Legal Counsel

Location: Babraham Research Park, Cambridge

Type: Full time, permanent 

Start: Immediate

Salary: Competitive

Hybrid working available (minimum 1 day/week on-site in Cambridge)

Your role in our team:

Reporting to the Head of Legal and IP, the Legal Counsel will play a key role in providing legal advice and support with contract negotiation and finalisation across all areas of bit.bio’s operations. This includes a strong focus on commercial and corporate operations, while also providing broader legal support across the business.

Your key responsibilities will include:

Commercial support

• Draft, negotiate and finalise NDAs, commercial contracts, material transfer agreements, (MTA) research collaboration agreements (RCA), supplier agreements, distribution agreements, SaaS agreements, consultancy agreements, terms and conditions of data as a product and other agreements.
• Provide legal advice to the business on commercial terms, update and maintain the business’ terms and conditions of sales and services and licensing terms.
• Provide legal advice and support to the business on product development, and development of commercial processes including workflow and alignment on legal checkpoints.
• Support licensing activities and compliance with licensing terms as required.

Corporate support

• Provide support to the business with all legal corporate functions, as required, including Heads of Terms, due diligence exercises, drafting, negotiating and reviewing transaction documents and the ancillary documents, completion of the transaction and implementing necessary post completion steps to close transactions.
• Prepare or review ancillary documents that are necessary supporting documents required to give effect to a wider corporate transaction.

General support

• Draft, negotiate and finalise consulting agreements and support the general business operation needs including reviewing related contracts.
• Develop and maintain strong working relationships with internal stakeholders, external counsels and external business partners.
• Develop and maintain a strong working knowledge of company contracts, standard terms and business objectives.
• Develop and maintain a clause library to expedite contract drafting and negotiation.
• Develop, maintain and improve company agreement templates and tools, including drafting internal policies and guidance documents as needed.
• Manage contracts lifecycle management tool for bit.bio’s legal department.
• Serve as the company’s central point of contact for managing contracts in support of ongoing operations, growth and general corporate matters.
• Serve as the primary administrator for the company’s contracts lifecycle management system and related business processes, including contract classification, dashboard reporting, follow-up tracking (e.g., execution, compliance with reporting and other requirements, expiration and renewals), and project-specific reports, analysis and support (e.g., diligence).
• Develop and deploy tools and training for attorneys and business partners to leverage contract management systems, including tailored dashboards, targeted search and notifications.
• Prioritise and implement contract management system improvements including serving as primary liaison with service vendor; synthesising user feedback; defining, prioritising and executing improvements with strong project management, stakeholder engagement and communication.

You…

• Are an UK-qualified lawyer with minimum 2 years PQE and substantial in-house experience with a strong background in reviewing contracts.
• Are a pragmatic, responsible, solution-oriented self-starter with exceptional organisational skills.
• Are a professional with unimpeachable integrity who exercises sound judgment and respects confidentiality obligations.
• Are comfortable working in a fast-paced, start-up environment comprising a diverse and geographically dispersed team.

With essential experience in…

• The role requires a track record of working closely with internal business partners (e.g., research operations, R&D, commercial teams) within the Life Sciences industry, ideally gained in academic technology transfer environment / biotechnology or pharmaceutical sectors.
• Commercially minded, with a primary focus on commercial and research contracts. and also confident handling broader corporate matters.
• Demonstrated ability to ensure compliance and proactively mitigate legal and commercial risks.
• Are fluent with standard software tools used in contracts drafting (e.g. Microsoft Office application suite and Google G Suite). 
• Able to work independently with minimal supervision.
• Have exceptional interpersonal and communication skills (verbal and written).

...and possibly.....

• In-house experience within the start-up or scale-up biotechnology industry.