Legal Counsel in London

You will be a member of the Legal & Company Secretarial team which provides strategic legal advice, governance support and compliance expertise to the Group. The purpose of this role is to provide high quality support as a key member of the Legal team, providing both contentious and non-contentious legal support on high value, strategically important projects across the UK. The role holder will support on projects across both our Transport and Natural Resources divisions.

Responsibilities

• Reviewing, drafting and advising on construction contracts (NEC focus) as well as JV agreements, consultancy contracts, variations, settlement agreements, heads of terms, collaboration agreements, and ancillary contract documents. This will entail both main contracts with client and subcontracts with the supply chain.
• Overseeing external legal support on projects, where required.
• Working with the wider legal team and the business to ensure procedures and processes are in place to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and regulations.
• Supporting the business to identify risk and to identify the best means of managing/ mitigating such risk.
• Supporting the team's ambition to be high-performing, including identifying and implementing new technologies and processes to improve efficiency.

Essential Qualifications

• Experience of PQE
• Transactional contract experience ideally both demand and supply side
• Strong technical skills in contract drafting & negotiation
• Commercially aware with a strong business acumen and a desire to support business objectives
• Ability to present key messages/complex matters in a clear, concise and engaging manner. Strong communication (written and verbal) skills
• Proactive self-starter who is highly organised and able to handle many ongoing and changing priorities without impact on outputs
• Experience in helping to navigate and train business teams on compliance/regulatory issues (ESG, ABC, competition)
• Experience of standard form construction and/or consulting contracts (e.g. NEC and/or FIDIC and/or JCT)
• Demonstrable construction sector experience (contentious and/or non-contentious)
• Prior exposure to IP/Software/Consultancy agreements

Desirable

• Prior experience in an in-house legal team (or on secondment)

Behaviours of a High Performing Team

• Acting as Owners - feeling and acting empowered to drive our work forward and make the best decisions for our future
• Using Curiosity to grow our business - being excited, connected and integral to growing and developing what we offer and how we deliver it.
• Having an Ambition for Costain - delivering your part in ensuring Costain is a success and realises its potential to become a leader across our fields of expertise.
• Using Inclusion to encourage collaboration - working together to deliver our work as a close-knit community that is built on trust, equity and positive approaches.
• Bringing Clarity and focus to what we do - challenging ourselves to remain clear and focused to ensure we land our work in the most effective, consistent ways possible
• Can work independently as well as part of a team

Qualifications

• Law Degree
• Ability to hold a practising certificate in England & Wales (or other UK area)

About Us

Costain helps to improve people's lives with integrated, leading edge, smart infrastructure solutions across the UK's energy, water, transportation and defence markets. We help our clients improve their business performance by increasing capacity, improving customer service, safeguarding security, enhancing resilience, decarbonising and delivering increased efficiency. Our vision is to be the UK's leading smart infrastructure solutions company. We will achieve this by focusing on blue chip clients whose major spending plans are underpinned by strategic national needs, regulatory commitments, legislation or essential performance requirements. We offer our clients leading edge solutions that are digitally optimised through the following five services which cover the whole lifecycle of their assets: future‐shaping strategic consultancy; consultancy and advisory; digital technology solutions; asset optimisation and complex programme delivery. Our culture and values underpin everything we do.

Costain appreciates the time and effort taken when applying for one of our positions but, due to the high volume of responses, we are unable to provide individual feedback on candidates at application phase. We do share individual feedback following an interview.

A Disability Confident employer will generally offer an interview to any applicant that disclose they have a disability and meets the minimum criteria for the job as defined by the employer. It is important to note that in certain recruitment situations such as high‐volume, seasonal and high‐peak times, the employer may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non‐disabled people.