Deal Lead - Commercial Counsel

Job description

**TL;DR:** You'll own Conduct's biggest deals from the first piece of paper to signature. Once our Account Executives have a deal ready to negotiate, you take it from there: designing the commercial offer, sitting across the table from procurement and their counsel, papering the deal yourself, and getting it signed. One person, the whole lifecycle, no handoffs. **WHY CONDUCT** We believe the world's largest companies should move at the speed of their ideas, not the speed of the decade-old systems they run on. Today they don't. Every process change, every new product line runs into software systems layered with decades of custom code and complexity no human mind can fully comprehend. New requirements take months to ship, system migrations cost $100M+ and years of pain. We're building the AI operating system that absorbs this complexity and gives enterprises back their speed and ambition. Major enterprises already trust us with their most critical systems, we've closed game-changing SI partnerships, just raised a $60M Series A, and demand is outpacing what we can service. We're a small, talent-dense team doing our life's work out of London and NYC. Extreme ownership, high velocity, low-ego collaboration. What you build here shapes the company and how the world's largest companies operate. We sponsor visas and are convinced diverse teams build better products, so we especially encourage underrepresented groups in tech to reach out. **WHAT YOU'LL OWN** Our deals are large, enterprise and increasingly bespoke. Today the commercial negotiation and the paper that follows it sit with two different people, and the handoff costs us time on every deal. You'll own both. You'll shape offers within our commercial strategy, sit across the table from enterprise procurement and their legal teams, negotiate the commercial and legal terms in the same conversation, and draft the documents that close the deal. In practice: - Lead procurement negotiations end to end, i.e. be commercial and legal in the same room, in the same conversation. - Own the paper: NDAs, our General Terms and AI Annex, DPAs, Order Forms, framework agreements, change agreements and renewals. Drafting and negotiating redlines yourself, not routing them - Own the pricing models behind our offers, including ramps and multi-year structures - Work with AEs to scope each deal, from what a customer's system landscape looks like to deal structures that bake-in tier sizes, volumes or ramp-structures - Be a credible counterpart to customer counsel without escalating every point, while knowing exactly where our GC has to be in the loop. - Keep an eye on expansions and renewals so we're always ahead of the next conversation As you go, you'll leave behind the templates and playbooks that let the next deal move faster. We're not looking for someone to administer a process — we're looking for someone whose own way of working becomes the process. **WHO WE HIRE** You're a commercial lawyer who'd rather close a deal than win an argument. You're calm under pressure, you know your numbers as well as your clauses, and you'd rather build a simple structure that works than a complicated one that looks good on paper. In practice that tends to look like: - You've worked as commercial counsel at an enterprise software or technology vendor, on the sell side, negotiating with the procurement and legal teams of large enterprises - You have owned or co-owned the commercial outcome, not only the legal terms. You can tell us what you gave up on price, term and volume and not just on liability and indemnities - You run the negotiation itself. You're the one speaking, not the one being consulted - You're confident with SaaS pricing: tiers, volume discounts, overage, ramps and multi-year deals - You draft fast and redline surgically; minimum changes, maximum effect - You're a deal-enabler: you find the path to yes without giving away the things that actually matter, and you can explain the difference - You stay calm under pressure and know how to find a deal that works for everyone - You're hands-on and resourceful, and comfortable working without a big support team around you To be explicit: this is not a pure legal role. You will own the number as well as the paper. If you want to advise on deals rather than carry them, this isn't the one. *You might see two roles advertised on our site for this position. That’s because we’re open to people from two different backgrounds: commercial negotiators who are comfortable with contracts, and commercial lawyers who lead negotiations themselves. It’s the same role either way, so just apply through whichever one fits you best.*