Senior Legal Counsel

Job Summary:
Are you ready to elevate your legal career? Join Cognizant's Commercial Legal Team for Australia and NZ, where you'll drive legal excellence and innovation, as well as contribute to vital strategy. You'll draft and negotiate client contracts, ensure compliance, manage legal risks, and provide strategic legal advice - working with clients across industries and handling all deal phases, from proposal to post-signature matters.

To succeed, you must come with a commercial mind set, and a taste and eagerness for technical innovation. Cognizant is a leading technology company, and this role offers the chance to support cutting-edge projects and emerging technologies. We're looking for someone with a curious mind and a passion for law who wants to make a significant impact.

Your mandate will include an emphasis on helping to grow Cognizant's public sector business. This means you will be a part of the leadership for Cognizant's public sector efforts, at the heart of strategizing and shaping our approach.

You will report to the Regional Lead Counsel (Australia/New Zealand) and become an integral member of a team that prioritizes collaboration and personal development. You'll mentor junior team members and work with top-tier professionals in a commercially focused, friendly environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Contract Negotiation: Take charge of drafting, reviewing, and negotiating contracts that are vital to our business success. Your expertise will ensure that we meet legal requirements and uphold our organizational policies.
• Risk Management: Identify and manage legal risks with a proactive approach, providing innovative solutions to mitigate potential issues and safeguard our interests.
• Compliance: Help us achieve compliance with relevant laws and regulations, including AI regulations, data protection, and corporate governance, working alongside our specialist compliance teams. Your vigilance will keep us ahead of the curve.
• Public Sector Legal Leadership: Lead the legal function support for Cognizant's public sector industry mandate. This includes shaping and improving legal processes, supporting strategic initiatives, and providing expert legal advice to ensure compliance and manage risks effectively. You will collaborate with various functions and leaders to develop innovative solutions and drive the success of our public sector efforts.
• Commercial challenges: Work alongside the business when commercial or delivery challenges arise, to protect our reputation and interests, and help achieve good resolutions.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to address legal issues and provide strategic legal advice that drives our business objectives.
• Mentoring and knowledge sharing: Empower our teams with the knowledge and understanding of legal matters through training and guidance, fostering a culture of compliance and awareness.

Job Requirements

• Qualifications: Admitted to practice law in Australia.
• PQE: Minimum of 5 years PQE.
• Skills: Strong written and verbal communication skills; excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities; adept at finding innovative solutions to legal challenges; high ethical standards and integrity; a natural desire to learn and explore new ideas, concepts, and technologies; business acumen; ability to mentor junior lawyers, and to foster a collaborative and supportive work environment; and proficiency in contract and commercial negotiation.
• Attributes While commercial law experience is essential to this role, you must come with a commercial mind set, and a taste and eagerness for technical innovation. Your experience in working on IT contracts must be accompanied by the ability to balance legal risks with commercial and operational needs of the business. You should be able to demonstrate strong, effective and impactful communication skills with people at all levels and backgrounds, being able to multitask with rapidly changing priorities in a dynamic working environment.

Location and culture
Location
: We believe hybrid work is the way forward as we strive to provide flexibility wherever possible. Based on this role's business requirements, this is a hybrid position requiring 2-3 days a week in a Cognizant office in Sydney or Melbourne. Regardless of your working arrangement, we are here to support a healthy work-life balance through our various wellbeing programs. The working arrangements for this role are accurate as of the date of posting. This may change based on the project you're engaged in, as well as business and client requirements. Rest assured; we will always be clear about role expectations.

Culture:
We work together to anticipate, innovate and advise our clients on the next groundbreaking solution. And when we're not engineering modern businesses through intuition, we're improving lives by volunteering in our local communities, fostering inclusion through our Affinity Groups and so much more. We don't just dream of a better way—we make it happena