Head of External Counsel Engagement

Job Family Group:

Job Description:

At bp lawyers shape the decisions that move our business forward and protect our reputation. Our function is made up of commercial lawyers, partnering with our businesses around the world, and specialists sitting at the centre covering specific areas of capability. Given the scale, complexity and nature of bp’s business our legal teams regularly instruct and work with external counsel. This is true across our global operations albeit with a concentration in certain geographies, including the US, UK, Europe and Asia.

We have made many advances in how we build and manage our law firm relationships. We have now decided to move forward once again and create a new team of business professionals with a singular focus on this one area of work. Our intent is to make another step change in the effectiveness and efficiency of our external engagements.

This role, as head of external counsel engagement, will be responsible for leading the newly formed team and developing and implementing engagement strategies. The team will play a critical role in creating the right frameworks and relationships to enable us and the company to succeed in its strategy and objectives. The successful candidate will be a key innovator in the creation of new ways of working and engaging with our law firm partners and drive the continued improvement of our processes, development of our systems and enhancement of how we harness data.

The successful candidate will have experience with pricing matters, applying innovative pricing models and analyzing activity in order to improve the way we work.  Managing spend is a key priority for this team.

We are looking for an accomplished leader who has deep capability and experience in legal sourcing, pricing and analytics combined with strong intuition for business and commerciality, a proven track record of innovation and challenging the status quo. Someone who can build and lead a world class team and deliver the step change we are seeking.

What you will do…

• Lead and develop a team of business professionals responsible for our external counsel engagement. Creating a high performance, inclusive team and a psychologically safe environment with a culture of integrity, openness and continuous improvement.
• Role model leadership across the legal function and beyond, setting strategic direction / priorities for themselves and others and acts as a speak-up channel.
• Lead the development and implementation of innovative spend and relationship management frameworks for external counsel including new models and alternative approaches with a particular focus on the US, UK and Asia.
• Design, negotiate, and embed alternative fee arrangements and agreed value-adds in external instructions, working in collaboration with our instructing lawyers. A key focus will be on supporting the negotiation of our most material instructions focusing on pricing and alternative models.
• Support the management and continuous improvement of processes for external counsel engagement and instruction including preparation, analysis and negotiation of RFPs.
• Oversee external legal spend management, tracking, reporting, and insight generation including the maintenance, development and improvement of legal spend platforms.
• Conduct legal market analysis and benchmarking.
• Develop process documentation and deliver relevant training to global legal teams.
• Collaborate across the function to support cost containment.

This is an exciting opportunity that will connect you broadly across our business and collaboration will be key. You will work with a wide range of lawyers across the Legal function, the Legal Operations and legal Innovation teams as well as various members across bp’s Finance, Procurement and Technology functions.

What you will bring…

• Leads, develops and motivates high‑performing teams, creating a positive environment that balances performance and wellbeing. Holds teams to account for delivery, behaviours, priorities and performance providing oversight and assurance.
• Strong emotional intelligence, listening actively to diverse perspectives and working in a highly collaborative manner across geographies and cultures.
• Extensive experience in tendering and pricing legal work including RFPs, negotiating rates and alternative fee arrangements. Specific US focused experience, particularly in disputes is highly desirable.
• Experience of innovating, designing and implementing new pricing models, approaches or frameworks. And more generally a demonstrable innovation mentality and a track record of proactively challenging the status quo, experimenting with new approaches and seeking to continuously improve systems, processes ways of working.
• C