Description:
Job Summary:West Pharmaceutical Services is seeking a business-oriented Corporate Counsel to join its Operating Unit Legal Team. This role will provide broad-based legal support to commercial and operational teams, serving as a trusted advisor on contracting, risk management, and strategic initiatives. The ideal candidate is a pragmatic attorney with strong transactional experience, sound business judgment, and the ability to independently manage complex matters in a fast-paced, highly regulated environment. #LI-CT1
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
- Draft, review, and negotiate a wide range of complex commercial agreements, including supply, manufacturing, development, services, confidentiality, and distribution agreements.
- Assist in developing playbooks, risk matrices and contracting guardrails
- Serve as day-to-day legal advisor to assigned business units, business functions and law department initiatives - providing practical and risk-balanced guidance.
- Partner cross-functionally with Commercial, Operations, Regulatory, Supply Chain, Finance, and Quality teams.
- Support strategic initiatives, operational changes and optimization, and enterprise strategic strategy including.
- Develop and deliver proactive legal education to internal stakeholders on identified areas
- Identify legal and business risks and develop practical mitigation strategies.
- Collaborate with internal subject matter experts (e.g., intellectual property, compliance, employment, governance) when specialized expertise is required.
- Support continuous improvement of contracting processes and templates to increase efficiency and consistency.
- Manage outside counsel relationships when necessary, including scope and budget oversight.
- Flexibility to serve as primary or backup on designated subject areas, fill capacity gaps dynamically based on need and support workload balancing across a global team of operating unit generalist lawyers
- Other duties as assigned.
Education:
Law degree and bar admittance or license to practice law in at least one US jurisdiction.
Work Experience:
- Minimum of 10+ years of legal work experience with a minimum 5-8 preferably combining large law firm and in-house experience.
- Preferred Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
- Preferred experience in pharmaceutical, medical device, biotech, or manufacturing industries.
- Preferred familiarity with regulated environments and operational business models.
- Demonstrated ability to embrace simplification of legal processes.
- As comfortable with reading a financial document as legal documents.
- Bias toward problem-solving with a demonstrated ability to innovate and think “outside the box”.
- Learning agility and intellectual curiosity to learn new areas of the law or aspects of the business.
- Significant experience drafting and negotiating complex commercial agreements independently.
- Extensive experience advising multinational clients regarding matters of legal and business importance and managing of related risks.
- Strong analytical, communication, and negotiation skills
- Excellent oral and written communication skills.
- Ability to maintain confidentiality at all times.
- Dependability, attention to detail with strong organizational and time management skills a must.
- Excellent interpersonal skills and ability to work as a team player.
- Must be able to meet deadlines and manage multiple priorities.
- Able to be aware of all relevant SOPs as per Company policy as they are related to the position covered by this Job Description.
- Able to comply with the company's safety and quality policy at all times.
Travel Requirements:
20%: Up to 52 business days per year
Physical Requirements:
Sedentary-Exerting up to 10lbs/4kgs of force occasionally, and/or negligible amount of force frequently or constantly to lift, carry, push, pull, or otherwise move objects, including the human body. Sedentary work involves sitting most of the time.