as a startup. Our founder David Goldman wanted to automate accounting processes in his own business. He worked with a team of Newcastle University students in the UK to develop software to make it happen and realised other businesses could benefit from this too. In 1981, he formed Sage. In 1998, Sage came to North America with the acquisition of leading desktop accounting software, Peachtree. Today Sage has 13 000 employees and serves over 3 million customers in 23 countries across mainland Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia and Latin America. In 2017, Sage acquired Intacct and Fairsail. In 2018, Sage launched Sage Business Cloud.