"..excellent all round; they have provided good advice and been supportive" - Chambers & Partners
We are looking for an Associate/Senior Associate to join our highly regarded Commercial team in Bristol. You will have the opportunity to advise on a good spread of technology-focussed commercial work, spanning complex commercial projects and advice, and across a range of specialisms like e-commerce, consumer and digital regulation, technology contracts, privacy and IP.
This is an exciting opportunity to join a top-tier Chambers and Legal 500 rated team and advise on high value, strategically important and often international projects within a supportive, fun and collegiate environment. You will have the opportunity to be involved in a wide variety of work, with a good degree of flexibility to choose the types of commercial work that you wish to focus on, and the sectors that you would like to advise, to build the career you want.
The practice
Our Commercial group provides leading-edge business solutions to clients, ranging from high growth start-ups to multinational tech firms, and covering the entire spectrum of commercial activity. Our Bristol team has a strong reputation both with local and national clients requiring support on strategically important commercial projects, and with large global clients requiring sophisticated cross-jurisdictional advice. Much of our work is supporting clients on their digitalisation journeys, helping with contracts and regulatory advice, but also bringing our wider strategic experience having work in this space for a number of years.
We span multiple sectors, with particular focuses on TMC and Retail & Consumer- creating opportunities for lawyers to gain experience and involvement in a variety of sectors and to develop a focus on areas of particular interest to them.
The work
You will get to work on high value, strategic commercial projects for big name brands across our sectors - companies like EE, Microsoft and Danone. Whether it's a regulatory compliance exercise, an innovative collaboration, developing digital sales channels or a strategic, high value technology procurement, there will be plenty of complex, interesting commercial work for you to support, working closely alongside partners and senior lawyers, with plenty of client exposure.
Our longstanding focus on the TMC Sector means we work with A-grade tech and comms businesses such as Microsoft, Facebook and YouTube. Equally, we are we are at the forefront of innovation in the Retail & Consumer sector and work with clients like Superdry, L'Oreal and Hunter on contractual and advisory matters (for example we recently supported various players such as Just Eat with platform regulatory advice and a variety of global brands with the IT contracts and data protection compliance that underpin their online operations).
Our commercial team is advising on projects that are at the heart of transformational trends across digitalisation, urban dynamics and decarbonisation. This role gives you an unrivalled opportunity to pick the areas of commercial law that interest you most, and the sectors that you find the most exciting, and build a career focusing on those.
To find out more about the practice, please see the link below:
http://www.osborneclarke.com/services/commercial/
The team
"As lawyers I find them straightforward, pragmatic and enjoyable to work with"- Chambers & Partners
Spanning all three of our UK based offices and working closely together, the Commercial department is made up of almost 50 lawyers in total. The Bristol team is made up of 4 Partners, 3 Associate Directors, 5 Senior Associates, 5 Associates, 1 Trainee Solicitor and a paralegal, and is supported by a commercial Professional Support Lawyer. The Bristol practice is led by partner Will Robertson, and you will have the opportunity to work with Will as well as supporting technology partner Tom Harding. You will also be able to work with other lawyers across the commercial team, as well as colleagues in our international offices.
It's a friendly, supportive and collaborative team, with a diverse range of wonderful and inclusive people. Culture, enjoying work and a longer term career view is important in this team - where individuals can flourish as individuals.
Technical skills and experience
You will show the desire to develop a range of commercial law experience, having trained at a law firm recognised for its commercial law practice. The role requires someone with strong drafting skills and the ability to provide concise, commercial advice to clients whilst really getting to know their sector(s) as well as the relevant law. Some exposure to advising international clients would be advantageous but is not a pre-requisite, and some experience of supporting clients in one or more of our key sectors would be helpful but again is not essential. Due to the nature of the work and the structure of the team, we are looking for an Associate/Senior Associate level lawyer with experience advising on commercial law, although we will consider candidates with more or less experience.
Technical skills are important, but we also want you to be yourself - we're a very inclusive team who welcome diversity, enjoy each other's company and focus on our people.
Your career development
Like all our lawyers, you will benefit from our multi-award winning career development programme. At each stage of your career this provides you with:
- clear expectations of your role and what it takes to progress
- high quality clients and work, with early responsibility and client exposure
- thorough assessment and individual feedback from a range of experienced colleagues
- robust technical training with early skills based development, tailored to you
- reward for your contribution, progression and potential, rather than PQE or tenure.
Salary and benefits
We offer competitive salaries and generous benefits.
For more information or to apply
At Osborne Clarke we welcome direct applications - if you would like any further information about the role, or the firm, we would be delighted to hear from you. Please contact, in complete confidence, Rachael Hardwick in the recruitment team on [email protected].
At Osborne Clarke we value difference and encourage applicants from all social backgrounds, ethnicities, disabilities, gender identities, and sexual or romantic orientations. We want everyone to feel that OC is a place where you can be yourself and where you belong, and our range of interest groups and diversity networks - not to mention our great teams - are a part of making that a reality.
We support working families via a range of family and caring friendly policies and will accommodate flexible working where we can. We value the health and wellbeing of our people: for example, we're signatories to the Mindful Business Charter, have an active network of mental health champions and offer free initiatives and flexible benefits to all our people.
Being an inclusive employer is important to us. We have made a number of external commitments such as the Race Fairness Commitment and Women in Law Pledge, and are working with organisations like Stonewall to become a more inclusive employer.
Osborne Clarke is a Living Wage Employer, so we're committed to paying everybody in our business enough to live on and to enable them to save for the future.
We want you to be able to show us your best during the recruitment process. If you require any adjustments to be made during the application, interview process or when working with us, please let us know.
