VP & General Manager LSW

The Vice President (VP) of the Legal SoftWare BU (LSW) serves as a member of the LR Divisional Executive Team and is responsible for managing a full P&L pan-European software business operating across multiple European markets. The VP sets the vision, strategy, and operating plan to deliver profitable growth of our legal software solutions. This role leads LSW through a transformation from a multi-product, country-based operating model to a focused portfolio of three core product lines and a function-led pan-European organization, while delivering profitable growth, innovation, and operational excellence.

The VP is accountable for revenue growth, profitability, market expansion, and organizational effectiveness, while leading the business through continued digital, AI-enabled, and operating-model transformation. The GM serves as the BU owner of strategy and execution across Sales, Product, Marketing, Customer Success, Operations, and Regional Leadership, ensuring scalable growth, strong customer outcomes, and long-term value creation. The role operates in a highly matrixed global environment.

Activities of the VP include general management of the business, creating vision, establishing business strategy, developing value proposition and overall product strategy for the Business Unit LSW; establishing standards and processes for LSW; overseeing and guiding the BU in the execution of company-wide strategies and tactics; leading the management team; driving growth and transformation; creating and maintaining a reliable system for measurement of business performance for all operations; directing budget development and administration; representing the BU in cross-organizational activities; maintaining performance standards while working remotely; and representing WK within the industry.

A critical aspect of the role is the ability to operate effectively within a complex matrix, partnering closely with DXG, GBS, HR, Finance, Legal, and other corporate functions to deliver integrated, enterprise outcomes.

Essential Duties And Responsibilities

• Business & P&L Leadership: Own and deliver full P&L accountability, including revenue growth, margin expansion, cost discipline, and forecasting accuracy. Lead the transformation from a fragmented product and country model to three key products with clear ownership and accountability. Define and execute a multi-year growth strategy aligned with corporate objectives and regional market dynamics. Drive predictable, scalable growth across subscription, renewals, expansion, and new customer acquisition. Establish and monitor KPIs, dashboards, and operating rhythms to ensure transparency and accountability.
• Growth, Go-to-Market & Commercial Excellence: Lead end-to-end go-to-market strategy, including pricing, packaging, segmentation, and channel optimization to markets across Europe. Strengthen enterprise and mid-market sales effectiveness through disciplined pipeline management and value-based selling. Embed a strong customer-first mindset, ensuring products, services and experiences are grounded in real customer needs and measurable outcomes. Identify and capitalize on new growth, product, and partnership opportunities across European markets.
• Product, Technology & AI Enablement: Partner closely with Product and Engineering leaders to shape a customer-led innovation-driven product roadmap, including AI-enabled capabilities. Accelerate speed to market, leveraging modern development practices, cloud platforms, data and AI to shorten innovation cycles. Ensure high quality execution from concept to launch while balancing speed, scalability, security and regulatory compliance. Promote data-driven decision making and responsible adoption of new technologies across the organization.
• Organizational & Operating Model Transformation: Lead the evolution toward a function-led pan-European operating model across markets. Act as a change leader, driving clarity, engagement and momentum through periods of structural and cultural transformation. Clarify governance, decision rights, and accountability to increase speed, execution quality, and collaboration. Drive continuous improvement in processes, cost structure, and organizational effectiveness.
• People, Culture & Leadership: Build, inspire, and retain a high-performing leadership team capable of operating at scale across Europe. Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, inclusion, and growth mindset, aligned with company values. Develop future-read-ready capabilities, succession plans and a diverse leadership pipeline. Demonstrate strong matrix leadership, influencing without authority and aligning diverse functional and regional stakeholders.
• External Representation & Stakeholder Management: Serve as a senior ambassador of the company with customers, partners, regulators, and industry bodies across Europe. Strengthen the company’s brand and reputation across European markets. Collaborate with global peers and corporate functions to advance enterprise priorities.

Success Measures: Sustainable revenue growth and market share expansion. Gross margin and operating income improvement. Customer retention, satisfaction, and net revenue expansion. Successful execution of AI, product, and operating-model initiatives. Leadership bench strength and employee engagement.

Other Duties: Ensure seamless collaboration and integration with DXG, GBS, HR, Finance, Legal, Communications and other enterprise functions embracing them as integral partners of LSW success. Represent the BU in cross-organizational and enterprise initiatives.

Job Qualifications

Education: Minimum: Bachelor’s Degree (or local equivalent) in Business, Finance, Marketing, or related discipline. Preferred: Master’s Degree in Business Administration or related discipline.

Experience:

• Required: 5+ years senior leadership experience (GM/VP level), with full P&L ownership in a software or technology-enabled business. Demonstrated track record in enterprise or B2B software, preferably SaaS. Proven success leading pan-European businesses with strong cultural awareness and sensitivity across multiple geographies. Strong background in product strategy, commercialization and growth acceleration. Proven change leadership experience, including operating model and organization transformation. Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams spanning Sales, Product, Tech, Marketing, Operations and support functions. Effective talent management including developing and acquiring professional-level staff in different functional disciplines and locations.
• Preferred: Experience leveraging AI, data, and modern technology platforms to drive innovation and growth. Multilingual capabilities and deep European market understanding.

