Legal Lead, Cancer Research
8-12 Month FTC
£90-98k
More information about location
2+ days a week in office (Stratford, London)
Cancer prevention, awareness and research charity
Posted today
Cancer prevention, awareness and research charity
1001+ employees
Posted today
£90-98k
More information about location
2+ days a week in office (Stratford, London)
1001+ employees
Company mission
To prevent, control and cure cancer through ground-breaking research.
Role
Who you are
- Qualified solicitor, barrister or equivalent with significant post-qualification experience in-house and/or private practice
- Strong track record of delivering high-quality, efficient and client-focused legal services, balancing service demand, team capacity and organisational priorities
- Demonstrable experience designing, improving or overseeing legal service delivery models, processes, triage systems and operational performance
- Ability to develop innovative, pragmatic solutions to complex legal and organisational challenges
- Strong business partnering skills, with the ability to build trusted relationships and influence senior stakeholders across the organisation
- Experience managing external legal providers and ensuring cost-effective, high-quality delivery of legal services
- Enthusiasm for legal technology, matter management systems, data-driven service delivery, GenAI and continuous improvement
What the job involves
- Reports to: Head of Legal
- This role will provide parental leave cover for a senior leader within CRUK's Legal team, to provide expert strategic and legal leadership within both the team and across dedicated business partner areas, driving high-quality legal service delivery
- This is a newly created role, and an exciting time to join to cover a period of transformation
- You’ll be joining a legal team with dedicated legal operations capabilities leading the organisation with our bold use of gen AI and AI for legal processes and legal work and enabling legal work via data-driven service insights
- This is a highly impactful role, and a particularly exciting time to join us as we continue to transform our Legal Service Delivery
- We’re looking for innovators, pathfinders, and changemakers who:
- Can act as a strategic partner, embedding legal into strategy and decision-making across the charity
- Thrive in complexity and challenge the status quo, whilst delivering pragmatic timely legal strategies and solutions to enable our work
- Are bold in their approach to legal service delivery and design and curious about how to best deploy legal tech and gen AI and AI capabilities for legal work
- Care deeply about purpose and impact
- You will be doing more than just legal delivery, you will empower teams across the organisation, gaining broad exposure to the internal operations of the UK’s leading cancer charity, deliver real impact, and get involved in shaping the future of Legal at CRUK
- Lead, develop and inspire the service delivery team, providing effective line management, coaching, performance management and professional development support, fostering a high-performing, collaborative and inclusive culture aligned with organisational values and strategic objectives
- Effectively manage resourcing and work allocation for all transactional matters coming into legal, working with other legal leads, ensuring matters are seen through to timely completion
- Lead strategic legal activity within the Lead area of focus, providing specialist oversight, direction, and quality assurance to the team on complex matters in this area, and identifying opportunities to develop and embed specialism-led capability across the team and organisation
- Develop and present innovative, feasible solutions to complex legal challenges
- Maintain strategic oversight of business partnering relationships across dedicated business partner areas including the CFO Directorate, and the Research & Innovation Operations team, delegating responsibilities appropriately within the team while retaining overall accountability for service quality, client satisfaction, and relationship depth
- Support the design of and ensure delivery against team SLAs and KPIs to support operational excellence across the Legal team
- Develop strong GenAI legal capability and contribute to training and knowledge-sharing on GenAI across the Legal team and the wider organisation
Application process
- Application method: Please complete the anonymous application form, making sure all of your experience is included
- Application Deadline: 9th August 2026: 23:59 hours
Salary benchmarks
Our take
The world’s largest independent cancer research charity, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) was founded from a merger between the Cancer Research Campaign and the Cancer Research Fund in 2002. CRC and ICRF had been long-standing pinnacles of the British medical institution, their work dating back to 1902 and 1923 respectively, and the merger signalled a strong step forward for UK medical institutes’ global influence.
A multi-armed charity, CRUK uses both grant-funded researchers and its own employed staff to research the treatments and causes of cancer, whilst its striking advertising and marketing campaigns are responsible for influencing public policy on the causes, prevention, and treatment of the disease. An example of a significant public campaign was Stoptober, which appeared to have triggered a third of a million smokers at the time to try quit tobacco throughout the month of October.
Alongside its pharmaceutical efforts, in 2023 CRUK funded clinical trials for the first-ever proton beam therapy for breast cancer, indicating a focus on technological innovations in the fight against cancer. On this subject, CRUK has also taken part in a billion-pound investment in the Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research institute that is aiming to make England an international leader in the industry.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
Stratford, London, UK
Leadership
Michelle is a Trustee at the Francis Crick Institute and an Advisory Council Member at The King's FUnd. Previously, she served as a Non-Executive Director at NHS England and as CEO at the MS Society.
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