As Senior Contracts Manager

You will provide strategic and commercially focused legal support across Bell’s operational, sales, pre-sales, procurement, and senior management teams. You will ensure the business operates within a robust legal framework whilst supporting the achievement of its commercial objectives and driving revenue enablement, risk mitigation, and operational efficiency through best-in-class contracting practices.

Working collaboratively across departments, you will deliver efficient, pragmatic, and commercially focused contract support, whilst also working closely with senior executives and coaching, mentoring, and developing junior members of the commercial contracts team.

Responsibilities

• Lead the provision of clear, strategic, and commercially minded advice on complex contract terms, legal matters, and business risk across multiple areas of the business.
• Take ownership of reviewing, drafting, and negotiating a broad and complex range of agreements, including high-value supplier and customer contracts, software licences, SaaS agreements, agency, reseller, subcontractor, and service provision arrangements.
• Lead negotiations with customers and suppliers on complex or high-value matters, acting as the primary point of contact and ensuring outcomes align with business objectives, company policies, and risk appetite.
• Oversees and continuously improves Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), including contract registers, obligation tracking, renewals, amendments, and system optimisation, ensuring accuracy, accessibility, and compliance across the business.
• Act as a senior point of escalation for internal teams, providing guidance and support on complex on-boarding, contractual disputes, claims, and legal risk matters.
• Monitor, interpret, and proactively communicate relevant legal and regulatory developments, assessing their impact on the business and recommending appropriate action (including data protection and other applicable regulatory frameworks).
• Engage, instruct, and strategically manage external legal counsel within agreed budgets, including oversight of matters involving non-UK jurisdictions or specialist areas of law.
• Own and govern the business's suite of legal templates, driving regular reviews to ensure they remain current, commercially appropriate, and legally sound.
• Lead the identification and implementation of improvements to legal team processes, ways of working, and internal tools, including legal technology and automation solutions, to enhance efficiency and service quality.
• Provide regular data-driven reporting and insights to senior leadership on legal risk, workload, contract lifecycle metrics (e.g., cycle time, deviation rates), and matters of strategic relevance to the business.
• Support the development of less experienced team members, sharing knowledge and providing guidance to build capability within the legal function through coaching and mentorship.
• Ensure full compliance with all processes and procedures adopted by the team and the wider business and contribute to their ongoing development whilst championing a culture of consistent, compliant, and risk-aware contracting.
• Act as the dedicated Legal Business Partner to an assigned business practice, developing a deep understanding of its strategy, commercial objectives, operating model, and risk profile.
• Act as the primary legal point of contact for strategic initiatives, deals, and projects within the assigned practice, ensuring effective alignment between legal, commercial, and operational objectives.
• Build strong, trusted relationships with key stakeholders within the assigned practice, proactively identifying legal needs and providing tailored, commercially focused guidance.
• Anticipate and support the evolving legal requirements of the business practice, ensuring timely and pragmatic advice aligned with its growth plans and operational priorities.
• Develop, implement, and continuously improve standard form documentation, templates, playbooks, and guidance specific to the needs of the assigned business practice, ensuring consistency, scalability, and risk alignment.
• Embed best-practice contracting processes within the business practice, including training stakeholders on policies, tools, and risk frameworks to enable self-sufficiency where appropriate.