General Counsel in London

Lawyer / General Counsel to join a fast-growing, well-backed intellectual property and rights business operating across entertainment, media and creative content. This is a high-energy, highly collaborative company built around a genuinely valuable portfolio and it's expanding quickly, both organically and through acquisition. This is the company's first senior legal hire. Rather than stepping into an established function, you'd be building it from the ground up, shaping how legal operates as the business scales, and becoming a close, trusted adviser to a small senior leadership team from day one.

About the business

The company sits at the intersection of creative content and commercial rights, protecting, managing and commercially exploiting a portfolio built up over many years, working closely with the creators and rightsholders behind it. It's backed by a significant institutional investor and has an active acquisition strategy, so the portfolio, and the legal workload behind it is only going to grow. Culturally, it's a close-knit, entrepreneurial team that moves quickly and expects the same from the people it hires.

What you'd be doing

• Leading the protection and enforcement of a significant intellectual property and rights portfolio, identifying infringement, managing breaches, and instructing and overseeing external counsel where disputes escape.
• Drafting, reviewing and negotiating a wide range of commercial agreements, including licensing, rights administration, agency and representation arrangements, supplier contracts and confidentiality agreements, often across multiple territories and media.
• Advising on new commercial and exploitation opportunities as the portfolio and the business grow.
• Supporting acquisition activity end to end — legal due diligence, reviewing and negotiating purchase documentation, and identifying legal and commercial risk on potential deals.
• Overseeing wider corporate governance and regulatory compliance, and managing relationships with external advisers across the UK, US and other jurisdictions.
• Building scalable legal infrastructure — contractual templates, governance processes, and appropriate legal technology — to support a growing transaction volume.
• Acting as a genuinely trusted, commercially-focused adviser to the senior leadership team, with real input into strategic decisions rather than a purely reactive legal function.

What I'm looking for

• Qualified solicitor, England & Wales.
• Strong grounding in intellectual property, licensing and commercial contracts.
• Experience gained within entertainment, media, theatre, music, content or another IP and rights-driven sector, whether in-house or from private practice with strong sector exposure.
• A track record negotiating complex commercial agreements, and confidence handling contentious or enforcement-related matters.
• Comfortable working autonomously, without a large legal team around you, in a fast-moving and genuinely entrepreneurial environment.
• Strong stakeholder and negotiation skills, you'll be dealing directly with senior counterparties and external partners.
• Acquisitions experience or exposure to multi-territory rights licensing would be an advantage, but isn't essential.

Why this role

Opportunities to build a legal function from scratch inside a well-funded, growing business don't come up often, and fewer still offer this level of autonomy and direct access to the people setting the company's direction. If you're currently a few layers down in a larger legal team, or in private practice and ready to make the move in-house, this is a chance to genuinely shape how legal operates as the business scales.