Other Knowledge, Skill & Abilities:

• Core competency requirements: P&L & Commercial Leadership: Seasoned general manager with full P&L ownership, strong commercial judgment, disciplined financial management, pricing and portfolio optimization, and data-driven decision-making to balance short-term performance with long-term value creation. Enterprise Software & Technology Innovation: Proven leader in B2B enterprise software with a strong SaaS mindset, bringing deep curiosity and practical application of modern technologies, including AI, data and cloud platforms, to accelerate innovation and speed-to-market while maintaining quality, security, and regulatory rigor. Pan-European Leadership & Cultural Fluency: Experienced pan-European executive with a track record of leading complex, multinational businesses across diverse markets, demonstrating strong cultural awareness, adaptability and the ability to unify teams across countries while respecting local customer, market and regulatory nuances. Customer-Centric Growth Mindset: Highly customer-focused leader who embeds customer outcomes into strategy, product innovation and go-to-market execution, consistently identifying growth opportunities through market expansion, product differentiation and improved customer experience, fostering a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement. Change & Transformation Leadership: Credible transformation leader with experience driving operating-model, organizational and product portfolio change at scale, excelling at leading through ambiguity, aligning stakeholders around a clear change narrative, and sustaining momentum through multi-year transformation journeys. Matrix Leadership & Enterprise Collaboration: Highly effective in complex, matrixed environments, building strong partnerships across corporate and functional teams, prioritizing enterprise outcomes over silos, and influencing without authority to drive alignment, execution speed and collective success.

Generale competency requirements:

• Forging purpose and vision: Leads with a strong, unifying vision that resonates across the organization, looking beyond short-term planning goals to connect to market trends and longer-term customer needs. Demonstrates strong tech curiosity, the courage to act on innovation and an aptitude for fusing technology and novel ways of working to identify and leverage emerging opportunities. Systems thinker, able to quickly survey and understand complex and dynamic systems and connect dots within the organization and externally. Demonstrates strong communication skills, able to motivate and inspire across diverse audiences. Effective at articulating a vision and advancing the company’s agenda and reputation. Sees around corners, thinks differently.
• Delivering strategic results: Has a system-level perspective but can also dive deep into details to surface risks and opportunities buried in nuance. Able to track and respond to shifting explicit and latent customer sentiment to pinpoint new opportunities and meet customer demand in novel, creative and innovative ways with a test-and-learn approach. Can effectively identify and tap a broad internal network of experts to determine where to lean in, take risks, place bets or hold steady. Brings a sense of urgency and assertiveness to hitting short-term financial goals while simultaneously driving a longer-term strategic agenda. Exhibits a strong enterprise mindset.
• Leading leaders and culture: Identifies, attracts, empowers, develops and motivates top talent, including next-generation talent with future-ready skill sets. Skilled at leading teams, leveraging a broad range of experiences, backgrounds and perspectives. Designs and fosters a culture built on trust, transparency, integrity and mutual support. Demonstrates a commitment and strong record of success in growing and supporting diversity, engendering a culture of belonging. Builds strong, collaborative teams that prioritize the division and business unit over individual market and function.
• Leading Self: Demonstrates a high level of agility, able to navigate ambiguity and change, pivoting as needed when conditions shift or new information is made available. Demonstrates strong curiosity, knows what they don’t know, asks the right questions and brings the right people together to mitigate risk and explore emerging opportunities. Remains calm, focused and clear-headed under pressure. Has the integrity and courage to challenge status quo without jeopardizing core values. Demonstrates sound, fact-based decision making and exceptional judgement. Exhibits genuine caring for Wolters Kluwer, its legacy, future potential, people and customers, encouraging truth-telling and honest feedback across all levels. Balances confidence with humility.

TRAVEL REQUIREMENTS: Frequent travel required to various locations and work in the field with customers and reps. Domestic and international travel to Group Business Units, customer sites, and/or industry events up to 35-40% of work time. Ability to travel independently. Must have a valid driver’s license and passport. Ability to travel by air and internationally.

PHYSICAL DEMANDS: Normal office environment, flexible work arrangement.

Our Interview Practices: To maintain a fair and genuine hiring process, we kindly ask that all candidates participate in interviews without the assistance of AI tools or external prompts. Our interview process is designed to assess your individual skills, experiences and communication style. We value authenticity and want to ensure we’re getting to know you—not a digital assistant. To help maintain this integrity, we ask to remove virtual backgrounds and include in-person interviews in our hiring process. Please note that use of AI-generated responses or third-party support during interviews will be grounds for disqualification from the recruitment process. Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.