Senior Lawyer Corporate/commercial

**JOHANNESBURG**

**THE OPPORTUNITY**

**Corporate/Commercial**

Our corporate practice includes, but is not limited to M&A, capital markets, investment funds, commercial contracts, corporate restructurings and regulatory matters.
- Our corporate team offers a wide variety of product offerings to both internal clients and directly to high profile external clients across multiple sectors. Such offerings are constantly evolving as our alternative legal services business continues to mature. These offerings include due diligence, drafting and negotiating large volumes of commercial contracts, regulatory change/implementation projects, prospectus drafting and verification, supporting in-house legal teams on their business-as-usual work, project management and general transaction support across a wide range of corporate deals.
- We have a focus on efficiencies and innovation including the use of cutting edge legal technologies e.g. artificial intelligence and automation.**The Role**

Senior Lawyers are experienced qualified Lawyers, who supervise the work of our Lawyers, Trainees and Legal Analysts on a day-to-day basis. Senior Lawyers also play a proactive role supporting the senior team with strategic management and delivery of matters, as well as the development of our junior team. They are expected to be able to lead certain projects, escalating to Managers who will support as necessary.
- Senior Lawyers in this role are likely to have a particular area of specialism in commercial legal practice, with a solid general corporate legal foundation, ideally in-house or at a private practice law firm, as well as being closely involved in developing processes and know-how for the wider team.**Key responsibilities**
- Scoping and setting-up new matters and conducting fee earning work directly, as well as supervising and training teams.
- Supports with pricing at the outset of a matter and then assists in managing costs and billing throughout.
- Maintains an up-to-date knowledge of relevant areas of law, providing technical excellence in relation to one or more of the specialist areas of the corporate practice.
- Working with legal technology tools appropriate to the relevant matter (e.g. artificial intelligence tools for due diligence) and keeping up to date with technological advances.
- Assists with preparing pitch documents and likely to attend client presentations and assist more generally with business development.
- Liaising with clients and teams elsewhere in the firm as required on fee-earning or other projects.

The responsibilities outlined above cannot totally encompass or define all tasks that may be required of the team member. The outline of responsibilities given above may, therefore, vary from time to time without materially changing either the character or level of responsibility or grade.

**SKILLS, EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS**

**Qualifications and skills**

**TECHNICAL**

**Essential**
- Qualified lawyer in England and Wales, Northern Ireland or South Africa but Republic of Ireland or other common law jurisdictions will be considered. (If not qualified in England, Wales or South Africa then willing to complete process to requalify as such, if required.)
- Proven experience of supervising and supporting a legal team.

**Desirable**
- Experience gained working at a private practice law firm.
- Experience working in an inhouse legal team.
- Experience working with, or a particular interest in, legal technology.

**GROUP / TEAM**

Alternative Legal Services

**GROUP / TEAM DESCRIPTION**

The Alternative Legal Services business delivers high quality, cost-efficient legal services for document or information intensive, defined process work.
The team works in a complementary and seamless way, offering a combination of legal expertise, process efficiency and client technology solutions to our clients.
The key products and services of our Alternative Legal Services business include document review, regulatory claims assessment, due diligence, verification commercial contracts, funds' repapering, client technology services (including advisory and document review software) and asset management for real estate clients.

**ROLE TYPE**

Legal professionals/Practice Group

**CONTRACT TYPE**

Permanent

**WORKING PATTERN**

Full Time

**DIVERSITY & INCLUSION**

At Herbert Smith Freehills you will be part of a diverse, innovative culture where high performance, client focus and highly engaged people are our differentiator. People at our firm come from a range of backgrounds and bring a wide variety of experiences and perspectives to their work with us. We strive to ensure that our inclusive environment means you feel valued and able to perform at your best by being your authentic self at work. We know that our future success not only depends on being innovative and progressive in the changing legal market but, most importantly, on our people feeling highly engaged in meaningful work.

We understand that you ha