Senior Legal Counsel

Job title: Senior Legal Counsel Location: Sydney/Hybrid Duration: Permanent Job type: Full-time 
Avant is Australia's leading medical defence organisation with a proud heritage of protecting Australian medical professionals for over 130 years. 
As Senior Legal Counsel, you'll take on a high-impact role at the heart of Avant's legal strategy. You'll manage a diverse portfolio of corporate, commercial, and financial services matters, helping the business navigate complex legal landscapes and make confident, strategic decisions. 
This role is critical in shaping outcomes, influencing strategy, and building trusted partnerships across the organisation. You'll work closely with senior stakeholders, provide pragmatic, solutions-focused advice, and contribute to initiatives that drive Avant's growth. 
Reporting directly to the General Counsel, you'll also lead and mentor a small team (two direct reports), fostering collaboration and excellence within the Legal and Compliance function.  The key responsibilities include: 

Provide technical expertise and strategic support to the General Counsel, while actively contributing to the development and positioning of the Legal and Compliance Team as a true Centre of Excellence.  
Deliver expert legal advice across a broad range of areas to Avant's businesses, identifying practical solutions to minimise or mitigate legal and regulatory risk.  
Keep executives and business leaders informed of legal risks, emerging legislation, and regulatory expectations, ensuring changes are clearly understood and fully embedded within the organisation.  
Support corporate litigation matters and liaise with regulators, government bodies, departments, and tribunals on issues impacting Avant, in collaboration with the Governance, Risk & Resilience function.  
Negotiate and draft major contracts including client agreements, vendor contracts, and other key commercial arrangements, to safeguard Avant's interests. 
Oversee day-to-day operations of direct reports, ensuring effective workflow management and collaboration with other senior members of the Legal and Compliance team.  

To be successful in this role you will have: 

Tertiary qualifications in Law (LLB or equivalent) 
Current Corporate Legal Practitioner Practising Certificate in NSW  
10+ years post-qualification experience (PQE) 
Proven experience in general insurance and the Australian financial services environment 
Exceptional verbal and written communication skills 
Strong commercial acumen 
Demonstrated ability in stakeholder engagement and people management 
Proven experience working within an in-house corporate legal team  
Background in private practice, providing corporate and commercial legal advice  
Previous experience leading and supervising lawyers   

Why work at Avant? 

At Avant, our people are the centre of everything we do for our members. We offer a range of benefits and opportunities to enable you to make a difference, learn, and grow in your career. 
We value our people by offering an inclusive workplace with a diverse range of benefits, flexible working options, career development, and internal mobility opportunities. Our flexible working arrangements are designed to enable genuine work-life balance. 
Your development is our priority and we have a variety of learning and development programs that will support you in your career. 
We offer support to our people via Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Health and Wellbeing programs, Tertiary Education Sponsorship and Support. 
We have a diverse and connected work environment where your contribution and ideas will be valued and respected and make a real difference to the lives of others.  

Avant now represents 90,000 health practitioners and medical students across every state and territory, delivering market leading products and services to meet their professional, personal and practice needs. Building on this heritage, our vision is to be the most trusted professional partner in supporting doctors throughout their lives and careers. As a mutual organisation, owned by members and run purely for their benefit, our members are at the centre of all we do. As well as providing products and services to our member, we play a broader community role by advocating for improvements in the healthcare system and in quality, safety and professionalism in medicine, through delivering education and research activities. 
For further information please contact Lisa Craddock, Talent Acquisition Business Partner on   

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