Legal Manager

Key Respomsibilities:

Operational leadership

• Serve as the operational head of the Legal & Contracts function, managing day-to-day legal matters across all business verticals with speed, precision and sound commercial judgment.
• Act as the primary escalation point for the Legal Managers; resolving queries, providing direction and making decisions at the right level without defaulting upward unnecessarily.
• Deputise for the Head Legal & Contracts on operational, governance and stakeholder matters as required.
• Maintain functional oversight of the Contract Administrator, ensuring in-country contract administration is aligned with the teams standards and the groups requirements.

Team management and development

• Manage, develop and hold accountable the Legal Managers, providing structured oversight of their work, identifying gaps in quality or approach, and actively working to raise the standard of output across the team.
• Conduct regular structured engagements with each Legal Manager to review workload, track progress against vertical objectives, and identify emerging legal risks.
• Foster a team culture of ownership, commercial awareness and continuous improvement.

Standardisation and legal infrastructure

• Close out all first-round standardisation efforts currently in progress, including contract templates, clause libraries, legal playbooks, approval matrices and internal policies.
• Establish and own review and update cycles for all standard documentation, ensuring the functions legal infrastructure keeps pace with the businesss growth and evolving risk landscape.
• Drive continuous improvement in legal workflows, processes and knowledge management across the team.

Transactional and advisory work

• Lead drafting, review and negotiation of complex domestic and international contracts, including service agreements, framework agreements, charter party agreements, consortium agreements, MOUs and consultancy contracts.
• Provide commercially pragmatic advice on contractual structuring, risk allocation, liability management and dispute strategy across company's international operations.
• Liaise with and manage external counsel on specialist, jurisdictional and contentious matters.
• Support and shape negotiation strategy for critical tenders, long-term international engagements and high-value transactions.

Stakeholder engagement and governance

• Act as a trusted advisor to business units across all verticals, balancing commercial objectives with legal risk in a way that enables, rather than obstructs, business decisions.
• Work closely with finance, operations, procurement and project teams on cross-functional initiatives and group-wide compliance matters.
• Support Board-level and executive-level reporting, and contribute to governance discussions at the direction of the Head Legal & Contracts.
• Advise on regulatory compliance across the jurisdictions in which the company operates, including the energy, marine and offshore services sectors.

Experience and background

• 8-12 years of post-qualification legal experience, with substantial in-house experience in a multinational or internationally operating organisation.
• Proven experience managing a legal team and being held accountable for its output not just supervising, but actively developing people and raising the quality of their work.
• Strong track record handling complex, cross-border commercial contracts independently and under time pressure.
• Exposure to advising on offshore or energy services contracts (including O&M, asset integrity, construction, or marine services). Oil & gas is the primary target sector but candidates from offshore EPC, Petrochemical, maritime services, energy infrastructure, or marine logistics with demonstrable contract complexity can be considered.
• Experience managing external counsel and arbitration or dispute frameworks is an advantage.