About Unilabs

Headquartered in Geneva and part of the A.P. Moller Group, Unilabs is one of Europe’s leading medical diagnostics companies, offering a complete range of laboratory, pathology, genetics, and imaging services to patients across 14 countries. Unilabs invests heavily in technology, equipment, and people – using digital technologies in its state-of-the-art laboratories and imaging institutes – to improve the lives of close to 100 million people every year.

About the Role

We are seeking a commercially minded and pragmatic Legal Counsel to support the Head of Legal with a broad range of contentious and non-contentious legal matters across the UK business. The role will focus primarily on medical claims, NHS framework and commercial agreements, legal risk management, data privacy, and engagements with pharmaceutical companies.

The successful candidate will be qualified in the UK, or another common law jurisdiction, or an EU jurisdiction when they have relevant UK legal experience. They will bring strong litigation and claims-handling experience, ideally including medical claims in the UK, together with the ability to advise confidently on commercial, regulatory, compliance and data privacy matters in a healthcare, life sciences and pharmaceutical environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Support the Head of Legal in managing contentious matters, with a particular focus on UK medical claims, complaints, internal medical and quality investigations, pre-action correspondence, litigation strategy, Coroner’s inquests, dispute resolution and related risk mitigation.
• Handle and support the defence and resolution of medical claims in the UK, working closely with internal stakeholders, insurers, insurance partners, external counsel, clinicians, quality and operational teams and other relevant parties.
• Instruct insurers’ external law firms in relation to medical claims and contentious matters, ensuring instructions are clear, timely and aligned with the company’s legal, commercial and risk management objectives.
• Attend Coroner’s inquests on behalf of the organisation, coordinating with internal stakeholders, insurers, external law firms and relevant clinical or operational teams as appropriate.
• Draft, review and negotiate a wide range of commercial agreements, including services agreements, consultancy agreements, confidentiality agreements, collaboration arrangements.
• Advise on legal risk across the business, identifying potential exposure and providing practical, business-focused recommendations to reduce risk and support compliant decision-making.
• Provide expert legal support on pharmaceutical matters, including advising on engagements with pharmaceutical companies and negotiating, reviewing and drafting agreements with pharmaceutical companies, with consideration of commercial structuring, contractual arrangements, compliance requirements, conflicts of interest, data privacy and legal risk management.
• Advise on data privacy matters, including UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018 considerations, data processing arrangements, data sharing, confidentiality, breach management and privacy risk assessments.
• Support the development, review and implementation of legal and compliance policies, templates, processes and training materials.
• Work collaboratively with colleagues across legal, compliance, operations, medical, commercial, procurement, finance and other business functions.
• Manage external counsel effectively, including scoping instructions, reviewing advice, monitoring budgets and ensuring advice is practical and aligned with business objectives.