Cancer Research UK (CRUK)
Legal Lead (8-12 month fixed term contract)
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Reports to: Head of Legal
Directorate: Finance, Governance & Assurance
Grade: P4
Location: Office-based with high flexibility (2 days per week in the office)
Salary: £90,000 - £98,000 per annum
Hours: Full-time (35 hours per week)
Application method: Please complete the anonymous application form, making sure all of your experience is included.
Application Deadline: 9th August 2026: 23:59 hours
Visa sponsorship: You must be eligible to work in the UK to apply for this vacancy. Cancer Research UK is not able to offer visa sponsorship.
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.
What will be some of the main responsibilities?
- 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.
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What skills are we looking for?
- 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.
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What will I gain?
Each and every one of our employees contributes to our progress and is supporting our work to beat cancer. We think that’s impressive.
In return, we make sure you are supported by a generous benefits package, a wide range of career and personal development opportunities and high-quality tools, policies and processes to enable you to do your job well.
Our benefits package includes a substantial retirement plan, a generous and flexible leave allowance, discounts on anything from travel to technology, gym membership, and much more.
We don’t forget people have lives outside of work too and so we actively encourage a flexible working culture.
Our work – from funding cutting-edge research to developing public policy – will change the world. It’s exciting to be part of our team.
How do I apply?
We operate an anonymised shortlisting process in our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion. CVs are required for all applications; but we won’t be able to view them until we invite you for an interview. Instead, we ask you to complete the work history section of the online application form for us to be able to assess you quickly, fairly and objectively.
For more information on this career opportunity please visit our website or contact us at recruitment@cancer.org.uk.
For more updates on our work and careers, follow us on: Linked In, Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube.
Our vision is to create a charity where everyone feels like they belong, benefits from and participates in, the work we do. We actively encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and cultures, in particular those from ethnic minority backgrounds who are currently under-represented.
We want to see every candidate performing at their best throughout the job application process, interview process and whilst at work. We therefore ask you to inform us of any concerns you have or any adjustments you might need to enable this to happen. Please contact recruitment@cancer.org.uk or 020 3469 8400 as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, we are unable to recruit anyone below the age of 18, so that we can protect young people from health & safety and safeguarding risks.
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